In honor of the longest discussion thread we’ve ever had at Independent Sources — our Charlie Sheen / 9-11 Conspiracy item Charlie Sheen Says 9/11 is a fraud so it must be so — I’ve put some photos I took of the WTC site in mid-October 2001 up on Flickr. Click on these to see a larger version:

A little about the photos and what I saw around Ground Zero:

I was in NYC for a friend’s wedding — unlike many, they went ahead with theirs — and had time early Sunday morning to head down to the Battery. Most of the area was blocked off to pedestrian traffic but the subway I took got me behind the outer roadblocks. I think I was in a “residents only” area, but virtually all of the residents were gone.

The near-solitude I found on the south and west sides of the WTC seemed to somehow accentuate the huge hole in the sky where the towers once stood. I remembered when my family lived in northern NJ in the ’70’s and from the tallest hill in town you could see the tips of the then-new towers poking up over a distant ridge. I had been to the top of the towers several times back then. I had stood very near where I now was and had had to look straight up to see their full height. And those enormous buildings were … gone?

Down at ground level, there were “have you seen” papers stuck everywhere — lampposts, doors and windows. All seemed incredibly sad — “last known to be in the mall,” or “went to work at x.” It struck me that they were obituaries — hundreds — thousands? — of them.

That, combined with the quiet, made the streets seem spooky and post-apocalyptic.

Destruction was everywhere around the site — not just on the WTC footprint. Every building still standing was damaged in some way.

The work of evacuating ground zero continued even at that hour. The debris pile was relatively small — six stories or so? It seemed to consist of only girders, pipes, and wire. The concrete floors and the inner walls must have effectively vaporized. Every few minutes a flatbed truck with an enormous distorted girder on it would roll south toward a barge; the warped steel proof of the incredible destruction released that day.

3,000 lives gone. It was fascinating and horrible and very very sad.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 10:16 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Weekend Edition / Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.