We have an emergency telephone "911" in NYC and now "311" for anything else to do with the city. I read in Britain it’s 999, and perhaps 9/11 would have been 11/9 there as they place the dates numbers. I have worked for business in the former “Twin Towers” and even had a Social Security card replaced there. The one company in particular was on the archaeology survey as a “tech” (read digger in the officers' trailer park) in the initial fall survey of what had been “Pine Camp” and now Fort Drum, NY for the cantonment of the former Colorado-based US Army 10th Mountain Division. It was hailed at the time to boost the economy of nearby Watertown, NY.
Fort Drum, over 100,000 acres near Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks, has been used by NY State National Guard units, the US Army tank corps stationary fire exercises, A-10 Thunderbolts jet "tank killers" (also known as “Warthogs”) had practiced live fire, escorted from Syracuse, NY by Phantom F-4s, US Army winter training, helicopter training, etc. A permanent facility with housing for 7,000 was constructed and the infrastructure vastly improved over the beaver-dam flooded dirt roads for the unit once at Camp Hale, Colorado, the 10th Mountain Division. There had been a number of iron foundries there (3 or 4 using "bog iron”) in the early days of locomotives casting wheels and axles for the nascent railroads in the US which also resulted in many widths of rails, without a standard before the US Civil War, in many places in the US, its first locomotive built for the timber industry in South Carolina in the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, NY, arguably the first in the nation. Around 1945, 10,000 persons mostly on farms and dairy farms, were asked to leave for the expansion, though their cemeteries and the roads to and through Fort Drum were kept mostly open. Some animosity developed after mis-fires landed in one nearby cemetery and some of the locals have reported to have fired at some of the US Army personnel, if I recall, near Philadelphia, NY.
You might ask, what does this have to do with 9/11?. Well for one thing, many are deployed from Fort Drum to Iraq which has been blamed, even though, the perpetrators were Saudi's living in Germany, and Saddam Hussein hated the "al-Qa'ida" (The Base). The security company in charge of the screening of passengers for commercial jet flights, which were used in the attacks, had just been recently bought (hostile takeover? then changed in "restructuring"?) and the previous owner has finally gotten over the tragedy, also calumniated with the "notoriety" is back in the commercial security business, I read and not automatically rejected in contract proposals. I read something similar, for the NYC ferry accident which killed 10 people, the usual captain had massive, postponed, dental surgery that day, and would have been there according to the Bronx press reporting about that very windy tragic day.
We hand-dug hundreds of shovel-tests, three women and three men, in a Ford Bronco, around Fort Drum that fall for a Texas based power plant design company occupying many upper floors in the World Trade Center, (as many as 79-93 or 94? see within for a personal response to that day by one of its former employees, moved by the Koch admin. from 40 Rector St., which our archaeology consulting co. was once in offices across the street from, since demolished) then moved to NJ. Incidentally the Fort Drum woman archaeology field crew chief's grandfather had invented Kevlar, the DuPont, Inc., bullet-stopping material used in personal armor and other uses invented in Delaware, where she was from and where many of the "space suits" were made.
I have worked further north and at times gone through or by Fort Drum, which had a nice 5.1 earthquake one early morning as we awoke next to the Black River, last in the Erie Canal system, and one of the few northerly flowing rivers in NY state. One of the other gentlemen, is an archaeology professor in a NY State college. Gone are the jeeps replaced by Humvees, gone are the "Hueys" replaced by Blackhawks, gone are the older tanks, replaced by the Abrams M-1 turbine driven tanks, I even saw a small platoon of women in war-paint get out of a truck with their rifle weapons, and presumably, infantry will no longer have to go out in front of tanks, replaced by the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which can shoot at troops and tanks, which I read the sales brochure for while there. It had a very small EOD unit it seemed, though empty at the time, they "drafted" people for tasks I imagine, especially barracks searches, where often stuff ended up. Many acres are surrounded by double chain-link fences with barb and razor wire, where shells were/are fired into. I wonder if nearby resident, Sigourney Weaver, who likes to live near the troops it's reported, will be in the new "Ghostbusters"?
So seven years later we still have a huge hole in the ground. My significant other, not on the crew, but the researcher on the 90th floor, was sent home one day when the wind caused the worry that the elevator shafts would go out of alignment. Visiting there prior to the 1993 attack, after all what is described above was in 1983 and later, was the apparent lack of emergency lighting in the stairwells, changed I read after 1993. Prior to 1983 I was once denied access to what I recall as Building 7's excavation, with an archaeologist from Baiting Hollow, NY, after a Queens County librarian recovered an 18th century horse harness, since curated at the Long Island Science Museum. There have been witnesses of "ships" hulks found in excavation on that site and elsewhere in lower Manhattan, one from the 1730s or so I helped expose at 175 Water Street.
New York City, which was finally granted NY police coverage on the 16 acres, before exclusively the Port Authority's jurisdiction, should also perhaps, take back the site, administratively, granted many "exceptions" when de-mapped, back during the recession that created much of the landfill there including the new Battery Park City named for "Battery Park" where I've worked a "swing shift" in archaeology testing next to the former sculpture centerpiece "Sphere" damaged in the WTC collapse. Battery Park was reported in that department's 19th century fiscal records as built using prison labor ("Special Collections" Stony Brook University) as presently configured, another land-filling out to "Castle Clinton" which once only had a causeway to it. At least I've said this, fired just before the MTA strike also my employer there, for having a "blog". At least it wasn't for being afraid of the many rats that were there at night.
For a geoarchaeology view of Fort Drum click New York Glacial Lake Iroquois - Fort Drum pdf. Some interesting paleo sites have been found in the 21st century. US Army Environmental Command Home Page
