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The National September 11 Memorial & Museum commemorates specific traumatic moments in history—the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. The recovered realia, exhibiting damage from the attacks, consists of many objects never intended to be preserved. Now 20 years later, the plastics, newspapers and corroded metals which served as placeholders connecting us with both the past and the innocent lives lost are beginning to age. In addition, the people who care for these artefacts may no longer have personal associations with the trauma; that is, the lived experience of the events which motivated the original caretakers. This paper discusses the current research conducted by museum staff related to how the conservation community navigates our own experiences, memories and evolving biases in interpreting trauma collections and how a human-centred approach of involving family members and survivors defines conservation priorities for objects meant to stay frozen in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some events have such an impact on society that it is unclear whether the standard rules of political decision making still apply. This paper analyses the planning process of rebuilding Ground Zero as a case in which politics was unhinged and new procedures were invented on the spot. The politics of planning was not only about what should be done on the site, but also about the sort of procedure that should be followed to take a legitimate decision. The paper conceives of the political process as a sequence of staged performances and introduces a model that analyses policy processes in terms of discourse, dramaturgy and deliberation. It describes the rebuilding of Ground Zero as a case of an ‘unhappy performance’ in which, as the process continued, the wider publicly-shared determination to create a bold symbolic response to terrorism lost out to uninspired political-economic reasoning. It argues that this analysis of policy processes as performance deserves a much wider application as today's world is full of situations in which decisions are made in networks marked by unclear rules as to how to arrive at a legitimate decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks in New York were a shocking act of terrorism on U.S. soil adding security as one, among many, in influencing factor of urban functionality and future corporate location decision-making. This paper initially examines the relocation preferences of former World Trade Center complex tenants with more than 20,000 square feet, using New York's attacks as the only major case of terrorism towards non-government U.S. office buildings. The paper further identifies the specific areas of the urban fabric impacted by terrorism along with the preparedness and prevention measures taken. In addition, the rising concerns of businesses in determining the safest, but highly profitable location, is outlined as well as some of the measures taken to fortify the selected locations. In an effort to highlight the possible threats towards office properties and the issues owners and tenants should be concerned, a table of threats is generated with their outcomes and occurrences around the world. Finally, the experience gained from this study allows the development of a theoretical cost benefit analysis for a site selection within Central Business District versus the suburbs, when security is viewed as the key factor of location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the occupant evacuation of World Trade Center (WTC) 1 and WTC 2 on September 11, 2001. Multiple sources of information were collected and analyzed: over 1,000 new interviews with survivors (including 803 telephone interviews, 225 face-to-face interviews, and 6 focus groups); over 700 published interviews; 9-1-1 emergency calls; transcripts of emergency communications, historical building design drawings, memoranda, and calculations; formal complaints filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; and other relevant materials. The population in WTC 1 and WTC 2 on September 11, 2001, at 8:46:30 a.m. is enumerated and described, where the characteristics of the population were relevant to the subsequent evacuation, including training, experience, mobility status, among others. The progress of the evacuation of both towers is described in a quasi-chronological manner from 8:46:30 a.m. when WTC 1 was attacked, until 10:28:22 a.m., when WTC 1 collapsed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of the evacuation of the World Trade Center towers culled from telephone and face-to-face interviews with survivors. The first investigation explored where occupants were located when each tower was attacked. Regression analysis explored the sources of variance in occupants' time to reach the stairwell, as well as stairwell evacuation time (how long the average occupant spent in the stairwells per floor). Finally, issues identified as contributing to either slowing or aiding the evacuation process were also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Following the 9/11 terrorists attacks in New York a strong economical effort was made to improve and adapt aviation security, both in infrastructures as in airplanes. National and international guidelines were promptly developed with the objective of creating a security management system able to supervise the identification of risks and the definition and optimization of control measures. Risk assessment techniques are thus crucial in the above process, since an incorrect risk identification and quantification can strongly affect both the security level as the investments needed to reach it. The paper proposes a set of methodologies to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the risk in the security of civil aviation and the risk assessment process based on the threats, criticality and vulnerabilities concepts, highlighting their correlation in determining the level of risk. RAMS techniques are applied to the airport security system in order to analyze the protection equipment for critical facilities located in air-side, allowing also the estimation of the importance of the security improving measures vs. their effectiveness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper aims to explore the diverse meanings of terrorism. It will also analyze UN's capacity to deal with it, regarding mainly the antecedents of 9/11 attacks in New York. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented toxic release in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 created one of the worst environmental disasters in US history, followed by a contentious and ongoing battle over the existence, etiology, and legitimation of World Trade Center-related illness. In this paper, I explore the enactment of epistemic authority by a complex array of stakeholders-government officials, scientists, physicians, environmentalists, advocates, journalists, and politicians-who have woven medical-scientific knowledge into their competing agendas and platforms. Despite the scientific validation of environmental dangers, the clinical documentation of illness and the epidemiological substantiation of links between environmental exposure and illness onset, the political-economic interests of federal, state, and local bodies have often been privileged over the protection of public health. 