Remembering 9/11

By Scot Feldmeyer
BarryStaff of Cincinnati – Weekly Newsletter 9/15/11

      This last weekend was the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on our country and us.   Just like the December 7th anniversary of Peal Harbor for our parents and grandparents, most of us can remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when news of the attack broke.
      I was interviewing a very nice lady for an Administrative Assistant position with a client. A co-worker poked his head in to ask if I had heard that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.  I thought he meant a little single engine plane and that the damage would be minimal.  Then word came about another plane flying into the second tower and we all crammed into the break room where we had a little TV tuned into the news.   We all stood there staring in disbelief but then I got a particularly sick feeling when they announced that a third plane had hit the Pentagon.
       That’s because my brother-in-law and best friend since high school was a career Army officer who was stationed at the Pentagon.   It had all been horrible enough just watching the destruction from afar on TV, but now someone in my family was a part of it all.   It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that one of Jim’s daughters was finally able to get through to him on his cell phone and we found out he was okay.   He had been in the building but in a section adjacent to the one hit by the plane.
       Almost three thousand people and their families were not so lucky.   New York Magazine recently broke down September 11 “By The Numbers.”   When the dust settled and the fires were out, here is how it added up as of September of 2002.

Number Killed in the attacks: 2,819
Number of firefighters and paramedics killed: 343
Number of NYPD officers: 23
Number of Port Authority police officers: 37
Number of nations whose citizens were killed in attacks: 115
Number of people who lost a spouse or partner in the attacks: 1,609
Estimated number of children who lost a parent: 3,051
Percentage of Americans who knew someone hurt or killed in the attacks: 20%
Jobs lost in New York owing to the attacks: 146,100
Estimated cost of cleanup: $600 million
Economic loss to New York in month following the attacks: $105 billion
Estimated amount of insurance paid worldwide related to 9/11: $40.2 billion

9/11 was a terrible tragedy, yet it may have made us a stronger country and helped to bind us tighter together as citizens.  “You never recover completely.   You always want to remember the people who perished. I think that is the lesson of 9/11:   You can never be complacent.” – Col. Franklin Childress, with the Army’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs