Thirty years ago today, terrorists left a bomb weighing more than a half-ton in a rented van parked beneath the World Trade Center, a workplace for tens of thousands. Its smoldering fuse took about 12 minutes to close the gap between the everyday and the horrific.
The lunchtime blast left a crater several stories deep, sent acrid smoke up the center’s north tower and killed six people. More than 1,000 others were injured that day, including a dark-haired trader just yards from the underground detonation.
Eight years later, that same man, Tim Lang, fled Lower Manhattan as terrorists struck the World Trade Center again, this time with jetliners. He saw the first of its two towers buckle and fall in an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, including those dear to him.
Mr. Lang is 69 now, with shock-white hair and photos of grandchildren stored in his smartphone. He describes himself as an unremarkable man. Yet he is also an everyman through-line between two remarkable events: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which upended world politics, and the bombing of Feb. 26, 1993, which is less indelibly burned into collective memory but stands as ominous prelude.
Thirty years ago on Sunday, Tim Lang was injured in the first attack on the World Trade Center — an ominous but often overlooked prelude to 9/11.
"Just about everybody forgets about it," he said. But he does not. https://t.co/dGR8lVXEyr
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 26, 2023