December 5, 2008
FDNY releases 9/11 oral histories, transmissions
A firefighter looks out over the destruction of what is left of the World Trade Center as he coordinates the rescue efforts of personnel below. The World Trade Center fell after two commercial airliners crashed into it in an act of terrorism on Sept. 11, 2001. (AFP / Getty Images Photo / September 13, 2001)
Fire Lt. Brian Becker had just arrived at the north tower with his unit on Sept. 11, 2001, when a chief grabbed him by the shoulders.
"'Team up with Engine 4 and start your way up,'" Becker recalled. "And I remember specifically asking him, 'How are we going up?' and he said, 'You're walking.'"
Becker's hike toward the burning floors of the Twin Towers was one of more than 500 accounts that emerged in interviews with fire personnel, logs of 911 calls and emergency dispatch tapes released Friday by the city under court order.
While some of the material has been reported independently in the past three years, the records contain a wealth of new details about the experiences of hundreds of rank-and-file firefighters and their immediate field commanders as they waded into the burning towers.
The often-graphic accounts, including raw dispatches in the terrifying moments immediately after the first plane hit, indicate that the response was plagued with radio problems, and that the rank and file had limited information about the situation above and the orders they received as they went into the worst high-rise fire in history.
Lt. Warren Smith, of Ladder Co. 9 in lower Manhattan, for example, recalled his orders when he arrived in the north tower lobby. "We got an order to go up the stairway," Smith said. "No specific orders or anything like that, just go up, see what you can do, basically.
"I think everybody was pretty much overwhelmed at that point because just shortly before that the other plane had hit, so
you could see the confusion."
Smith said civilians on their way down slowed their progress, and the radios were "difficult to use." Still, Smith heard the order to pull out and passed on the message to others who did not get the message on their radios.
"If you weren't near a chief, from guys I talked to, you didn't get that order, at least not as quickly. I think it came over later," Smith said.
Another lieutenant, Howard Hahn, then of Battalion 50 in Jamaica, noted, "I was able to get through but transmissions were very hard. You're doing basically your own show."
"I didn't have any information," said Lt. Thomas Piambino, then of Engine 65, who also would up at the north tower. "The handie-talkie information was pretty sketchy at best."
After the south tower fell, Piambino said he opted initially not to evacuate. "We continued to go up," he said.
But then, he changed his mind. "I don't know what it was," he said. "It was just the culmination of intuition or what. I just decided it was time to go, I received no Handi Talkie communications to get out."
Firefighter Michael Beehler, of Ladder 110 in downtown Brooklyn, says he did hear an evacuation order from the 21st floor of the North Tower. "I heard on the radio, Chief come over the radio," he said. "I don't know his name. He said this is
Chief so and so. I personally am ordering you out of the north tower now."
There are also striking details in the records. At 9:59:13, for example, within seconds of the collapse of the south tower, a caller already had phoned EMS to raise health concerns about the "white particles falling" through the air.
In the ensuing months, federal and city officials would seek to deflect health concerns, sparking a battle that rages on today in the thousands of lawsuits.
Inside the towers
A firefighter, Timothy Brown, of the Office of Emergency Management describes the awful scene inside an elevator that had plummeted to the ground floor with eight people inside. "The elevator pit was on fire with the jet fuel," he said. "People were screaming in the elevator. They were getting smoked and cooked."
Firefighter first grade Maureen McArdle-Schulman, who is assigned to Engine 35 in Manhattan, recounted watching the jumpers fall. "I was getting sick," she said. "I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die, and I was watching them and shouldn't have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at the wall and we could still hear them hit."
And there are bits of that gallows humor familiar to any cop on a crime scene. Chief of Operations Salvatore Cassano spotted the Rev. Mychal Judge, who later died on the scene. "I walked up to him, gave him a smile," he said. "I told him, 'Father Judge, we are going to need a lot of help here. You better get some more chaplains.'"
The dispatch tapes, meanwhile, are filled with voices walking the ragged edge of the crisis: trapped people calling for help, a report of a bomb in the battery tunnel, a man hanging from a window on the 110th floor, 50 people with the fire burning below them, the dust cloud.
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