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911, 16 years Later

Chicago Loop, September 11, 2001: Like most other office workers, I was quietly working on a now-forgotten but at the time urgent project when a co-worker walked by and told our floor that she thought a plane had just hit one of the NY World Trade twin towers. ‘That’s a shame,’ I thought, resuming my urgent whatever-it-was, ‘that an accident could happen in such an unfortunate location.’ That might seem naïve, but unlikely accidents do happen. In fact, the world’s first commercial aviation disaster was the 1919 fiery death of the hydrogen-filled blimp, Goodyear’s the Wingfoot Express , as it plummeted into the heart of Chicago’s financial district and, like Robin Hood splitting the arrow, cleanly through the skylight of the Continental Bank, vaporizing passengers, bank customers and tellers. The Continental survived, and was actually down the street from where I was working, in Chicago’s Sears Tower. (BTW, I will not call an old building by a new name; I don’t care how much money
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