Is there any record of what Walter Lord was doing on 9/11?

[Dan Kappes]

Since Walter Lord lived in Manhattan for the last years of his life before he died in May 2002, I was wondering if there's any information about what he was doing on the day the 9/11 attacks occurred.

Were most people forced to evacuate Manhattan when the World Trade Center collapsed? That couldn't have been easy for Walter Lord, who was 84 at the time.

 

[Jonathan Granato]

Nobody was forced to evacuate. I have a friend who lives in TriBeca. He had to evacuate his building during the morning, but was allowed back home. It's always been a concern of mine that he might develop cancer related conditions from being so close to ground zero and also breathing in the dust and debris flung into the air by the big trucks taking away the wreckage. If you go to 1:10 of this link:

, you'll hear a man exclaiming, "HOLY $H!T!" That's my friend Steve's mailman. Just to give you an idea of how close he lives to ground zero, and wasn't evacuated. He told me that initially you had to provide ID to get back to your home. And as time went on, the barricades keeping the homeowners in and the non essential residents out, move farther and farther away until they were permanently removed.

 

[Samuel Halpern]

What many people have no idea about is the horrible smell that lingered in the area of lower Manhattan for weeks after the event. I can tell you from first hand experience, it was terrible, and travelled across the East river over into Brooklyn. To me, it was like burnt electrical insulation mixed with something else.

 

[Dan Kappes]

That "something else" might well have been the ashes of the many victims.

 

[Scott Mills]

Partially; however, there were thousands of chemicals in the resulting ash. See: here.