What else came down when the Twin Towers fell?

[Chase]

It was one of those days where every one remembers where they were at and what they were doing when we realized the United States was under attack. We witnessed in horror as a second jet airline smashed through the South Tower while the North Tower was still smoldering; we heard that the Pentagon had been attacked; and then there were the rumors aplenty that another jet might be flying toward Washington D.C. for either the White House or the Capitol Building right at that moment. The cost of what was actually lost that day is yet to be determined by the historians. The cost of diesel runs anywhere from $4.30 and change up in the New England states, barely over $4.00 a gallon in the nation's midwest. If you tanked up before the *911 Attack*, you paid anywhere from $1.40 to $1.50 per gallon of fuel. And we paid anything between $2.50 to $2.60 (and more in remote stops) the week before Hurrican Katrina hit nearly four years later. It doesn't take a historian to note that we're paying nearly three times more for diesel today than we were in 2001. I remember that the stock market was about ready to collapse before a single jet flew into the World Trade Center on September 11th. Some might suggest that the market toppled solely because of the *911 Attack*. I distinctly remember it was ready to crash before September 11th and knew the attack would only make things worse than they already were. The headlines were gloomy the weekend leading up to Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I was concerned that the market may crash on Monday the 10th, but the collapse was staved off for another day -- perhaps Tuesday the 11th would be the Black Tuesday of the new 21st Century. A day that would lead us into the New Great Depression of our day. From the Long Beach Press Telegram, dated August 31, 2001 ... "It has been a long, cold summer on Wall Street. Stock prices, which have staggered since June, plunged Thursday, pushing the Dow Jones industrial average below 10,000 for the first time since April." Job layoffs at the time were massive. To put things mildly, we were all in a lot of trouble. The *911 Attack* changed all that. I'll start to explain how in my next article.