Free Republic

The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. From Bayonne to Brooklyn and beyond, people were jolted from bed as windows shattered within a radius of 25 miles. The Statue of Liberty, holding high its torch less than a mile from the epicenter, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. On nearby Ellis Island, frightened immigrants were hastily evacuated to Manhattan. Ground zero itself -- a small island called Black Tom -- all but disappeared, "as if an atomic...