“But look at these,” I said to Ed and the other Massport senior staff gathered around him. I pointed to the abbreviated Arabic names of passengers who were seated toward the front of the plane.
American Airlines officials had actually tried, Ed said, to locate the two al Shehris in the gate area before the flight. The manifest noted they were “club” members, entitled to relax in a special area reserved for first-class and business travelers.
The room went quiet. The realization that every single person on this list was dead seemed to hit each of us at the same time.
“Two planes are off the radar.”
The reality of that haunting phrase was right in front of me. On American 11, seventy-six innocent passengers, two pilots, and nine flight attendants. Ninety-two people in all dead. On United 175, fifty-one innocent passengers, two pilots, and seven flight attendants. Sixty-five people in all dead. Each of those passengers and crew had gotten up that morning. As I did. Followed their normal routine. As I did. Kissed their spouse and their children goodbye. As I did. Traveled to Logan to catch a flight. As I did. Did they die instantly? Did they suffer?
I needed to be alone for a few minutes. I nodded to the firefighter seated at the desk by the entrance as I stepped out the door to the parking lot. For the first time, I noticed the details of the special access badge he was wearing, the same one I put on as I arrived at Fire Rescue headquarters. It was yellow with an illustration of an airliner on it. The airliner was cracked in half. But large pieces remained intact, making survival, rescue, a possibility. I imagined for a second what the badge would look like if the illustration tried to capture what had happened that morning.
The plane striking the second tower.
The explosion.
The ball of fire.
The black smoke.
Fingering my own badge, I walked slowly toward the chain-link fence separating the Fire Rescue headquarters from the airfield. I stopped and listened. Something didn’t feel right. It took me a minute more to figure out what it was. Silence.
I looked up and saw nothing but sky. On the tarmac ahead of me, planes were lined up against empty jet bridges. Unmoving. No fuel trucks, no maintenance vehicles driving on the perimeter road. No workers directing or refueling planes on the ramp. No baggage handlers. The runways at Logan Airport, the eighteenth-busiest airport in the country, were completely and unnaturally empty.
The sky above? Emptier still.
1:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.—Logan Airport
For the next twelve hours, we focused on the massive operational task of closing down and securing 1.2 million square feet of terminal space. The more than fifty Massport volunteers who made up the Care Team took on the emotional task of providing support to the growing stream of families coming to the Logan Hilton.
I sat at the head of the conference table and looked across at the people I’d worked with day in and day out for the past two years. Chris, Massport’s head of the multibillion-dollar modernization project underway at Logan; Joe, the chief of security; Ed and John, the leaders of aviation operations; Mike, the head of Massport’s cargo and cruise facilities in the Port of Boston; Joey and Jose, the communications and media leaders. Leslie, Tommy, and Dave, the agency’s finance, government relations, and legal teams. Given the runway fight and other difficult negotiations with the community over airport-impact issues—the intense forums, the public hearings, the media scrutiny—I felt I knew each of these people better, more personally, than I would in an ordinary work situation. Now on each face I saw the same recognition I knew was on mine. What we had seen so far that day and what was yet to come would be beyond any experience we’d ever shared.
I asked each operational head to provide a status update on their area of responsibility:
“The American Red Cross is on-site with the families at the Hilton. Father Richard is on his way.”
“We’re bringing cots and supplies to the Exchange Conference Center for passengers who have no place to stay.”
“We’re already getting calls from families in East Boston offering their homes for people to stay in.”
“Canine units are being deployed.”
“No word from the FAA on the airspace reopening.”
“An employee’s daughter was on United 175.”
“Wait, what?” I stopped John and asked him to repeat what he’d said. A Massport customer service agent’s daughter, who worked for United, was on Flight 175. “Marianne MacFarlane,” he said.
The operational reports continued:
“All construction sites have been shut down.”
“The governor is going to need another update before her next press availability.”
“The tower says everything was normal leaving Boston airspace.”
“We’ve opened a media center at the Hyatt. We need someone to make a statement.”
Ed came into the room. “American Airlines,” he said, “has found luggage in the bag room that mistakenly hadn’t been loaded onto Flight 11. State Police are on the way over to open and search it.”
In the first major break in the investigation, the luggage turned out to be Mohamed Atta’s. In it were an instructional flight video and a fuel consumption calculator.
Shortly before 4:00 p.m.—Logan Hyatt ballroom
Logan security director Joe Lawless ascended the makeshift platform in the media center set up in the Logan Hyatt ballroom. I stood on the side of the room. We’d asked the FAA and representatives from the airlines to join him, but they’d refused. Still, we felt we had an obligation to attempt to satisfy the intensifying restlessness of the gathered media.
