NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Tuesday marks 26 years since the first attack on the World Trade Center.
On Feb. 26. 1993, in an underground parking garage beneath the North Tower a 1,200-pound bomb was detonated at 12:18 p.m.
The explosion caused a series of power outages, trapping people in elevators and almost instantly shut down all communication systems.
Smoke quickly swept through the towers and around 50,000 people began evacuating the buildings.
News broke of the event on WCBS 880 and witnesses recalled seeing people breaking windows on the top floors to release the smoke and bring in air.
“We started smelling smoke, we tried to cover up the doors, but smoke kept coming in anyway. Then after about an hour, our electricity totally went and the smoke started coming in worse,” said one woman after being evacuated via helicopter from the roof of the building.
First responders knocked down communication towers on the North Tower so helicopters could safely land on the building, firefighters tore open the doors to trapped elevators all throughout the building and thousands were rescued with only minor injuries.
The explosion resonated through the bedrock of Manhattan, violently shaking the island, but the towers were still standing.
Investigators concluded that a small group of Islamic extremists were behind the attack and had driven the bomb into the garage that morning.
Police tracked down six of the terrorists, but they believe a seventh remains at large decades later.
In total, six people were killed that day and while the attack was not nearly as devastating as the attacks on September 11, 2001, it did teach law enforcement a number of valuable lessons but, not nearly enough.
“It should have been a huge wake up call for this country that we were under attack by a terrorist network that was out to destroy us,” said then-NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
After the attack, Mohammed Salameh reported that his rental van had been stolen and returned to the rental agency, eventually leading to the arrests of him and his accomplices: Ramzi Yousef, Mahmud Abouhalima, Nidal A. Ayyad, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and Ahmed Ajaj.
Kelly believes the rapid arrests may have led to complacency in the NYPD forces. He says the attack was not taken seriously enough.
“The fact that they came back for their deposit for the truck was seen as a joke, the gang who couldn't shoot straight, so it was written off to a certain extent. We should have seen it as a looming threat,” the former police commissioner said.
The terrorists’ goal had been to destroy the North Tower and have it collapse into the South Tower, effectively destroying both buildings and killing thousands.
While that did not happen, the bomb did create a huge hole through five levels of the basement parking garage.
The former commissioner even recalled assessing the damage with a Port Authority engineer.
“We were looking at the, sort of the base of the building, and he made a statement: ‘These buildings could never come down,’” Kelly said.
He says nobody considered the threat as a real possibility and there was no real initiative to fight terrorism. He told WCBS 880’s Peter Haskell that, for a number of hours after the attack, authorities didn’t even believe that it had even been a bomb that caused the explosion.
Kelly said, looking back, they should have taken it much more seriously. But, they didn’t.
“We experienced the horrific events of September 11th as a result,” the commissioner said. He says he remembered the exact conversation with the Port Authority engineer years later when the towers were attacked again.
Still, the bombing did lead to a number of pro-active measures to be put in place.
“Vehicle checks were installed in so many places, the World Trade Center itself received security upgrades, probably over $1 million, but it was all pretty much on the ground. We simply didn’t anticipate attacks by aircrafts,” Kelly explained.
Though, he notes that much more was learned after 9/11.
“I think we are safer, certainly, than we were then,” Kelly said. “But, there are no guarantees in this world. There are threats everywhere.”