THE morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was just like any other in New York City. People were commuting to work, crowding the major roads and stuffing the subway trains. Many would be heading to lower Manhattan, site of the World Trade Center and other major institutions, such as Wall Street.
Low Eng Chye, a former North America director for MIDA (the Malaysian Industrial Development Authority), was working as a real estate developer at the time, living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, about 10-km north from the towers.
He and his wife were about to open a lobster restaurant nearby his apartment, and he had a meeting with an architect to go over plans. That meeting was to take place at 11am at the twin towers.
The meeting did not take place because at 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Where they were
“I was brushing my teeth at my apartment on 89th street where we have large mirrors, and I saw, even though I wasn’t focusing, an airplane fly right into the tower on the 89th floor, I think.”
Recalling the story of a World War Two bomber crashing into the Empire State Building in 1945, Low thought the crash was a similar accident.
At 9.03am, a second plane crashed into the South Tower, thus eliminating any possibility that this was anything but deliberate.
Meanwhile, former Ministry of Higher Education secretary-general Tan Sri Noorul Ainur Mohd Nur – who was a lecturer at Intan Bukit Kiara at the time – had returned to New York to defend her PhD thesis. She had previously lived there from 1993 to 2000.
Originally scheduled to return to Malaysia on the 14th, she cut short her stay and planned to fly back on the 11th instead. Her flight was to depart from Newark Airport in nearby New Jersey at 11.30am.
On the drive to the airport, she passed by the twin towers for the last time at 8.35am.
She would be in the Holland Tunnel – an underwater connection between lower Manhattan and New Jersey – when the planes struck the towers.
At Newark, people were abuzz about a plane crash at the World Trade Center. At the MAS Clubhouse, a crowd was glued to the television screens. Noorul Ainur realised that it was a terrorist attack as planes did not fly that low over Manhattan.
It was then announced that her flight had been cancelled – all airports across the entire United States were being shut down with thousands of airborne planes ordered to land. Airspace was closed to international flights, with many diverted to Canada. Fighter jets were also being launched.
The people in Newark airport were told to evacuate for security reasons.
United Airlines Flight 93 – which ultimately crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 44 onboard – had taken off from there at 8.42am.
“I was lucky to pass by the Twin Towers at 8.35am,” she recalled later. “Thirteen minutes later and I would have been in the middle of the catastrophe.”
In Midtown Manhattan, Ambassador to the United Nations Tan Sri Hasmy Agam was rushing to the UN headquarters to attend a ceremony officiated by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The annual UN General Assembly was to begin in a few days.
Before he could make it there, his social secretary said, “Sir, our Twin Towers have been attacked…”
Having woken up later than normal because of work the night before, and not having seen the news, he thought she was talking about the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.
Only when he arrived at the UN building and noticed the smaller crowd did he realise the attack took place in New York City itself.
“I rushed back to my office, switched on my TV… saw the live coverage of the devastation. And then, out of blue, to my utter horror, another aircraft crashed into the second tower. I jumped up my chair, spilling my cup of coffee on the floor,” the ambassador recalls.
Further away in Bergen County, New Jersey, just across the George Washington Bridge from the northern tip of Manhattan, Kirby Tan, a computer graphics designer who has been living in the United States since 1984, was having a typical morning.
“I actually didn’t even know 9/11 what happened, my brother called me from Malaysia, ‘is it a movie, are they filming a movie’. I had no idea, I was having breakfast,” Tan remembers.
“My brother called me so I turned on the TV and it’s a real thing and then things started getting crazy.”
Members of the local Malaysian community, including the consulate general, called him to find out what was going on. The phone lines were overloaded and calls to and fro were not getting through.
Tan went to the roof of his office building and looked towards lower Manhattan, some 20 or so kilometres away. While a distance away from seeing any details, the plumes of thick smoke pouring out of the towers were unmistakable.
“I can see very clearly, smoke, so far I see the World Trade Center, very small, all you see is the smoke coming out. We are on top of the roof to see the smoke coming out, burning.”