9/11 illness is a 'contested illness' enmeshed in politically charged disputes regarding the relationship of environmental toxins to disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The September 11th 2001 impact on the World Trade Centre (WTC) resulted in one of the most significant evacuations of a high-rise building in modern times. The UK High-rise Evacuation Evaluation Database (HEED) study aimed to capture and collate the experiences and behaviours of WTC evacuees in a database, which would facilitate and encourage future research, which in turn would influence the design construction and use of safer built environments. A data elicitation tool designed for the purpose comprised a pre-interview questionnaire followed by a one-to-one interview protocol consisting of free-flow narratives and semi-structured interviews of WTC evacuees. This paper, which is one in a series dealing with issues relating to the successful evacuations of towers 1 and 2, focuses on cue recognition and response patterns within WTC1. Results are presented by vertical floor clusters and include information regarding cues experienced, activities prior and subsequent to occupants first becoming aware that something was wrong, perceived personal risk, time taken to respond and the inter-relationships between them. The results indicate differences in occupant activities across the floor clusters and suggest that these differences can be explained in terms of the perception of risk and the nature and extent of cues received by the participants. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The subject of the paper is the collapse of towers and highscrapers, particularly, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11, 2001. The deduced equations of progressive collapse are used to refute the generally accepted opinion of experts about progressive collapse of the WTC towers in the free-fall regime, which is the official version of the US government. It is proved that progressive collapse is much slower than free fall. The critical floors where collapses started from are estimated using the well-established fact of the free-fall time of all WTC collapses. To this end, the most comprehensive “hybrid” analysis is advanced taking into account that collapses could start on several floors simultaneously, not on one floor as suggested before. According to this “hybrid” model, at the first stage, several floors collapsed simultaneously as a result of fracture waves causing a dust cloud and, at the second stage, the lower part of tower being intact in the first stage collapsed in the regime of progressive failure. Five different collapse types are studied, including the fastest and slowest collapses, and then the hybrid mode is examined with initial collapse of several floors followed by the “domino-effect” of the remaining floors. It is established that the floors where the WTC collapses started from were located significantly lower than the floors hit by the terrorists and subjected to fire. This conclusion confirms the same former result obtained by using the simple official theory of pure progressive collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution addresses the diverging discourses of the United States, France and Germany in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 2001 in New York and Washington, with a focus on gender. As a discourse analysis, it explores the ways in which the different narratives instantiate dichotomous conceptions of gender. It is argued that owing to the centrality of gendered constructions for identity, and owing to the mutually constitutive nature of the relation between identity and foreign policy, the comparative perspective adopted adds to the understanding of the disparities in enacting foreign policy between these three close transatlantic allies. Not only does this paper expose the contingency of the gendered underpinnings of the US, French and German high-level policy discourses that were constitutive of the early "war on terrorism" but it also shows how these stories matter. The three countries' foreign policy formulations in response to "9/11", particularly their respective choices between identifying the attacks as acts of war or crime, pursuit or rejection of regime change, and unilateralism and multilateralism, make explicit that the varying degrees of dichotomously gendered framings of identity are constitutively significant for foreign policy formulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the New York World Trade Center attack, an emergent group of citizen volunteers organized to provide needed supplies to the workers at Ground Zero. The emergent-group phenomenon has been documented after many disasters. This paper examines the organization of this emergent group through the organizational characteristics of structure, legitimacy, communications, leadership and organizational change. Finally, it argues that through a better understanding of the organizational characteristics, emergency-management personnel will be better prepared to manage and coordinate the activities of disaster-related emergent groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) covered a large area of downtown New York City with dust and debris. This paper describes the testing of an analytical method designed to evaluate whether sampled dust contains dust that may have originated from the collapse of the WTC. Using dust samples collected from locations affected and not affected (referred to as ‘background’ locations) by the collapse, a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis method was developed to screen for three materials that are believed to be present in large quantities in WTC dusts: slag wool, concrete, and gypsum. An inter-laboratory evaluation of the method was implemented by having eight laboratories analyze a number of ‘blind’ dust samples, consisting of confirmed background dust and confirmed background dust spiked with varying amounts of dust affected by the WTC collapse. The levels of gypsum and concrete in the spiked samples were indistinguishable from the levels in the background samples. Measurements of slag wool in dust demonstrated potential for distinguishing between spiked and background samples in spite of considerable within and between laboratory variability. Slag wool measurements appear to be sufficiently sensitive to distinguish dust spiked with 5% WTC-affected dust from 22 out of 25 background dust samples. Additional development work and inter-laboratory testing of the slag wool component will be necessary to improve the precision and accuracy of the method and reduce inter- and intra-laboratory variability from levels observed in the inter-laboratory evaluation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, family and friends of victims missing in the towers began placing “Missing Person Posters” of their loved ones around New York City. In this paper, we argue that the posters represent a powerful response to a traumatic and in some ways unprecedented situation, a response that transformed the death of loved ones from a reality or future certainty into a probability made possible by the searchers' desire, emotions, or imagination. We demonstrate how the posters, operating in the “subjunctive” voice, transformed the “liminal” space between life and death and “haunted” onlookers, so that survivors and spectators alike could ponder the possibilities of a world that would “hopefully” turn out for the best. We also consider the implications of the posters for those who were unable to acknowledge the loss of their loved ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Americans are aware that joy was expressed in the Arab world over the suffering inflicted on Americans with the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Less known is that such Schadenfreude was expressed by many Chinese citizens as well. This paper analyzes a sample of texts from postings on the Beijing University bulletin board system. Following a discursive approach to the social psychological study of emotion, we consider discourse as the means whereby power relations are asserted and maintained. These power relations comprise a domain within which actions and emotional displays are occasioned and understood. Based on the texts analyzed here, Schadenfreude can be understood as a discursive display by an observer of an event. This event must be recognized in terms of a "discursive history" within which a bully (here, the United States) has repeatedly violated the "rights" of bullied parties. In accordance with this discursive history, the event is seen as a reversal-in-tradition whereby rights presumed by the bully are violated. Finally, the observer must disidentify with the bully. As a discursive display, Schadenfreude not only comprises the overt performance of the observer's taken-for-granted understanding of the bully-as-bully, but also displaces any potential alternative discourse such as expressions of sympathy other observers may have for any target of such an event. This approach complements the social constructionist perspective within the literature on the sociology of emotions, but departs fundamentally from this literature's essentialist (or psycho-physiological) perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The horrific terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, left an indelible mark on perceptions of security and threat across the world. This paper uses Schwartz's (1992) value circumplex model to examine value change across matched high school and university student samples in Finland, questioned before and after the World Trade Center (WTC) and associated attacks. In Study 1 ( N=419), security values of adolescents were higher the day following the WTC attacks than before, but fell back toward pre-attack levels in the subsequent two samples. In contrast, levels of stimulation were lower following the terrorist incidents. In Study 2 ( N=222), security levels of students were also higher following the WTC attacks, but again were closer to pre-attack levels in a subsequent cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces practices of tourism and memory at Ground Zero in New York in 2001 in an attempt to understand the perceived significance of what had happened and what it was that had been seen as traumatic. It describes the endless circling of the site, and the need for people to see for themselves. It argues that what happened included not just the impact of the planes but the collapse of the twin towers and the wound to the cityscape that followed. This exploration leads the paper to propose a more all-embracing view of trauma, not as an injury to the flesh, to the psyche, to the community, or to the built environment, but as the name for an event where the very distinctions between body, psyche, community and environment are called into question. Practices that took place after 9.11 reveal how visitors and rescue workers sought, for example by taking photographs and in their insistent search for remains, to reinstate distinctions that had been obliterated, and how they struggled not only against the use of victims as a means that took place that day, but the ongoing instrumentalisation of life that takes place anyway under contemporary systems of sovereign power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attack on the World Trade Center occurred less than a quarter of a mile from Pace University in Lower Manhattan. This paper represents a compilation of the recollection of the events of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath from the four senior staff members of the Counseling Center. Our purpose is to share our experiences and perspectives of these events from the point of view of the closest university to the attack. We will also share some of the ways in which we coped as a staff, how we helped the larger community to cope, and some of the lessons we learned from both a professional and personal point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cataclysm of September 11, 2001 created a universal reaction that the world would never be the same. Understandably, Washington unleashed a counterattack to find and extirpate the terrorists as an end in itself. But is terrorism essentially a senseless act of anarchy, or does it mask a malaise deeply held in various non-Western cultures? This paper contends that the horrendous events of September 11 precipitated a head-on clash of two competing worldviews and societal orders: Muslim Theism versus secularized Western Humanism. Meanwhile, the latter is in turn being challenged in a second set of competing worldviews, not at the former site of the World Trade Center but wherever the World Trade Organization meets. Those outside the fenced perimeter are calling for implementation of a very different view of reality. This new paradigm with its own emerging attributes-Holism-builds upon humanistic traditions and values, but extends to all societies and cultures, henceforth perceived as systemically interdependent, and embracing all forms of life in an ecological matrix. For the first time in human evolution, all peoples are simultaneously being transformed in the direction of a new worldview that is global in its inclusiveness, and novel and innovative in its behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a simplified approximate analysis of the overall collapse of the towers of World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. The analysis shows that if prolonged heating caused the majority of columns of a single floor to lose their load carrying capacity, the whole tower was doomed. Despite optimistic simplifying assumptions, the structural resistance is found to be an order of magnitude less than necessary for survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the abstract of the research paper 'Impact of the 9/11 Disaster on Blood Donations in the New York Area,' by R. Jones, et al, to be presented at the American Association of Blood Banks' 55th Annual Meeting on October 26-29, 2002.