ROSS SIMPSON

Senator Rankin Fite (right) making the call.

The first 911 call was placed by Rep. Rankin Fite, the Speaker
of the Alabama House of Representatives, in the town of
Haleyville, Alabama on February 16th of the following year.

By 1987, 50 percent of the nation was using the system.

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, was killed by U.S.
forces during a raid on his compound hideout in Pakistan.

The notorious, 54-year-old leader of Al Qaeda, the terrorist
network of Islamic extremists, had been the target of a nearly
decade-long international manhunt.

The raid began around 1 a.m. local time (4 p.m. EST on May 1,
2011 in the United States), when 23 U.S. Navy SEALs in two
Black Hawk helicopters descended on the compound in
Abbottabad, a tourist and military center north of Pakistan’s
capital, Islamabad. One of the helicopters crash-landed into
the compound but no one aboard was hurt.

During the raid, which lasted approximately 40 minutes, five
people, including bin Laden and one of his adult sons, were
killed by U.S. gunfire. No Americans were injured in the assault.

A vendor walks past a sand sculpture of al-Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden created by Indian sand artist Sudarshan Patnaik on a beach in Puri in the eastern Indian state of
Orissa on May 2, 2011. (Reuters)

At 2:00 p.m. on Friday, February 16, 1968, history was
made. That’s when state Rep. Rankin Fite made the
first call to 911 in the nation.

U.S. Rep. Tom Bevill answers the first 911 call at the
Haleyville (Ala.) police station with “Hello.” Directly
behind him is Bull Connor, head of the state’s Public
Service Commission, and B.W. Gallagher, president
of the Alabama Telephone Co.

February 16, 1968 saw the first official "911" call placed in the
United States. Now taken for granted as first course of action
in the event of emergency by nearly all of the nation’s 327
million people, 911 is a relatively recent invention and was
still not standard across the United States for many years
after its adoption by Congress.

As telephones became common in U.S. households, fire
departments around the country recommended establishing
a single, simple number to be dialed in the event of a fire or
other emergency.

The red phone used to make the first call to 911.

The September 11 attacks were the deadliest terrorist attacks in
human history, causing the deaths of 2,996 people, including
2,977 victims and 19 hijackers who committed murder–suicide.

Thousands more were injured, and long-term health effects have
arisen as a consequence of the attacks. New York City took the
brunt of the death toll when the Twin Towers of the World Trade
Center complex in Lower Manhattan were attacked, with an
estimated 1,600 victims from the North Tower and around a
thousand from the South Tower.

Two hundred miles southwest in Arlington County, Virginia,
another 125 were killed in the Pentagon. The remaining 265
fatalities included the ninety-two passengers and crew of
American Airlines Flight 11, the sixty-five aboard United
Airlines Flight 175, the sixty-four on American Airlines Flight
77 and the forty-four who boarded United Airlines Flight 93.

The attack on the World Trade Center’s North Tower alone
made the September 11 attacks the deadliest act of terrorism
in human history.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia