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September 11 Attack Timeline. On September 11, 2001, nineteen al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial U.S. jetliners, deliberately crashing two of the planes into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center and a third plane into the Pentagon.

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Take a look at history’s first draft on the New York Times 

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Take a look at history’s first draft on the New York Times 

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The 9/11 Decade: The Towers' Rise and Fall

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Pick 3-4 images

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The 9/11 Decade: The Towers' Rise and Fall

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A photo album of the World Trade Center's life and violent death.

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The 9/11 Boat Rescue that Saved Half a Million People | I Was There

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The 9/11 Boat Rescue that Saved Half a Million People | I Was There

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She Fled the 68th Floor. She's Finally Dealing With 9/11 Trauma. (Published 2019)

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She had a foreclosure and two drunken-driving convictions before she was diagnosed with PTSD.

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Kayla Bergeron worked in the north tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, as a high-ranking official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Today she works in a fast-food restaurant. Credit... Melissa Golden for The New York Times

Kayla Bergeron can still describe that morning in matter-of-fact detail: She was dutifully working at her desk on the 68th floor when the building lurched. Someone ran in and said that a plane had hit - a small plane, she assumed. She realized it must not have been just a Cessna.

Then came a harrowing descent in a stairwell that was dark and wet because pipes had burst as the twin towers collapsed.

She can also describe her life since, including the loss of a new job, the foreclosure of her condominium, the two convictions for drunken driving and, just last year, the diagnosis from a court-ordered alcohol treatment program: post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from Sept. 11, 2001.

In the 18 years since the terror attacks, the police officers and firefighters who rushed into the flaming towers have been honored with a memorial at ground zero.

On Wednesday, the names of those who died, read every Sept. 11 at a ceremony there, will be read once again, even as the number of people who have reported being sickened by their work on the so-called pile continues to rise. Congress, after a fight last summer championed by the comedian Jon Stewart, voted in July to replenish the fund that covers their medical care.

Ms. Bergeron, center, holding a jacket to her mouth, on the day of the attacks. Credit... Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

"PTSD doesn't have a time limit," said Dr. Jacqueline M. Moline, the director of Northwell's Queens World Trade Center Health Program, which provides monitoring and treatment for dozens of illnesses. "People can develop PTSD related to an event years later." Often, she said, it is not clear what triggers the disorder.

Of the 24,550 emergency responders in the health program, 7,425, or 30.25 percent, have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of those who fled the towers or the nearby destruction, 2,625 - or about 12.3 percent of all survivors registered in the program - have post-traumatic stress disorder, according to data from Northwell Health. Another 675 have anxiety disorders, and 661 others have what the program classifies as major depressive disorders.

"PTSD is the most common illness in the 9/11 community," said John Feal, who worked as a demolition supervisor at ground zero and became one of the leading advocates for a permanent victims compensation fund.

Even now, some survivors replay the disaster in their minds. They have nightmares about it. They jump when they hear loud noises. They avoid anything that reminds them of that day.

Usually, she said, the symptoms are brought out by "a trigger in the here and now."

The triggers could include ordinary elements of daily life. For example, a bright late-summer morning could serve as a reminder of Sept. 11, 2001, and touch off memories of the planes taking aim at the twin towers. Sounds could have a similar effect.

"From the time I was 17 on, I couldn't listen to an airplane overhead or a helicopter, or a car backfiring," said Lila Nordstrom, who was a senior at Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan in 2001 and now lives in Los Angeles. "If I was in traffic and someone honked, it would lead to a protracted period of me panicking. It took a while for me to realize it was happening, and it took a while after that to realize it was 9/11-related."

She said that she was certified for post-traumatic stress disorder under the World Trade Center Health Program in 2015.

For Elinda Kiss, a business school professor who was attending a conference in the Marriott World Trade Center hotel on Sept. 11, driving past Newark Liberty International Airport on the way to teach at the Rutgers University campus in Newark would bring a replay of her frantic run to safety.

"I would see the planes coming in for a slow landing," she said. "I would relive seeing the plane hit" the south tower.

Dr. Kiss, who now teaches in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, said she assumed her post-traumatic stress had largely disappeared over the years. But on Sunday night, lying awake, the nightmare replayed again and again. "I kept seeing the plane hit in the middle of World Trade 2," she said.

Compounding the pain - and the pressure to continue - was the loss of her boss, the executive director of the Port Authority, Neil D. Levin, who was killed in the attacks.

As the years passed, Ms. Bergeron remained largely out of the public spotlight until 2006, when she was quoted in articles about the last aboveground remnant of the World Trade Center, a part of the staircase that she had taken to safety. She called it "the path to freedom."

Ms. Bergeron said she left the Port Authority in 2006 for a state-funded job in Florida, in part to be closer to her aging mother, who lived in Georgia and had developed lung cancer.

Over the next few years, her mother died, her job was eliminated in a round of budget cuts and her savings ran out. She lost her condominium in West Palm Beach, Fla., to foreclosure.

In 2013, she was arrested and charged with driving under the influence in Parkland, Fla., and her driver's license was suspended for several months. She later moved to Georgia to live with her father, and there she found a job making sandwiches in a fast-food restaurant.

She said that drinking had not become a constant in her life but that she was depressed and felt anxious "all the time."

"That's really all I remember," she said, adding that she apparently blacked out. The police took her to the Forsyth County Jail in Cumming, Ga.

When she and her father went to retrieve her car, she was surprised to see that the front end was damaged. The police told her father that after she left the Mexican restaurant, she hit the back of another car that was stopped at a red light.

She was offered a choice of jail or a program called accountability court, which offers intensive counseling, treatment and monitoring.

Carol Simpson, the assistant director, said that those who enter the program must agree to spend at least 24 months in it. Ms. Bergeron has just completed her 18th month. Ms. Simpson said that post-traumatic stress disorder "is something we treat in our program pretty regularly."

Ms. Bergeron said she could find no World Trade Center survivor groups, either in New York or in Florida when she was living there. The World Trade Center Survivors Network, a nonprofit set up soon after the attacks, ran an outreach program that was intended to help survivors come to terms with their experiences.

But in 2007, the group removed its president when The New York Times published a story questioning her account of escaping the twin towers. ( She was in Barcelona attending business school.) The last post on its website appears to have gone up in 2017. Several people who were involved with the group did not return calls seeking comment.

"There are so many survivors out there who don't realize they have issues from 9/11," said Ms. Cilento, a therapist who was at home on Long Island when the planes hit the trade center. Her son, a volunteer fireman, was eventually sent to ground zero.

"So many suffer in silence. It's 18 years later, and to some it's pretty new."

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She Fled the 68th Floor. She's Finally Dealing With 9/11 Trauma. (Published 2019)

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She had a foreclosure and two drunken-driving convictions before she was diagnosed with PTSD. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Kayla Bergeron can still describe that morning in matter-of-fact detail: She was dutifully working at her desk on the 68th floor when the building lurched.

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Explore the “Portraits of Grief” archive — more than 2,500 impressionistic sketches of the lives lost in the Sept. 11 attacks. With videos by Matthew Orr of six families 10 years later.

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Opinion | Footprint: Where the Towers Stood (Published 2018)

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Remembering 9/11: Watch and answer questions 

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Remembering 9/11: Watch and answer questions 

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What moments in this film stood out for you? Why?

• Were there any surprises? Anything that challenged what you know — or thought you knew?

• What messages, emotions or ideas will you take away from this film? Why?

• What questions do you still have?

3. An additional challenge: What connections can you make between this film and your own life or experience? Why? Does this film remind you of anything else you’ve read or seen? If so, how and why?

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Op-Docs

The World Trade Center wreckage once smoldered here. Now visitors come from around the world to learn, remember and grieve.

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Op-Docs: Where the Towers Stood

The World Trade Center wreckage once smoldered here. Now visitors come from around the world to learn, remember and grieve the loss of 9/11.

