|
| 102 Minutes | | Date Created: Mar 02, 2005, 08:25 AM |
 You should probably read 102 Minutes - The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. You'll find it very tough going emotionally though. If you're more interested in the forensics of the attack and the collapse of the towers with enough personal stories to make it mean something, I'd suggest, Ghosts of Vesuvius: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections by Charles Pellegrino. Relating the horrors of the 9/11 attack to burying Pompeii and Hurculaneum is a more apt comparison than the sinking of the Titanic which is what 102 Minutes is compared to.
Walter Lord, who wrote, A Night to Remember, was writing over forty years later from the disjointed and even contradictory accounts of the survivors of the Titanic's sinking. Pellegrino has written wonderfully on the Titanic as well. Dwyer and Flynn are writing with far more knowledge and a lot closer to the event.
There are some similar aspects, notably the confusion and lack of information within the huge structure of the dying ship and buildings. The disjointed and mostly futile rescue efforts is another one. Also there is the reality that casual decisions early on usually made on incomplete or erroneous information often spelled the difference between life and death for individuals. On the other hand, a lot depended on where you where in the Towers when the planes hit. No one survived from above the crash zone in the North Tower and only 18 got out of the crash zone in the South Tower.
One other similarity is the effect of the belief that the Twin Towers could not and would not collapse (reinforced by the 1993 bombing) and the idea that the Titanic was unsinkable. I'm sure the safety of shelter and home kept many people in Pompeii and Herculaneum when they had time to escape before Vesuvius's pyroclastic flow (which Pelligrino compares to the collapse of the Towers)
Still, 102 Minutes, for all the work it took to document the disaster, comes off as a litany of horrors and certainly personalizes it, but you get overloaded and lost as to who's doing what, when, and where. Who survives and who dies? It's sort of clear sometimes (and they do list those who died that are mentioned in the text in an appendix). The pictures are relatively few and don't tell much unless you cross reference them to the text in the book. The discussion of the faults of the design, the building codes, the police and fire department squabbling, are interesting to know but ultimately inconclusive and largely irrelevant to at least this outcome.
As usual it doesn't say much for the ability of government regulation and preparedness to avoid such disasters. It comes down to individuals doing the best they can under the circumstances. The lessons aren't learned or aren't used properly for the future. (The 1993 bombing experience documents this). And anyway, the next time will be different.
Just as an example with the Titanic, much is made of the codes for lifeboats that the ship actually exceeded but with only a fraction of enough available to get everyone off the ship. This is only relevant because the ship took over two hours to sink by the bow. If it had heeled over on one side quickly, virtually none of the lifeboats would have been usable. No one thought of or foresaw the possibility of the effects of fully loaded planes crashing into the middle of the upper floors of the WTC towers.
There are no real conclusions to be drawn in 102 Minutes either. The authors largely avoid the politics and fingerpointing and concentrate on the personal details. This is perhaps as it should be. Reading the harsh reality of what happened is enough. Perhaps we should force Ward Churchill to read this book...
|
|
|
|
|
|
