N.B. This is an expanded version of an essay first posted in 2009.
I Could Smell the Smoke
Certain dates take on special meaning, as shared experiences and defining vignettes in our global consciousness. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on these dates. The Apollo lunar landing (July 20, 1969) is one such date. For many in the United States, September 11, 2001 is another. The 20th anniversary of this date prompted me to reflect on my experiences, both social and technical on that day.
On September 11th, I was hosting a National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop on Computation as a Tool for Discovery in Physics at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Access Center, which was adjacent to NSF, in Arlington, Virginia. After the meeting opened, I ran downstairs to hail a taxi and head to Capitol Hill for a meeting at U.S. Representative Dennis Hastert’s office in one of the Congressional office buildings. At the time, Rep. Hastert was Speaker of the House and second in line to the U.S. Presidency, a fact I had not considered particularly noteworthy until that day. Nor did I know of the scandals that would later envelope him and lead to his conviction in Federal court.
I arrived a few minutes early for my appointment with one of Representative Hastert’s legislative affairs directors and was awaiting the arrival of my other Illinois colleague in the hallway outside when my Blackberry suddenly began buzzing. That I carried a Blackberry and a cellphone on a “belt area network” absolutely marked me as a geek. At that time, long before it became de rigueur among road warriors, the Blackberry offered text messaging on a proprietary network and email forwarding, which I used to reach a select set of friends and colleagues while traveling. Argonne National Laboratory’s Rick Stevens was among that select few.
That morning, Rick sent me a brief message asking if I were okay. As it was a clear and beautiful September day in Washington, I thought this rather curious and responded, “Of course, why wouldn’t I be?” as I ambled into the office anteroom. Like almost all Senate and House offices, the anteroom contained televisions tuned to CSPAN and CNN, with the sound off, as young staffers scurried about.
At that point, I heard a mumbled comment about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. My immediate thought was that the pilot of a single engine plane must have done something incredibly stupid in the highly trafficked New York City airspace. As I was pondering this apparent foolishness, the person I was waiting to meet emerged and told me we would need to postpone our meeting. “Why?” I asked. Pointing to the television, which was now showing a replay of American Airlines Flight 11 hitting the first World Trade Center tower, he said, “That’s why.”
Unbeknownst to either of us, a third plane had just hit the Pentagon, a few miles away. As we stood chatting, the Capitol Police began a polite and respectful, but leisurely evacuation of the building. As I emerged into the fall sunlight, small groups of people were wandering slowly around the House and Senate office buildings. There was no panic, because most of us had no idea what was happening, at least until we looked to the southwest, where a column of smoke was now rising from the Pentagon.
Uncertainty
My Illinois colleague and I retreated to Bullfeathers, a bar just off the Capitol, where we joined a growing group of members of Congress and staffers. Rumors were rampant, including one that a plane was headed for the Capitol, and none of us really knew what was happening.
Cellphone service was non-existent, overloaded by frantic call attempts. At that time, there were few cell on wheels (COWS), and there certainly wasn’t enough time for their deployment. Hence, we had only relayed information from the single television in the bar. Periodically, someone would duck inside, catch the latest headlines and rumors, and trundle back outside to repeat what they had seen and heard.
Through it all, my Blackberry continued to operate, and I received brief news updates from my friends. It really drove home the fact that wireless spectrum is precious and can be quickly overloaded in times of crisis. It also highlighted the resilience of packet data networks, as the early Blackberry used the DataTAC protocol in the 800 MHz bands. Little did I know that I would later spend years at Microsoft working on adaptive spectrum management and policies with the FCC and ITU.
At the time, we did not know about the desperate struggle underway aboard American Airlines Flight 93, with the passengers fighting to regain control of the hijacked plane. I have often wondered what might have happened had that plane hit the U.S. Capitol. For all the national outrage and anger in response to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, I suspect an attack on the Capitol might have roused the country in an even more pointed way, and I am grateful for what the passengers on Flight 93 did to protect the Capitol.
Why didn’t we leave a high value target area, you might ask? The Washington Metro was closed, taxis were non-existent, there was a security cordon around the area, and it was too far to walk back to Arlington, VA. As we waited, fighter jets were flying low over the Capitol, sirens wailed regularly, and bomb squads rolled past. To say it was surreal would be a massive understatement.
After several hours, some semblance of normality began returning and the Metro reopened, though we still knew little about what had happened. My colleague and I boarded the Metro, which was packed with worried people. Notable among them were groups of soldiers and airline workers, both in uniform. Their fear and mine rose further when the train passed the smoke-filled Pentagon stop at high speed.