[somber music playing] [airplane engine] See it? Yeah. Am I just seeing things? Oh, jeez. Oh, they're people. Oh. Oh, jeez, they're people. They're people. They're people. [quiet music playing] I'm going to take us right here to this tree where there in shade and there is sun, so you could have which ever you prefer. So we don't get in everyone's way, if we can stay over here on the left hand side, we'll be in good shape. The memorial is designed for you to make physical contact with it, to actually touch the names. So do not feel that the appropriate behavior that shows respect is to be standoffish. It is not. The only thing that we do ask - and I really doubt that any of you would have the impulse to do this anyhow - do not put things on the name. Coats, elbows, cups, bags, anything like that. The other thing I want to say to you is this was truly - you're an international group of people - this was the World Trade Center. People from over 90 countries died here that morning. They were Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists. Some made their way in the world washing dishes, others ran powerful companies, but almost every single one of them dies that morning because they do something that all of us do with most of our lives - they woke up and they went to work. [somber music playing] Excuse me. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. There's no smoking in the plaza. No smoking in the plaza. That's quite all right. Thank you. So I want to talk to you about the pools. Directly in front of you is the south pool. The south pool stands in the footprint of the South Tower, World Trade Center number two. So that's exactly where World Trade Center number two stood. Can everyone see that line of trees that goes around the pool? That line of trees represents the outer wall of the building. So that means in a few minutes when we go up to see the falls and you go past those trees, you will be standing in what was once the lobby of World Trade Center number two. You're going to see the falls. The falls come out in individual rivulets, one for each person killed on 9/11. Goes down about 20 feet or so into a huge pool. In the center of the pool, another opening goes on another 10 feet or so. No matter how hard you try, you can't see the bottom of that opening because it's a void, and the void is a symbol of the emptiness that we feel here over the loss of life. I'm sure all of you can see the water under the names. That water comes directly from the pool. What someone will do, visiting a loved one - and please feel free to do the very, very same - take their hand, put it in the water, rub their hand over a name. Water, of course, a symbol of life. And notice how the names are on the wall. They are not arranged in alphabetical order. For example, people who worked in the same office in this building, they're together. Firefighters out on the same firehouse, together. Police officers out of the same police precinct, together. We call that meaningful adjacencies. People together in death just the way they were together in life. I have a stupid question. The names of the killers. Are they - Absolutely not. Not. Absolutely not. Yeah. The only place you'll find them is if you should go into the museum, there's a special part that deals with Al Qaeda. [somber music playing] [water cascading] [somber music playing]

The World Trade Center wreckage once smoldered here. Now visitors come from around the world to learn, remember and grieve the loss of 9/11. Credit Credit... Sara Newens

A few weeks after the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001, New York City began allowing people into downtown Manhattan again. And so I went, with my 35 mm camera in tow, as I often did back then to document street life. I can still remember the subway feeling so hollow, save for a few brief moments when extended eye contact with a stranger meant acknowledging our collective broken heart.

Police barricades and National Guard members would allow us within only three blocks of ground zero, just close enough to glimpse scraps of metal dangling next to the gaping hole in our skyline. The only thing we could do at that point was bear witness, even if that meant holding shattered glass in our hands or writing "God Bless America" through the thick layer of ash coating every surface.

In 2016, I visited those same grounds for the first time since the memorial was completed. The space had evolved but my intent was the same - to bear witness. And though 15 years had gone by, I found myself expecting the mood to be as somber as those first weeks after the towers came down. To my surprise, myriad experiences were unfolding before me; I was struck most by the barrage of selfie-takers, smiling family portraits, distracted teenagers on their devices and briefcase-clad men and women taking business calls ... all just steps away from grieving visitors, family members of the victims, and young children trying to wrap their heads around what transpired long before they were born.

Admittedly, I was a bit perplexed by the commotion, as I'd imagined an environment with more reverence and reflection. But as I settled into the surroundings, my judgment dissipated. I was immersed in a symphony of experiences that unified the space, a tourist destination and graveyard at once.

For many years I've wanted to make a purely observational film like this one. It's an approach that often lacks a central character to guide the narrative, and it requires the viewer to actively participate and interpret the meaning as it relates to their own experience. So I set out to document this commemorative shared space, echoing its function as a place for both observation and reflection. To me, what we captured encapsulates a moment in our shared history that is both far from and still painfully close to this tragedy that forever changed our world.

As we approach another anniversary, I will think about all the ways we choose to commemorate tragedy both publicly and privately, and how tuning in and tuning out of our surroundings is a choice we must make over and over in our daily lives. I will also think deeply about those who perished and all the lives they touched, hoping for more healing all around, as the sun sets on another day.
Sara Newens is a freelance filmmaker and former New Yorker currently living in Los Angeles. Op-Docs is a forum for short, opinionated documentaries by independent filmmakers. Learn more about Op-Docs and how to submit to the series. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Op-Docs newsletter.

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Opinion | Footprint: Where the Towers Stood (Published 2018)

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Op-Docs The World Trade Center wreckage once smoldered here. Now visitors come from around the world to learn, remember and grieve. A few weeks after the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001, New York City began allowing people into downtown Manhattan again.