WHERE WERE YOU ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001?

It was September 11, 2001, 6:45 am MDT in Grand Junction, Colorado. On the Today Show the host reported that “a small airplane” had just crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). I was in my hotel room preparing to be the breakfast speaker at the Colorado Association of Transit Agencies Annual Meeting. One look at the TV showed me this was no small airplane and while I was wondering why it happened, the second airplane hit the south tower. These were no accidents.

South tower (on left) is hit by second plane. Photo Credit: Robert J.Fisch

I proceeded to the meeting. Word had not yet spread to all the attendees and the conference leaders decided to continue with the program. By the time I was done speaking everyone knew something serious had happened in New York as cellphones were ringing off their metaphorical hooks.

The formal conference program was suspended. We adjourned to the sports bar of the hotel with its multiple TV’s. Soon the Pentagon was attacked, and fear became palpable in the room. What else would be a target? Then United Flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Was this a general attack? Who would be next?

Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta announced that all airplanes in U.S. airspace were to land immediately at the nearest airport possible. As the aircraft landed tens of thousands of passengers found themselves in cities they did not want to be in and didn’t know anything about. Many schools, businesses and institutions closed early. An estimated nine million people had used bus and rail vehicles to travel that morning; now they all wanted to go home as quickly as possible. More than 50 percent of those riders were in the New York and Washington, DC metro areas.

Local officials and emergency agencies set about welcoming their new unexpected visitors. Calls went out for transportation. Public transportation agencies and private bus companies across the nation responded. It became clear to many more people that day, what we in the public transportation industry already knew: public transportation employees are first line responders in times of emergencies.

HOW DID PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION PROVIDERS RESPOND?

The transit systems serving New York City and Washington D.C. were at the literal Ground Zeros of the attacks. Employees of the principal systems serving those areas responded heroically, but they were not the only ones. Across the country transit operators rose to the challenges presented big and small. Review of actions reported by many operators about both immediate effects and longer-term effects of the attacks revealed four recurring roles for public transportation on 9/11:

1. Evacuating workers and residents on very short notice.
2. Moving airline passengers stranded by the nationwide grounding of aircraft.
3. Providing buses, trains, operators, police and other assets to other emergency response organizations.
4. Improvising service with extra trains, buses, substitute service, overflow capacity, and transportation to hotels and other establishments.

Here are some examples large and small.

NEW YORK CITY

The Cortlandt Street subway station of the MTA’s New York City Transit and the WTC station of the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) system were destroyed by the collapse of the towers. Five nearby stations were made unusable. By 9 am transit officers began closing and evacuating nearby stations and adjoining tunnels. Many buses in the Financial District were damaged in the catastrophe or made inoperable as dust and debris that clogged filters or blocked streets. While formal service on NYC Transit was quickly halted, by the end of the day 65 percent of bus and subway service was back in operation.

Cortlandt Street subway station after the attacks.  Photo Credit: George Miller, NYC Transit.

Even with service formally stopped many buses continued to transport people away from danger with operators devising makeshift shuttle services on the fly. The Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road trains operated on a “load and go” basis, departing when filled. One of the most helpful things NYC Transit was able to do was make available a prodigious amount of heavy equipment and 3,500 employees ready to do their part to clear away debris and whatever else was needed. The caravan of heavy equipment and people reportedly stretched two miles in length heading towards Ground Zero.

NYC Transit official surveys damage after the attacks. Photo credit: Dana Trytten, Records of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Before the first tower fell the PATH system employees acted. After the first airplane struck, a PATH train headed to the WTC stopped in Jersey City, discharged its passengers and continued its trip empty to evacuate passengers and staff from the WTC station leaving Manhattan at 9:10 am not long before the first tower fell.

With the PATH service to the city ended, NJ Transit (NJT) took on added customers. NJT bus and rail served many more people than usual. In the subsequent days, it changed schedules and service levels to accommodate altered commuter patterns.