As part of security precautions, all public transportation in New York was shut down, and vehicle traffic was highly restricted, with priority given to emergency services responding to a whole host of crises.
New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told New Yorkers south of Canal Street to evacuate and walk north. Over a million workers and residents complied.
Many kept walking over many kilometres to get out of New York and many of those walked across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey.
“There were so many people on the street, I believe everything slowed down, you can’t just run to the bridge, there is no room to squeeze in to get across the bridge.”
Tan was as surprised as anybody about the day’s events and like many, he did not expect the buildings to come down. He would spend the entire day helping out people who had fled New York.
“The whole day it was total chaos. The road next to the GW (George Washington) Bridge, was all soldiers, I think Navy, and all these tankers blocking all traffic. Only people can walk across.
“Thousands of people walked over the bridge, I’m very near the bridge, my car is there and I just pick them up, my friend was there and I would send them home,” Tan said.
Having lived in the US for many decades, while working on behalf of MIDA to secure tech and industrial jobs for Malaysians, Low had witnessed the towers being constructed – they were completed on April 4, 1973.
For business and social reasons, he had often visited the World Trade Center, including having meals at the once iconic Windows on the World restaurant located at the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower.
“I was also in the restaurant business and a few of my people had worked there before. It was a really popular restaurant and I’m glad that the impact had happened early in the morning because if it was later on the building would have been full of employees.
“The two buildings were really a city unto themselves. It was a self-contained city and you won’t believe the number of people working there,” Low said.
From where the planes slammed into the towers, he knew that the stairwells had likely been hit and that many people were likely trapped on the topmost floors. A few of those people, maybe a couple hundred, in moments of desperation that are hard to imagine, chose to jump out the windows to certain death.
The aftermath
After a few days staying at a hotel in Newark, Noorul Ainur managed to get back to New York to stay with a friend, and about a week later she returned home to Malaysia.
“I was then not in fear of coming back to Malaysia nor did I think at that point of being fearful of other races because at Union Square (in Manhattan), there was a congregation of people looking at photos. People of all races were together to support each other.”
A few months after the attack, Tan accompanied other Malaysians including then Permanent Representative to the United Nations Tan Sri Hasmy Agam, to tour Ground Zero – which is what the site of the World Trade Center was called.
“There was still smoke coming out, the smell was still there, a few months later. We went there to look at the site and the smoke and smell were still there, it was pretty bad,” Tan recalls.
For those still in the New York area, there was a lot of recovery work that needed doing before the city could go back to function like it normally did.
“The thing that I remember most is the acrid smell of burning garbage from the building,” said Low.
“The whole building collapsed in on itself and there was a whole mountain of garbage. There was a whole bunch of people clearing the debris, which was taken to another area where they were sifted for clues, bones and human flesh.
“There was a long period of removal of debris, and I remember the acrid smoke still hung for months and months.
“Pieces of flesh and human bones were discovered in surrounding apartments for years after the event,” Low added.
The smoke and acrid fumes could be seen for months after the attack, as thousands toiled to clear the debris, and now many of those people are feeling the health effects from that work.
“One of the things that the community and local government mismanaged is the long term effects of the burning debris and 20 years later we are now beginning to understand the enormity of the problem.
“Even though the event took place and lasted for a few months, the people within the smoke and the acrid fumes are now beginning to file claims against the government on the after-effects of the inhalation of the smoke,” Low added.
That is why even though 2,606 people were confirmed to have died during the attack on September 11 itself, the official death toll continues to rise as more people succumb to illness relating to diseases in the aftermath. It is now at 2,751.
Three Malaysians died that day.
They are Ang Siew Nya, 37, from Penang who was a technical analyst for March USA; Khoo Sei Lai, 38, from Sandakan who was a mutual fund manager at Fred Alger Management; and Vijayashanker Paramsothy, 23, from Selangor who was a financial analyst at the Aon Corporation. – The Vibes, September 11, 2021
