00:00September 11th, 2001, a day of grief, a day of courage.
00:21This is how that day unfolded.
00:25My daughter called me.
00:26She said, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center.
00:29I said, no, you got to be kidding.
00:31It's got to be a Piper Cub if some clown was flying down the river.
00:35At 8.46 AM, American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston,
00:41with 92 aboard, traveling at a speed of 470 miles per hour,
00:46strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex.
00:51Within minutes, officials coordinate the citywide emergency response.
00:56Their base of operations is a state-of-the-art command center,
00:59located on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center.
01:03With one tower in flames, the tragedy is only beginning.
01:08It is 9.03 when United Airlines Flight 175, with 65 aboard,
01:14traveling at the speed of 590 miles per hour,
01:17smashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
01:20This aircraft strikes the corner of the South Tower.
01:25It rips a diagonally shaped gash from the 84th to the 78th floors.
01:31The South Tower lasts only 56 minutes before it succumbs at 9.59 AM.
01:38The dust cloud billows outward for blocks.
01:49Victims stagger away.
01:54At 10.28, the television mast atop the North Tower spears straight down.
01:58Once the collapse started, there really wasn't any way to stop it.
02:11It was just going to go all the way down once it got started.
02:15It was just going to go all the way down.
02:18It was just a big crash.
02:19It was just a big crash.
02:20It was just a big crash.
02:21It was just a big crash.
02:22Chaos in New York City.
02:32Power is down in lower Manhattan.
02:38Phone lines jammed with more than 230 million calls.
02:44Hundreds of firefighters trapped in the towers.
02:50Hundreds more race to the sea.
02:58Falling debris from the collapse of the north and south towers ignites fires in the neighboring buildings of the World Trade Center.
03:07World Trade Four, Five, and Six are ablaze.
03:12World Trade Seven, the building housing the city's command center, burns unchecked for seven hours.
03:19At 5.20, it collapses.
03:28The city's emergency nerve center is destroyed.
03:31Somewhere in that time, and it's very hard to keep track of time during this,
03:35they had been ordered to evacuate Number Seven by the Port Authority.
03:38To this day, we don't know who gave that order.
03:42But whoever it was saved a lot of people's lives.
03:47With New York a war zone, some residents walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to get out of the city.
03:53Others seek escape in vessels piloted by the Army Corps of Engineers.
03:58At 7.45 PM, the New York Police Department says 78 officers are missing, and estimates that 200 firefighters are dead.
04:12At 10.56 PM, police officials say they believe there are victims alive in the rubble of the World Trade Center.
04:22Working with urban search and rescue teams, there was a lot of areas to be searched underneath the debris field.
04:29There were voids that had to be searched for possible live people.
04:37September 11, 2001, the longest and most tragic day in New York's history is drawing to a close.
