21 awful truths about 9/11

1. The number of children who lost a parent in the events of 9/11 was 3,051. Seventeen babies were subsequently born to women whose husbands died during the attacks. Nine months after 9/11, the number of births in New York City rose by 20 per cent compared to the same month in 2000.

2. According to researchers, alcohol consumption in Manhattan in the week after 9/11 increased by 25 per cent compared to the same period the year before. Tobacco consumption rose by 10 per cent, marijuana consumption by 3.2 per cent and church and synagogue attendance by 20 per cent.

3. The total value of art lost when the Twin Towers collapsed exceeded $100million. Items included Alexander Calder’s sculpture WTC Stabile , Joan Miró’s epic World Trade Center Tapestry , a painting from Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablature series, and others by Picasso and David Hockney.

4. One of the unsung heroes of 9/11 was a guide dog, Roselle, a yellow Labrador who led her blind owner, Michael Hingson, down 78 storeys of the North Tower and to the home of a friend.

5. It took firefighters 100 days to extinguish all the fires ignited by the attacks in New York.

6. Only 291 dead bodies were recovered “intact” from Ground Zero. The parents of Lisa Anne Frost, 22, who was a passenger on United Flight 175, which hit the South Tower, had to wait almost a year before anything belonging to their daughter was found by workers sifting through debris.

7. In total, workers sifted through more than one million tons of debris looking for remains and personal effects. They found 65,000 items, including 437 watches and 144 wedding rings.

8. Three hours before the attacks, a machine called a Random Event Generator at Princeton University predicted a cataclysmic event was about to unfold.

9. The section of the Pentagon hit by Flight 77 had just undergone a $258 million rearmament, in which walls had been strengthened and reinforced windows had been installed. Many right next to the plane’s point of impact remained intact.

10. The top four search-topics on Google in the week of 9/11, in descending order, were for: Nostradamus; CNN; The World Trade Center; and Osama bin Laden.

11. The bestselling American novel of 2001 was Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

12. When the 9/11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, checked in at Logan airport, in Boston, his name triggered an alert on the airport’s security system and his bags were never put in the plane’s hold.

13. Hundreds of memorials, dedications, flagpoles, crucifixes and artworks have been made using steel from Ground Zero. These include a cross in Shanksville, Philadelphia, where United Flight 93 crashed, made out of steel from the North Tower, and a Memory and Light monument in Padua, Italy.

14. In an exercise named “Vigilant Guardian”, NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command), which is responsible for defending US airspace, simulated at least four plane hijackings in the week prior to 9/11 and was scheduled to simulate another on the morning of the attacks.

15. Property developer Larry Silverstein bought the 99-year lease on the World Trade Center for $3.2 billion just six months before they were destroyed. He is now rebuilding a commercial office and shopping complex, alongside a memorial and museum, on the site.

16. Earlier this year, the official death count for 9/11 was raised by one to 2,753. New York’s Medical Examiner’s Office ruled that Jerry Borg, an accountant and part-time actor, had died in late 2010 from a lung disease caused by inhaling dust close to the World Trade Center.

17. Five of the 9/11 hijackers stayed in a motel right outside the gates of the American spy organisation, the National Security Agency, in the days immediately before the attacks.

18. Black boxes stored in the tail of Flight 77 were reported as having been discovered in the Pentagon on September 12 2001. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld later said that data from the cockpit voice recorder was unrecoverable. This is thought to be the first time in 40 years that a cockpit voice tape, once found, has yielded no data.

19. A Muslim prayer room was destroyed when the World Trade Center collapsed, along with a store of Korans.

20. John Patrick O’Neill, a special agent in charge at the FBI, who had investigated al-Qaeda and the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, left the FBI due to policy disagreements. He took up a new job as head of security at the World Trade Center – where he died on 9/11.

21. Scientists took advantage of the three-day flight ban over the US to conduct experiments on the effect on the atmosphere of jet planes. They found the days were a little warmer and the nights cooler, suggesting that the exhaust trails planes leave in the sky act like clouds; shielding the Earth from the sun during the day and trapping heat during the night.