In a short prepared statement, Joe said that Logan’s priority was dealing with the needs of the passengers’ families. He provided phone numbers the airlines had made available for them to call. He then confirmed it was American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 that had been hijacked.
As we expected, there were some questions about Logan security procedures. Joe, a highly respected state homicide investigator and head of the governor’s security detail before running Logan Airport security for the past eight years, said, “We have a very high security standard here. We are as secure, if not more secure, than any other airport in the US.”
Since the hijackers had successfully boarded and taken over four planes at three different large East Coast airports at almost exactly the same time, I expected the media and political leaders would see the security issues as national rather than Logan-specific. And that the immensity of this world-changing event would trump any tendency to turn the terrorist attacks into some kind of political football. I believed the target of understandable collective anger and fear would be the terrorist sponsors who launched this horrific attack.
On all three counts, I had never been more wrong in my life.
Approximately 5:00 p.m.—Massport Fire Rescue headquarters
As we reconvened in the conference room, Ed related the story of a passenger who had called police to describe an encounter with three Arab men in the parking garage that morning. “When he heard about the hijackings, he immediately contacted authorities,” he said. Because of the passenger’s report about the odd behavior of the men who sat in their car staring straight ahead as he tried to open his car door, investigators recovered the hijackers’ rented white Mitsubishi, the second big break in the investigation. In the car they found Arabic-language flight manuals.
A check of Logan’s parking garage records, which tracks the license plates of cars entering and exiting Logan garages, indicated the hijackers’ car had been in and out of Logan several times in the preceding days, a further indication that the attacks were carefully orchestrated.
8:00 p.m.—Logan Hyatt ballroom
Some twelve hours from when American 11 and United 175 had pulled back from Logan’s gates, I approached the podium set up in the makeshift media center. Tom Kint
on, Logan’s director of aviation, had arrived at the airport under police escort after traveling for hours from a meeting he was attending in Canada.
Reporters packed the room, many more than were there that afternoon. Cameras, mounted on tripods, lined the back wall. Working with Joey, I had quickly jotted an opening statement on the way to the media center.
“Good evening,” I said, looking straight ahead into the cameras, the notes I had made on three sheets of yellow paper in front of me.
“On behalf of Massport, I want to express our deepest sympathy to families of loved ones on the aircraft involved in these incidents. Even as our response has focused on the safety and security of our passengers and employees, the pain of these families has been foremost in our minds. These incidents triggered our emergency response plan. Throughout the day Massport has worked with public-safety agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. We’ve trained extensively for disasters, though certainly today’s events are beyond our worst imaginings.”
Reporters scribbled furiously in their notebooks.
“I also want to thank the Hilton hotel and the numerous volunteers who have responded to the family assistance center to support those families who came to Logan in search of information.
“We appreciate the patience of the press throughout this long day. We’ve attempted to provide you with whatever information was made available to us, and we will continue to do so throughout the hours and days ahead. This media center at the Hyatt will stay open as long as this crisis continues. Finally, from the onset this morning, we pledged our wholehearted support for ongoing law-enforcement efforts and will continue to do so. Nothing is more important to those of us in the aviation industry than finding out how this could have happened. Thank you.”
I turned the microphone over to Tom Kinton, who made a similar statement and then, in turn, introduced Joe Lawless. Lawless barely finished before the questions started coming rapid fire.
Row after row of reporters poised, pens or microphones in hand, on the edge of their seats jostled for their turn:
How did the hijackers access the planes?
What weapons did they have?
Is it true other Logan flights were targeted?
Were the weapons snuck onto the planes from the ramp?
Is it true five Arab men were seen running from another plane?
Tom, Joe, and I fielded each question, but we had few answers. I could see the frustration on the reporters’ faces. It mirrored our own.
After the press conference was over, I received a call on my cell phone from Frank Phillips, the head of the Boston Globe’s State House Bureau. “You look awful,” he said.
I hadn’t realized until then that the press conference had been carried live on some local television stations. I’d known Frank for years, from the days when I was a young assistant press secretary in the governor’s office and he, even then, was a crotchety senior reporter on the state political beat. We typically had fun repartee, teasing each other about politics and media coverage from the vantage points of our disparate ages.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice serious.
“I am horrified,” I answered quietly.
10:00 p.m.—Massport Fire Rescue headquarters
I spent the rest of the evening with Tom Kinton and Joe Lawless in the Emergency Operations Center, overseeing incoming reports and operational updates.
“Med flights are being allowed now.”
“The American Airlines Care Team has touched down and is headed to the Hilton.”
“There are twenty families there. We’re going to keep it open overnight.”
“One hundred passengers are sleeping in the Exchange Center.”
“Did you hear about the flags?”
“No, what flags?”
