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What happened....
Around 8:00 Eastern time four planes were hijacked-
- American Airlines Flight #11 - Boeing 767; 7:45 a.m. from Boston, MA, to Los Angeles, CA
- United Airlines Flight #175 - Boeing 767; 7:58 a.m. from Boston to Los Angeles
- United Airlines Flight #93 - Boeing 757; 8:01 a.m. from Newark, NJ, to San Francisco, CA
- American Airlines Flight #77 - Boeing 757; 8:10 a.m. from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles
The first plane went right into the North Tower at around 8:46. Then, about 15 minutes later the South Tower was hit by a second airplane. About forty minutes later, a third airplane went right into the pentagon in Washington D.C. About twenty minutes later (its now approximately 10:05) the whole South tower collapses. Five minutes later, another plane crashes into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. About twenty minutes later the North Tower collapses. So much...all happening at once.
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How Many Died?
About 120 people died in the Pentagon Attack
About 260 people died in the four airplanes
About 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center Towers
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The Buildings & Why the Explosion was such a big one....
The Twin Towers were huge, gigantic buildings with the North Tower at 1,368 feet tall and the South Tower at 1,362 feet tall. Each building had 110 stories, each story about 210 feet by 210 feet. This means that both towers, put together, had about 165 acres of space. When the Twin Towers were built in 1970, it costed more than 1 billion dollars, but today could easily cost more than 5 billion dollars.
Big towers...But an even bigger explosion. Why? The planes used (Boeing 767) can weigh up to 400,000 pounds when fully loaded and carry as much as 24,000 gallons of jet fuel. That much fuel could cause a huge fire.
Some of you may wonder why the sprinklers located all around the building wouldn't work. Well, first off, water works well when paper or fabric are on fire but will do absolutely nothing to fire thats been started by fuel. The fuel will just float on the water and continue to burn. Secondly, the sprinklers were not made to fight off a fire this drastic. Again they were designed for small fires of the burning of fabric and such, not for a fire caused by 20,000 gallons of fuel. Lastly, when the planes hit, they would have obviously taken out many floors with them, probably causing damage to the sprinkler system as well.
The fires were unstopable. No sprinklers, nor any other system could have stopped them either.
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