Special Report - The Numbers

Special Assignment: The Numbers
February 8, 2002
by John Bloom

People don't talk about the numbers anymore.

We have the more or less final death numbers from the Twin Towers, but the story is fine print on page 7B.

The first number I heard, back on September 11th, was 60,000. "There are as many as 60,000 people in World Trade One during business hours," the expert on TV was saying.

The second number I heard was 100,000, spoken by a CNN commentator after the second plane hit the second building. All day long I heard these numbers. No wonder we thought the apocalypse was at hand.

The next few days were dominated by Mayor Giuliani and his numbers. He speculated that there were 20,000 missing, but worried that the figure might rise. He emphasized the toll of dead firefighters. "Entire companies have been wiped out," he said.

A week or so later the number went to 10,000, then to 8,000, then settled for a long time right at 6,000 "missing." This became the more or less "official" number, and there were a few articles about miraculous escapes, the people who had scurried down the stairwells, the ones who had been late to work. I still notice people using the number 6,000, especially overseas, because they've missed the follow-up reports.

But the number kept steadily falling, a dozen at a time, a hundred here, a hundred there, as duplicate names were eliminated. Names submitted by foreign embassies were compared to names submitted by companies in the building. Names phoned in by loved ones were checked for spelling variants against the official lists. It was obvious that the numbers would go even lower.

And yet this was not news. There was an odd psychological block against hearing this, much less celebrating it. I didn't see a single New York editorial that said, "Thank God it wasn't worse. Thank God so many people got out." At one point the death toll dropped one thousand bodies in a single report, which would seem to be cause for rejoicing but came across instead as an almost grudging acknowledgment that the original estimates were way off.

The original estimates weren't just off. They were fantastic exaggerations so colossal that they make me doubt all those stories about the tolls in foreign earthquakes and tidal waves. Supposedly every media organization in America has a protocol: they don't report any number until it's verified by official authorities who have presumably counted actual bodies. That obviously went by the wayside in this case.

The current numbers are 2,183 missing and 693 bodies identified, for a total of 2,876 presumed dead. (I tried to find out if this includes the ten dead terrorists or not. I don't believe it does, because I couldn't find their names in the Newsday list, and that newspaper has done the best job of accounting for the dead.) This is an incredible tragedy, but it's roughly 3 per cent of some of the original estimates. When the number dropped under 3,000 for the first time, it became less than half the number I still hear bandied about as what we'll call the "popular myth" number.

The reason numbers matter is that they were used to bolster our position internationally. But those 2,876 people died in what were actually the second and third attacks on the World Trade Center. The first attack, on February 26, 1993, killed six, with an estimated 1000 injured. (For some reason the estimates of the injured, some of them maimed and crippled for life, are never compiled with the same rigorous accuracy.)

If we were going to declare an international war on terrorism, that would have been the time--on behalf of those 1,006 people, or at least on behalf of the six barely remembered ones who died. If we're the nation that values the individual life, then six is already too many. One is too many.

Why is there a vague uneasiness when the death toll goes down? Because there's a number in our heads somewhere--a thousand? 500? 100? perhaps 168, the number of dead in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. There's a number between six and 168 that triggers outrage. And we don't like it creeping toward the outrage threshold. We want to remain outraged.

The outrage threshold should be one.

Return to Column Archive