American and United employees, without direction or permission, had gone out on the tarmac at some point during the day to the jet bridges connected to gates C19 and B32, the departure gates of the two flights. On the top of each one, they mounted an American flag, the first Logan memorial to the passengers and crew.
Approximately 1:30 a.m.—Marblehead
James drove me back to Marblehead, neither of us saying anything on the short, solemn ride. Candles were still burning along the side of the road, illuminating homemade signs, remnants of earlier spontaneous vigils. As we drove through Swampscott, near the spot where we first heard the radio reports that morning, there was still one man, standing alone, waving an American flag.
James dropped me off in my driveway. “Good night,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I’ll pick you up in the morning,” he said. “Six o’clock?”
“Right,” I answered. I’d scheduled a staff meeting for 6:30 a.m., five hours later.
David opened the front door and immediately took me in his arms. I tried to accept his embrace for a few seconds but I needed to see Jack. I pulled away and ran up the stairs. David joined me by Jack’s crib, and I leaned back into his chest. He wrapped his arms around me from behind. For several moments we just stood there watching Jack sleep. He was so peaceful. His little breaths going in and out. Special Doggie in his arms as always. Just as it was when I woke him that morning.
Just that morning.
Suddenly, there was a roar overhead. David and I literally jumped. My heart pounded as I quickly followed him downstairs to the front door. We stepped outside and peered into the darkness in the direction of Boston. The city was far beyond our line of sight, but we both wondered, Is this another attack?
“It’s a military plane,” I suddenly realized. “It must be patrolling Boston’s airspace.”
I read many years later in President George W. Bush’s book Decision Points that the White House had experienced a similar scare that night, pulling the president and Mrs. Bush from their bed as an unknown aircraft approached. It was a reminder that, at times, my 9/11 experience was similar to that of many others, including the president himself, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. Nor did I know that within a few short days my 9/11 experience would take a painfully isolating turn.
As the sound of the plane’s engine died away, David and I stood in the darkness. “Let’s go upstairs,” David whispered.
For the rest of what remained of the night, we lay in bed, holding hands, waiting for dawn.
Chapter Four
Shut Down
September 12, 2001, 6:00 a.m.—En route to Logan
I couldn’t let myself feel anything. I had to be intensely focused on the job in front of me. When the horror of the attacks, the fear of what was still unknown, coursed through me, I pushed those feelings away, to be dealt with at some later time. At first I did this consciously, then increasingly, automatically.
I could not let myself feel anything else.
Focus. The airport. I needed to make it safe.
Was it over?
Were there more?
Stop.
The twisted metal. Smoking pile.
Stop.
The plane striking the second tower. The ball of fire.
Stop.
How many were dead? Six thousand? Seven thousand?
Stop.
My hand went to my stomach.
The baby. Was it okay?
Stop.
The airport was shut down. I would keep it closed. I would make it safe. I had to make it safe.
But it was too la—
Stop.
September 12, 2001, 6:30 a.m.—Logan Airport, Emergency Operations Center
The airport’s senior staff and I gathered around the conference table. “The FAA has put out several new security directives. They came in all night,” John Duval said. He and Joe Lawless noted that airports and airlines had to comply with each one before reopening.
“Let’s go through them,” I answered. M
y pen was poised over the yellow legal-sized notepad on the table in front of me.
“Curbside check-in must be discontinued.”
“Only plastic knives in the food service areas beyond the security checkpoints.”
“Cars can’t be parked within three hundred feet of the terminals.”
I put my pen down.
“Access beyond the checkpoints is limited to passengers with tickets.”
“All the terminals have to be swept with K-9 teams.”
I could feel my cheeks burning with frustration.
“Suspicious items or activities have to be reported immediately.”
“No cargo or mail is allowed on commercial flights.”
John and Joe stopped their recitation.
“And?” I said. “Is that it?”
“So far,” John answered evenly. “More are coming in. Some are for the airlines. Some for us. We have a checklist that we’re going through. The expectation is airports will reopen tomorrow.”
“We’re preparing to reopen,” he said, “like we would after a major winter storm.”
I felt my cheeks burn redder.
I understood what was driving him and the aviation team. It was a point of pride in “snowbelt” airports to reopen quickly if storms forced runway closures. Every fall we even held a “snow parade” of gleaming, peak-condition snow equipment—I’d once driven a plow at the head of it—to demonstrate to our airline tenants our readiness for winter.
But this is no snowstorm, I thought. It’s a terrorist attack.
It might be acceptable to every other airport to reopen after banning curbside check-in and removing metal knives in concession areas. It was not acceptable for us. I tried, unsuccessfully, to push away the intrusive image.
The second plane strikes the tower.
The explosion.
The ball of fire.
On My Watch Page 6