Twin Towers.

On this day in 2001 terrorists flew two planes into the Twin Towers
in New York City, causing both towers to collapse. In the hours after
the collapse, healthcare officials in New York City expected that
they would have to handle a huge surge of injured patients. They
asked people to donate blood, and they took volunteers to help staff
makeshift hospital stations around the city. But it turned out that
very few of the survivors of the attack had suffered serious
injuries. And when cleanup at the site of the attack began, there
were almost no identifiable bodies of victims. Almost everything had
been buried.

For weeks, no one knew how many people had died in the attack. It was
as though thousands of people had just vanished. Relatives of the
victims had no way of knowing if their loved ones were even dead.
Missing-person posters began to appear all over the city, around the
entrances of hospitals, on storefronts, bus shelters, and lampposts,
asking for help in locating the missing people in the photos. It was
believed that some of the victims might be unconscious in unknown
hospitals, or wandering the streets in the wake of the attack. The
posters kept appearing, even days after it was clear that few, if
any, of the missing would be found. Many of the photos were wedding
pictures, or pictures at birthday parties, or pictures of the victim
holding a new baby.

Journalists at The New York Times quickly realized that there
wouldn't be an official list of the dead for weeks or even months,
and so on September 14th, a half-dozen reporters divided up 100
missing-person fliers and began calling the phone numbers on the
fliers, interviewing the friends and relatives. And on September 15,
2001, the Times began publishing portraits in a section called "Among
the Missing." The title was eventually changed to "Portraits of
Grief." The journalists involved decided that they would try to write
portraits of every victim of the attack whose family they could
reach. And they decided that the stories would focus on how the
victim lived, not how he or she died.

The portraits were shorter than the average Times obituary, at about
150 words, and they skipped things like college degrees, jobs held,
and names of surviving family members. They just tried to capture
some detail or anecdote that would express each person's
individuality. There was a firefighter who wore size 15 boots; a man
who put toothpaste on his wife's toothbrush when he got up before
her, almost every day; a grandmother who wore pink rhinestone-studded
sunglasses and a metallic gold raincoat.

Ultimately, 143 reporters worked on the project, and they managed to
write about 1,910 of the 2,749 victims. They would have written about
every victim, but some families didn't want to participate or
couldn't be found. The portraits were collected in the book Portraits
9/11/01 (2002) (buy now). Two other Times reporters, Jim Dwyers and
Kevin Flynn, set out to tell the story of the final moments inside
the Twin Towers, and the result was their book 102 Minutes (2005).
(buy now)

The New York Times won six Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of the
terrorist attacks that year, including one for the section of the
paper devoted to the Portraits of Grief. It was the first time in the
Pulitzer's history that any paper won more than three awards in a year.