Jan Wiginton Cromer

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[Jan Wiginton Cromer @ladiestjan]

@tracegallagher So glad to see Cata Truss again!!

[Jan Wiginton Cromer @ladiestjan]

@MariaBartiua Yes

[Peachy Keenan @KeenanPeachy]

Reminds me that I am slightly horrified about the upcoming Fred Astaire biopic, starring Sabrina Carpenter (!) as my all-time favorite, Ginger Rogers

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Kid Cleverly Waits Until Bedtime Before Asking Dad To Explain The Trinity https://t.co/I6Re6UGzbO

[Heritage Foundation @Heritage]

Americans need and deserve elections that they can trust and have confidence in the final results.

The Election Integrity Scorecard compares election laws in all 50 states, highlights best practices, and helps Americans see how their state measures up on election security. See where your state ranks: https://t.co/KiwdE9ohGg

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Tragic Study Finds 99% Of Fries Don't Survive Trip Home From Drive-Thru https://t.co/NLPcmYV4Ju

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Delivery Guy Patiently Waits 'Til You're In Bathroom To Deliver Package That Requires Signature https://t.co/qqhZHScU7Y

[Jan Wiginton Cromer @ladiestjan]

@ClayTravis Plus I don’t have Peacock, so I can’t watch the other two games.

[Jan Wiginton Cromer @ladiestjan]

@KeenanPeachy I saw it on Broadway many years ago, with the original cast!! Absolutely amazing!! Definitely my favorite musical!!

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

On this day in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Devils Tower in Wyoming as the first National Monument in the United States!

[Sam Kille @SamKille]

At a loss for words on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Then I watched nearly 200 @FordhamNYC students, many born years later, climb 2,200 stadium steps in honor of the ascent FDNY firefighters undertook that day. They showed up. They remembered. I have hope for this generation.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island.

Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand.

They were looking for people.

The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it.

Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door.

Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center.

He drove back.

The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way.

The site was empty. So that is where the towers went.

Here is how it worked.

At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip.

At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill.

And then the sorting began.

The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve.

Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt.

And along the belts stood the detectives.

NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time.

When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet.

A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe.

A piece of a person.

The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue.

The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months.

A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed.

You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look.

Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow.

Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal.

The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months.

By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury.

When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered.

It is a park now.

Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it.

Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place.

Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about.

Here is what you should know.

Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified.

Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket.

Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark.

Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home.

They did that for ten months.

Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch.

They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

[WKRN News 2 @WKRN]

Lone flight after 9/11 takes organ from Nashville to Houston to save baby's life https://t.co/I2PTMKi8km

[Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 @julie_kelly2]

Today is one of those days when social media does the work that schools and corporate media do not. Millions of young people seeing 9/11 videos they don’t see anywhere else. More powerful than a lecture could ever be.

[Madeleine Nolan @MaddieNolanTV]

25 years ago, as planes across America were grounded on 9/11, one needed to get in the air to save a life.

A donor liver was in Nashville. A 6-month-old baby in Houston had hours to live.

The extraordinary mission, and reunion 25 years later, tonight on @FOXNashville.

[FoxNashville @FOXNashville]

Nashville will never forget. 🕊️

Nashville police officers, firefighters and city leaders gathered to remember the lives lost in the Sept. 11 attacks. A procession traveled down Broadway before a special ceremony outside the Schermerhorn Symphony Center downtown.

See photos of ceremonies around the Midstate: https://t.co/ZHc2ZIK3sS

#NeverForget #September11 #911Memorial #Nashville #FirstResponders #NashvilleNews

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Twenty five years ago today, forty people who had never met decided to die on purpose so that strangers in Washington would not have to.

United 93 should have left Newark at 8:00 a.m. It sat on the taxiway in a line of airplanes and did not get airborne until 8:42. Forty two minutes late. That delay handed the people in that cabin the one thing nobody else in the sky that morning was given. Time, and the truth.

When four hijackers took the cockpit at 9:28, both towers were already burning. The passengers picked up the seatback airphones and called home, and their families told them what was happening in New York.

So they knew. That is what separates Flight 93 from everything else that happened that day. Every other victim died without warning. These forty had roughly half an hour to sit with the knowledge that they were already dead, that the only question left was where the airplane would land and how many people it would take with it.

Think about who they were.

Captain Jason Dahl was flying that trip because he had swapped for it, so he could get home for his fifth wedding anniversary. His first officer was LeRoy Homer Jr., Air Force Academy class of 1987, a C-141 pilot who had flown in the Gulf War and into Somalia, a major in the Reserve, with a wife and a ten month old daughter at home. Both men fought for that cockpit and neither of them gave it up willingly.

Todd Beamer's wife Lisa was pregnant with their third child. Jeremy Glick's daughter was twelve weeks old. Tom Burnett had three little girls. Lauren Grandcolas was pregnant and flying home from her grandmother's funeral. Deora Bodley was twenty. CeeCee Lyles was a flight attendant who had been a police detective in Florida and had four sons. Sandy Bradshaw had two small children waiting in North Carolina.

Not one of them had a reason to be brave. Every single one of them had a reason to sit still and hope.

Listen to what they said instead.

Tom Burnett told his wife Deena, don't worry, we're going to do something.

Sandy Bradshaw called her husband from the galley and told him she was filling coffee pots with boiling water. Then she said she had to go and hung up on him.

Honor Elizabeth Wainio told her stepmother, I have to go, they're breaking into the cockpit, I love you.

Todd Beamer stayed on the line with a phone operator named Lisa Jefferson for thirteen minutes, gave her his home number, asked her to tell his wife he loved her, and asked her to say the Lord's Prayer with him. Then she heard him set the phone down and say to the men beside him, are you ready, okay, let's roll.

They took a vote first. On a hijacked airliner, with a man at the front claiming to have a bomb, they held a vote, because they were not going to force anyone else to die for their decision.

At 9:57 they came up the aisle.

The recorder caught six minutes of it. A galley cart driven into the cockpit door. Men shouting. The hijacker at the controls throwing the airplane into rolls and dives trying to knock them off their feet, and failing, because they kept coming. At 10:00 he asks the man beside him whether to finish it. Twenty five seconds later you can hear an American voice screaming, in the cockpit, if we don't we'll die. At 10:02 the hijackers are yelling at each other to put it down.

They put it down. At 10:03 a.m., in an empty field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 130 miles and twenty minutes short of the United States Capitol, where Congress was still inside the building.

The men who hijacked that plane were willing to die for their cause. So were the passengers. The difference is that the hijackers wanted to take thousands of people with them, and the passengers of Flight 93 made sure the only people who died were themselves.

Forty of them. Salesmen, flight attendants, a college student, a retired ironworker, a judo champion, two pilots fighting to the last second for a control yoke. No weapons, no training, no orders, no chance.

They are the only Americans on September 11, 2001 who saw it coming, understood exactly what it would cost them, and walked into it anyway.

[Kevin Corke @kevincorke]

A cloud of debris and dust…

[Kevin Corke @kevincorke]

Watch in silence. And never forget. 🇺🇸

[Katie Pavlich @KatiePavlich]

God Bless you @WhizBuckleyNFH