September 11

Well, it's been three years since that horrible day in 2001. What started out as a glorious day in New York turned into a day of horror beyond imagination. Everybody talks about what they were doing and where they were that day, but I just don't have the energy to tell that story again. I had no loved ones lost in that tragedy, and for that I'm very thankful. I'm not a cold person, but the way I try to look at the events of that day is like I'm living through history. I think that's the way I deal with it.

One thing that has bothered me more and more, however, is how people say the buildings failed. Well, if you call two skyscrapers crashing to the ground like that a failure and look at nothing else, I guess they did fail. However, the more I learn about them and the engineering that went into building them, the more grateful I am that they were built the way they were. In the end, because those buildings withstood the crashes as well as they did, 25,000 people were able to escape. How much worse could it have been if:

...the buildings had been decapitated when the planes hit, with the tops crashing to the ground
...the towers had fallen over when hit or later, instead of pancaking
...if the bathtub hadn't held as well as it had and let the river in, flooding the city
...if they hadn't withstood the crash itself long enough for most people to survive

Like I said before, I'm sure it's easy for me to see things this way since I didn't lose anyone that day. To people who lost loved ones, the loss is 100% and how many did escape really doesn't matter.

Those buildings were built better than any other buildings of that era were and built beyond the code of the day. They were built to withstand hurricane winds and the largest plane of the day, I believe a Boeing 707, flying slowly due to being lost. I don't think anybody could have planned for those huge planes flying around 500 and 600 mph crashing in the way they did, full of fuel. The one thing that really wasn't planned for was the heat caused by the jet fuel burning. It did not occur to them when they were simulating the plane crashes. That is a tragedy, since that was the ultimate factor which made the buildings collapse -- the weakening of the steel due to the extreme heat of the fire.

I think that it's impossible to plan for every contingency, especially looking down the line 30 years. I may be in the minority, but I think it's amazing that those towers stayed up as long as they did and I'm thankful for them. I cannot imagine the additional devastation of any of my little points above had happened.

I also wanted to address the whole "Have you forgotten 9-11?" thing. No, I haven't and I doubt i ever will. Just because I do not think we should have gone to war in Iraq for various reasons (this isn't the time nor place to go into that) does NOT mean I have forgotten what happened that horrible day. I don't get offended easily, but I think it's very offensive to treat people like they have forgotten 9-11 simply because they don't agree with the politics of those who are for the war in Iraq. I won't go into details because I don't want to get started on that whole thing, but that kind of treatment really ticks me off.