Corrections and Facts Page!
All right, I got a few things wrong. But then, that's what I get for using info I got on Wikipedia. It's just minor mistakes, but I feel the need to set them right.
1. I was dead-on about the time the north tower was hit and the time it came down. However, the south tower was actually hit at 9:02, and it fell at 9:52, seven minutes earlier than I previously thought and fifty minutes after Flight 175 crashed into it.
2. I was inaccurate in that I left Naruto and Sasuke's bodies intact when they hit the ground. The people who jumped or fell turned into bloody puddles when they hit the ground. One survivor at first thought that their remains were pieces of red clothing because the remains looked nothing like human beings. So I did take a little artistic license in their deaths.
3. Itachi wouldn't have been able to watch Naruto and Sasuke fall, because once the south tower came down everything was obscured by dust and debris. There was enough airborne debris and smoke that the sky grew dark, and no one could see more than a few feet in any direction, according to one survivor.
4. The statistics of September 11th are horrifying. Of over three thousand who died that day, over a thousand alone were at the World Trade Center. Approximately the same number died at the World Trade Center as the number that died when the Titanic sank in 1912 (about 1,300 for the Titanic, and between 1,200 and 1,300 for the World Trade Center).
5. Eight of the victims were children, the oldest being eleven and the youngest being two years old. The children were passengers on flights 77, 11, and 175. There were no children on United 93.
6. In the south tower, only eighteen people escaped from above the impact zone after the plane hit. In the north tower, no one above the 91st floor escaped because of the solid walls of debris that blocked the stairways.
7. A little under half of the victims at the World Trade Center came from Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost over 700 workers (all the workers in the offices at the time of the crash). Those who survived from the upper floors of the north tower did so only by dumb luck, such as being late, or being sick, or having to go down to the lobby to greet clients, such as in the case of one very lucky Cantor Fitzgerald executive.
8. As for why the buildings collapsed, it was most likely because in 1968 the New York Port Authority put into place a newer and less fire safety conscious building code for New York City, about a year before the building of the World Trade Center complex began. The steel columns inside were not fireproofed well at all. The people who "fireproofed" it said the fireproofing material would work for at least three hours to keep the steel from melting, and as we know the twin towers stood for much less than that.
9. When the towers were built, they were built to withstand the biggest jetliner crashing into them. However, the problem was that in the late sixties and early seventies, the biggest airliner at the time was a Boeing 707. The planes that crashed on September 11th were Boeing 767s, which are much bigger.
1o. The stairways were bunched together in the middles of the buildings, making escape in the event of an emergency a very slow-going process, or in the case of those above the 91st floor of the north tower, an impossible task. In the south tower only one of the six total staircases in both buildings, staircase B, was left passable by Flight 175's crash. Very few knew about it, and those who did found it by chance.
11. Of the 200-odd people who jumped or fell from the towers, only a few were from the south tower. Most were from above the impact zone in the north tower. Everyone who jumped from above or in the impact zones was killed on contact with the ground.
12. The World Trade Center complex was built only a few blocks away from the old Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where in 1911 (90 years before September 11th) many workers (mostly females) perished in a horrible fire that spread from the 8th to the 10th floor. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was most likely started by an errant spark from one of the sewing machines on the workroom floor. Most of the people who died there either jumped, were crushed, suffocated, or burned to death, like those in the north tower on September 11th.
13. The hijackers had all become legalized US citizens, and had been trained in the same flight school, one that was either in Arizona or Texas.
14. The impact zone in the north tower stretched from the 93rd to 99th floor. The impact zone in the south tower stretched from the 78th to the 86th floor.
(Most facts and figures courtesy of 102 Minutes: The Struggle for Survival inside the Twin Towers)
Well, that's all, you guys. I hope that you liked reading this story as much as I liked writing it. Well, I don't like what happened that day, but I think that I wrote this story well and that I have license to be proud of my work. I'm sorry if it sounds like bragging, but I really do think this is one of my better stories.
Please review, and if you have any more facts about September 11th that I don't know, please write to me so I can add them to my profile or to this list of facts up here.