WASHINGTON, DC

In Washington, Flight 77 plowed into the west side of the Pentagon away from the Pentagon Metrorail and Metrobus stations, killing and injuring hundreds of people. The closure of the federal government offices that followed led to hundreds of thousands of people wanting to go home or just get away. Traffic jammed streets made it slow going for Metrobuses and other bus operators. WMATA’s Metrorail continued to operate carrying hundreds of thousands of people that day. In addition to its usual passengers WMATA transported local police, recue workers and emergency supplies as needed and made buses available as temporary shelters for rescue workers.

In the ensuing days the Metrorail system operated extended hours of service to aid in recovery efforts near the Pentagon. Other public transportation systems in the Washington region also responded with altered schedules and hours of operation being of primary importance.

In Atlanta, experience hosting the 1996 Olympics was cited as helping the MARTA system’s response in helping stranded passengers quickly. In the San Francisco Bay Area, BART’s prior terrorism and emergency response preparation was useful. In Cleveland, the RTA mobilized rush hour service levels in mid-day both to serve customers who wanted to leave the downtown early and be prepared in case other attacks might be coming. In Austin, Capital Metro supplied buses to move 300 people whose airplane was unexpectedly diverted to its airport.

It wasn’t just in major metropolitan areas that systems were called upon that day. In Youngstown, Ohio buses were put into special airport service to transport the passengers from six commercial flights that had altered their destinations. In Wichita, Kansas buses were mobilized to serve more than 1,300 diverted air passengers.

WHY WERE THE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION AGENCIES ABLE TO RESPOND?

One of the reasons New York and Washington area operators were able to mobilize relatively quickly and effectively in time of crisis was because, unfortunately, public transportation systems and passenger rail systems around the world have been frequent terrorist targets. Prior to 9/11, high profile attacks in Tokyo, Paris, London and Israel to highlight a few examples, had demonstrated in deadly fashion the need to prepare for what could happen.

FTA provided a grant to prepare this 1997 transit security research report.

Because of this tragic history, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) and its members had worked with the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to develop common approaches toward system safety, which included security and emergency preparedness. Transit operators in New York and Washington had emergency response plans in place, but no one was prepared for passenger airplanes being used as lethal guided missiles!

Across the nation most medium and large systems had some type of emergency response plan in place. Unfortunately, the attacks of 9/11 gave them the chance to use them.

THE AFTERMATH.

Literally within hours of the attacks APTA and the FTA convened discussions with senior transit system managers as to what resources might need to be put into place to strengthen transit system security. This initial discussion led to many more and the development of an approach to improving public transportation security. Examples include:

• Developing vulnerability assessments to aid systems in refining their security plans and tightening aspects that needed to be improved.
• Sponsoring research through the Transit Cooperative Research Program to develop useful approaches to improve security.
• Establishment of the Public Transit Information Shared Analysis Center (PTISAC) where any transit agency could acquire information security information including intelligence information.
• Developing security standards for transit operations.

When the Congress created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) it assumed some of the security functions from the FTA. APTA and its members continue to work effectively with both agencies. As a result, not only are transit systems more secure, but ideas that began in public transit migrated to other parts of the nation’s transportation services. The best example may be, “See Something, Say Something” which is nearly ubiquitous.

In the months following 9/11 I traveled the country meeting with transit officials, seeing how they were doing, encouraging them to improve their system security and listening to their ideas of what APTA and the federal government should do to help. One thing became crystal clear: the whole country was behind New York and its recovery efforts and remained so. But as time went by some communities began to resent the new security requirements that were being promulgated as too burdensome particularly among smaller operators. It also seemed the further away from New York and Washington the more pronounced the feeling was with notable exceptions in the big cities who felt a large city vulnerability kinship. One result was to encourage a move away from “one size fits all” rules and reporting requirements to a more size and vulnerability based approach.

Steps in a New York City subway station. Photo taken in 2015. Credit: Steven Lek

The attacks of 9/11 changed aspects of public transportation in many ways, raising security and generally emergency preparedness to be a much more important consideration for transit systems. The openness and exposure of transit systems operating environment make them vulnerable to attack. Today America’s public transit systems are much more secure than they were, but constant vigilance and continuous improvement are required to keep them that way.

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The Eno Center for Transportation would like to thank Rose Sheridan, APTA’s Vice President for Communications at the time of September 11, for providing Bill Millar with valuable materials and information that greatly informed this article.