Professor Roger Cooke, chairman of ITS’s Control Risk, Optimization, Stochastics and System Theory department was in Manhattan last week, when terror struck.
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”I was at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis reading my email when someone stormed in and said that the World Trade Tower had been hit by an airplane. I first imagined a small private plane and wondered how I should adapt my presentation on ”Aviation risk to groundings” for next week at the European Safety and Reliability conference in Italy. Then came the rest of the news, and rumor, and I realized I would not be going to Italy. I got a flight to Amsterdam on Monday from JFK and decided to spend the afternoon in New York, to get as close as possible to ”ground zero.”
”When I arrived at Penn Station, I asked where the lockers were for checking luggage. The attendant’s look made it clear that my question was weird enough to be suspicious. Of course the lockers were removed many years ago. Someone could put a bomb in them. The closest I got to ground zero wasn’t very close. I couldn%t honestly say that the air burned my nose and eyes more than it used to do on a warm summer day in New York, but there was a foul and unfamiliar smell.”
”The mood of the place was indescribable. New Yorkers are a unique breed. The waves of immigrants have brought waves of cultures, lifestyles, religions, fads, causes, ideologies, etc. They see it all come and go, and preserve a certain irony towards everything taken seriously. New York must be the most ethnically diverse place in the world. In fact it is not really American, it is everything; every culture, language, religion is there.”
”And then this attack, with which no group or cause has yet wished to own, whose apparent goal was simply casualties, as many as possible. Something wants to kill New York. What a ridiculous idea, you can’t kill New York. It%s like trying to kill humanity. The most striking images for me were the posters with faces of the missing, often with a description and little story. You see them everywhere, and always with large crowds of people reading them. Words just choke in my throat.”
(This story was published in Delta 28, 2001.)
Professor Roger Cooke, chairman of ITS’s Control Risk, Optimization, Stochastics and System Theory department was in Manhattan last week, when terror struck.
”I was at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis reading my email when someone stormed in and said that the World Trade Tower had been hit by an airplane. I first imagined a small private plane and wondered how I should adapt my presentation on ”Aviation risk to groundings” for next week at the European Safety and Reliability conference in Italy. Then came the rest of the news, and rumor, and I realized I would not be going to Italy. I got a flight to Amsterdam on Monday from JFK and decided to spend the afternoon in New York, to get as close as possible to ”ground zero.”
”When I arrived at Penn Station, I asked where the lockers were for checking luggage. The attendant’s look made it clear that my question was weird enough to be suspicious. Of course the lockers were removed many years ago. Someone could put a bomb in them. The closest I got to ground zero wasn’t very close. I couldn%t honestly say that the air burned my nose and eyes more than it used to do on a warm summer day in New York, but there was a foul and unfamiliar smell.”
”The mood of the place was indescribable. New Yorkers are a unique breed. The waves of immigrants have brought waves of cultures, lifestyles, religions, fads, causes, ideologies, etc. They see it all come and go, and preserve a certain irony towards everything taken seriously. New York must be the most ethnically diverse place in the world. In fact it is not really American, it is everything; every culture, language, religion is there.”
”And then this attack, with which no group or cause has yet wished to own, whose apparent goal was simply casualties, as many as possible. Something wants to kill New York. What a ridiculous idea, you can’t kill New York. It%s like trying to kill humanity. The most striking images for me were the posters with faces of the missing, often with a description and little story. You see them everywhere, and always with large crowds of people reading them. Words just choke in my throat.”
(This story was published in Delta 28, 2001.)
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