After what seemed a lifetime, but which was really only about three hours, I found myself again sitting in my meeting at NSF, discussing the future of computational physics. All the attendees had agreed that continuing the meeting was the best policy, because we had no other practical options. It was somber and subdued, and we struggled to focus on the computing-mediated research opportunities in plasma physics, molecular dynamics, and accelerator physics.
By this juncture, the broad outlines of the attack were known. We also knew U.S. airspace had been closed to civilian traffic and all the airports were closed. One colleague was asked to disembark from an already boarded flight at Reagan National.
Consequently, most of us knew we would need to find alternative transportation to our varied homes across the country. At least one of the workshop attendees, who was from NYC, had immediate family within blocks of the New York ground zero site, which triggered collective and unsuccessful attempts to find any working communication channel to New York City. All telephone circuits were jammed.
Throughout the day, I continued to track developments on MSNBC, where I began experiencing timeouts due to query volume. It made me remember the webserver scaling challenges we faced when NCSA released the Mosaic web browser, and we were deluged with network traffic, motivating work on round robin DNS.
A Silent Night
That evening, I walked through the deserted streets of Arlington to reach my nearby hotel. I somewhat hesitantly went to the front desk and asked to extend my stay. With a sad smile, the desk clerk told me that would not be a problem, as their expected guests were not going to arrive.
Later that evening, I unsuccessfully searched for an open restaurant, only to find the streets deserted in a way I had never before encountered. Seeing the National Guard now armed and ready outside many buildings was even more sobering. Nobody knew what might happen next.
After finally finding some food in the hotel, I returned to the Access Center, where I was contacted by the U.S. Coast Guard, which was seeking help in establishing communication with their units in New York City. Why, you might ask, would the Coast Guard reach out to NCSA? Coincidently and ironically, NCSA had just hosted a Top Officials (TOPOFF) exercise, which brought together federal officials for wargames to gauge the efficacy of coordinated responses to potential terrorist attacks. From that, we were known to have advanced networking expertise.
For a few moments, I pondered how I might call in some technical favors to create a temporary optical network from Washington to New York that bypassed the eastern seaboard. However, I knew that voice over IP (VOIP) infrastructure in the federal government was quite limited, and quickly concluded that this was not feasible. That the U.S. Coast Guard would contact me seeking help during a national crisis spoke volumes about the fragility of our national communication infrastructure.
Aftermath
For a time, we feared terrorist attacks across the country on critical national infrastructure, and many of us took extra security precautions to protect national assets. In our case, it was additional security to protect the NSF supercomputers in NCSA’s data center. Fortunately, it was never needed.
We were all shocked and shaken by the terrorist attacks. After all, this was Fortress America, a continent-scale nation with friendly allies on its northern and southern boarders, its east and west coasts protected by blue water oceans, and a military capability with global reach and unrivaled power in the post-Cold War era. We believed we were untouchable. We were wrong, awakened to the reality of asymmetric warfare on U.S. soil.
All this made me recall a then-recent conversation with one of my Illinois computer science colleagues. I had asked what had brought him to Illinois, other than the obvious scholarly opportunities. He said that he had lost part of his family in the Holocaust, and seeking safety, some of the survivors had immigrated to South Africa, only to find themselves again ensnared in social instability. He then said he had come to Illinois because he craved stability and safety – it was the last place in the world where he could imagine tanks rumbling through the cornfields. Since then, I have looked at cornfields in a new way.
Heading Home
Over the next three days, I collected information on various University of Illinois faculty, staff, and students stranded in greater Washington, DC. Eventually, we found a rental car (no mean feat) and drove back to Champaign, Illinois. One friend took a taxi home to upstate New York. Another group of friends bought a used car and headed home to California. Somewhere west of the Rockies, the airports began opening and they were able to sell their used car and fly the rest of the way home.
As for me, now safely ensconced at Illinois, I resumed my research collaborations, one of which involved a previously scheduled trip to Caltech as part of the Scalable I/O Initiative. It was my first indication that air travel would never be the same again. The Chicago O’Hare airport was emptier than I had ever seen it, there were National Guard troops everywhere, and everyone was on high alert. My American Airlines flight to LAX had only nine passengers, so few that the flight attendants moved all of us to first class. I suspect it was in part to keep an eye on each of us.
Coda
In the years since, I have visited the New York 9/11 Memorial, with its damaged fire trucks and other artifacts from the frantic rescue efforts at the World Trade Center. The memorial’s haunting line, “No day shall erase you from the memory of time” is inscribed atop a repository of unidentified human remains. Although the line was lifted from the Aeneid out of context, the sentiment is apt.
The United States and the world were changed on September 11, with reverberations still affecting global politics, national policy, and everyday life.
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