Andrew Winston

Law librarian and legal research teacher @GWLaw. Formerly @LawLibCongress

[2001 Live @25YearsAgoLive]

New York City is soused by a heavy thunderstorm as a result of Hurricane Erin, which may hit Long Island and Manhattan overnight.

Hundreds of commercial flights on the east coast are delayed or cancelled today and tomorrow.

[Andrew Winston @winstandr]

One of the most sobering tales of that day. Two fighter pilots who not only were ordered to bring down a civilian aircraft but would have had to have done it in a kamikaze mission, because there wasn’t time to arm their jets with missiles.

[Ellen Pasternack @pastasnack_e]

I knew about Flight 93 - the other plane hijacked on 9/11, whose passengers stormed the cockpit and crashed the plane into a field rather than allow it to be used in another attack.

But I didn’t know that two fighter pilots - including 26yo Heather Penney, chosen alongside squadron leader Marc Sasseville because she happened to be already suited up and ready to go - had scrambled to their jets with no time to load weapons, intending to ram the passenger plane. A suicide mission, and one that would also have killed a whole plane full of civilians. They didn’t have to because those civilians did it for them. What incredible bravery and resolve.

[Mike Bales 🫡🇺🇸 @MikeBales]

FDNY Firefighter Gary Box, Squad 1. On 9/11 he ran through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel toward the World Trade Center after his truck was stuck in traffic. Last photo of him. Remains never recovered. Family found this picture almost nine years later. A hero. Tell your kids.
This why WE WILL NEVER FORGET! 🙏🇺🇸

[MUSEO @MementoM2023]

World that does not exist anymore

Depeche Mode atop the World Trade Center / New York City / 1990

[Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸 @BarnabyHistory]

🇺🇸 The Boatlift That Was Bigger Than Dunkirk

At 10:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Coast Guard lieutenant named Mike Day keyed a radio in New York Harbor and said the only sentence that mattered.

“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”

The boats were already coming.

The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subways were dead. South of the towers, hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere left to walk. Some jumped into the Hudson. Some stood on seawalls that were never meant to be docks and waited for anything that floated.

Dunkirk took nine days to pull 338,226 Allied soldiers off a beach in 1940.

On 9/11, roughly 800 mariners on about 150 vessels moved as many as 500,000 civilians off Manhattan in about nine hours. Ferries. Tugs. Dinner boats. Pilot boats. Yachts. A retired fireboat. Rubber dinghies that held two people. The largest water evacuation in history.

NY Waterway did not wait for the official call. After the second plane hit, the whole fleet moved. Captain Rick Thornton nosed his ferry against a seawall that was not a slip and started taking people off. Some of them he pulled out of the river. His company alone carried about 158,000 people to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Queens.

On a normal Tuesday they carried 34,000.

The Staten Island Ferry moved more than 50,000 people and came back the other way with water, bandages, and men who still had work to do in the dust.

The old fireboat John J. Harvey, already retired, tied up near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, took civilians off the seawall, then pumped water when the hydrants downtown died.

Lt. Day later admitted what the day required. “I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”

In raw numbers it was bigger than Dunkirk. No boat went down. By nightfall the southern tip of Manhattan had been emptied by people who were not on anyone’s list of heroes when the morning started.

They were tug captains. Ferry deckhands. Pilots. A lieutenant with a microphone. Ordinary boats answering one sentence.

All available boats.

[Andrew Winston @winstandr]

The first job I had after law school was at a firm on Pine Street, one up from Wall, a ten minute walk from the World Trade Center. I went to the towers every so often: there was a Borders bookstore there, and an urgent care, and a Brooks Brothers. The lawyers I worked with took me to lunch at Windows on the World at the end of my summer associateship, and there was no better view of New York.

I was living in Brooklyn and went into work that morning as usual. I saw the smoke from the first tower as I crossed the street to the subway station, but didn’t realize the gravity of the situation, or I would have turned around and gone home. A sort of special operations fire truck went by, presumably on its way to the scene, though I don’t know if it ever came back; Squad 1 in the Park Slope neighborhood where I lived lost a dozen firefighters. By the time I went outside at the Wall St subway station, the second tower had been hit. From there, everyone knows what happened.

The upcoming 25th anniversary is not something I’ve been looking forward to. But I will remember the heroism shown by people like Rick Rescorla, recounted below, who did deeds of bravery and goodness that outshone the malice of that day.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.

The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.

Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.

An airplane. In a 1993 report.

Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.

Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.

They literally made it a trading center.

The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.

Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.

He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.

People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.

Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.

He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.

By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.

Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.

It was stunning.

Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.

He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.

The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.

He was one of the 13.

He was a hero in every sense of the word.

Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.

[いまり @imari33_photo]

夜散歩🌃

[Charlie Brown Fan Account @Peanuts_4Fans]

How is your day going? #Peanuts

[Daily Snoopy @DailySnoopys]

there are 52 days until the first day of fall

[Andrew Winston @winstandr]

!!

[Library of Congress @librarycongress]

Fascinating Declaration of Independence 🇺🇸 facts:
The printed copy on the right actually pre-dates the more well-known, handwritten copy on the left, which wasn't produced or signed by John Hancock and other members of the Continental Congress until weeks AFTER July 4, 1776. 🧵

[Ghosts of DC @GhostsofDC]

A rum runner plowed into the Library of Congress wall at 70 mph with 240 jars of corn whisky in the trunk. That's just one of three wild DC police chases we dug up.

https://t.co/VcYXD6SQW2

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

Thomas Jefferson submits the final draft of his Declaration of Independence to Continental Congress.

[Andrew Winston @winstandr]

@rachaelbereba Yes, consult @Mangan150

[NASA @NASA]

Orion's main parachute has deployed. The spacecraft has a system of 11 chutes that will slow it down from around 300 mph to 20 mph for splashdown.

Get more updates on the Artemis II blog: https://t.co/7gicm7DWBt

[RetroNewsNow @RetroNewsNow]

🌸🐰Happy Easter!🐣🌼

[NASA @NASA]

Even in darkness, we glow.

In this image of Earth taken by the Artemis II crew, we can see the electric lights of human activity. In the lower right, sunlight illuminates the limb of the planet.