Cruel calculus: The death toll
By Richard Esposito Special to CNN
As darkness falls, the city seems different.
It is quiet. Streets are empty. Official cars covered with rubble dust are
driving in silence.
The reports are of at least 78 police officers unaccounted for and perhaps
300 firefighters presumed dead. We may learn of other emergency workers who
died racing into danger before the second plane struck the World Trade
Center, desperately trying to save others, others who were already killed or
about to die.
There are no official counts of how many are dead. But this can already be
felt: the number will change a city and change a nation.
The mayor has said the numbers will be horrific. A former New York City
police commissioner agrees the city will never be the same.
Now, the counting is being done by calculation. No exact numbers. Just facts
that add up to a sum that is truly unthinkable.
The two main Trade Center towers that fell housed at least 50,000 workers.
Beneath them is a subway concourse, where tens of thousands more arrived to
work in lower Manhattan, exiting trains even as the planes arrived.
At this time, no one knows how many were killed by the impact of the planes,
or the explosions or how many lay dying beneath the stories of rubble that
cover the streets when the walls melted and collapsed.
Firefighter emergency
beepers, the ones they wear to keep track of each other inside burning
buildings, are slowly fading as batteries run out. Frantic cell phone calls
have rescuers trying to dig out possible survivors.
But even if we had the numbers, we don't have the context to comprehend them.
A bad year in Vietnam during the height of the war is one way to look at what
happened yesterday in New York City.
The last time the Trade Center was hit, it was a car bomb. When that
occurred, in 1993, most of the workers were evacuated. Then, the streets were
cold, and there were snow flurries that people walked through when they crept
out of the building. This time, there were people jumping from the building to
try to get out.
By nightfall, correspondents on television were doing reports from in front
of what would have been the Twin Towers as backdrop. Instead, there was an empty, dark
night.
This will have an impact on people that will be known only in retrospect.
Nothing recent compares. Not Waco nor Oklahoma City nor the beating of Rodney
King.
I live in New York and the first thing I thought of was my daughter and
whether she was safe. She was. Then, I thought about how this will affect
her life. She is a little shy of seven. She may have an inkling that her
world has changed. I did, when a little shy of seven I learned that John F.
Kennedy was slain.
Last night, though, there was only shock, the kind of devastation that
precedes mourning. After the attacks, midtown Manhattan seemed changed. The
streets were crowded. But people moved slowly. You could hear voices, even
from a taxi, of people talking to each other. It was very strange. No cell
phones. Virtually no traffic.
Just an eerie twilight end to a terrible summer tragedy.
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