Fifteen years ago today, a truck packed with explosives detonated under a tower at the World Trade Center. While it failed to knock down the towers (the parking garage suffered the most damage), six people were killed and over a thousand injured.
A retired Port Authority official, Peter Caram, spoke about the first bombing with amNY and said, "The country as a whole was never put on a security alert [after the '93 bombing]. We didn't understand the threat. We didn't understand the adversary." Afterwards, measures like placing planters outside the WTC to prevent future truck bombings and closing off City Hall Park were implemented, as other plots from Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman's followers were discovered.
The Port Authority is currently fighting a judge's ruling that the agency is "68% responsible" for the bombing (the terrorists are 32% responsible), based on a 1985 report recommending the parking garage be closed. And Caram, who wrote The 1993 World Trade Center Bombing: Foresight and Warning, also says the rest of the country has a lot of catching up in terms of security, "I think it's going to take another horrendous incident to maybe bring the rest of the country on board."
amNY guest columnist Joseph Daniels, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center, writes that we should remember February 26, 1993 as much as we do September 11, 2001, and its victims, so "'we protest,'as memorial scholar Ed Linenthal has said, 'against the anonymity of mass death in our time.'"
