In dramatic new accounts of 9/11 released yesterday, hundreds of New York firefighters describe in their own painful words the horror, heroism and hell of the World Trade Center rescue effort.
The heart-wrenching documents and audio tapes were made public after a court order ended the city’s three-year battle to keep them confidential.
In agonizing recollections, taken down after the attacks, firefighters and paramedics describe how they saw desperate office workers plummeting to their death as they tried to escape the flames.
Emergency medical technician Richard Erdey recalled rushing from the scene in an ambulance with Daniel Suhr – who was hit by a falling body and became the first known FDNY fatality that day.
“I know he’s not going to make it . . . Anybody hit with a body from 70 stories up,” he said.
But Erdey said he couldn’t tell two of Suhr’s colleagues, who were in the ambulance, that there was no hope.
“They kept yelling, ‘Danny! Danny! Danny!’ . . . Should I tell them? How can I tell them tactfully . . . Please stop staring at him. You’re going to burn this image in your head . . .
“Even though it was a short ride, it was the longest ride.”
The fresh details were contained in 15 hours of audio tapes and 12,000 pages of transcripts of FDNY radio dispatches and accounts by surviving rescue workers of their frenzied efforts to save those trapped in the flames and debris of the stricken Twin Towers.
“It was single file, civilians going down and firemen going up,” firefighter Marcel Claes recalled in his oral history testimony.
“The civilians were orderly and blessing us and helping the injured down.”
At the 35th story of the north tower, on his knees and talking with other firefighters about how best to get equipment up the tower, Claes and his brethren felt a rumble – “like an earthquake, or a train going through your living room,” he said.
It was then, as the south tower of the World Trade Center was collapsing in a giant cloud of rubble, that he heard the voice of a chief from another battalion: “Drop everything and get out.”
Some firefighters spoke of sharing a cellphone to call their wives and say goodbye – or of saying goodbye to each other.
Timothy Brown recalled saying to fellow firefighter Terry Hatton, “I love you, brother. It might be the last time I see you.”
The tapes also recorded the anguished cries of trapped people begging for help over FDNY radios.
“I can’t breathe much longer. Save me!” said an unidentified civilian. “I don’t have much air. Please help me. I can barely breathe.”
On another tape, an emergency worker shouts: “The World Trade Center has collapsed. Urgent! Urgent! Everybody get out!”
One account, by Chief Fire Marshal Louis Garcia, recounts how he thought he heard gunshots from the collapsed buildings.
“Police officers that were trapped were shooting their guns off to try to draw attention to where they were trapped,” Garcia said.
Some of the material had been previously released but much of it was withheld until the state Court of Appeals resolved a suit filed in 2002 by several victims’ families and The New York Times.
The state’s highest court rejected the city’s claim that the release would violate the privacy of victims in their final minutes and would jeopardize the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, who ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers.
In March, the court set in motion the release that took place yesterday.
“The city did not think we should release them,” Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday in explaining the long legal wrangle.
“There’s all sorts of privacy issues. People say things when they call 911 or the firefighters and police officers talking to each other that probably would be best for everybody if it just was not released.”
Yesterday’s action was by far the largest release of documents detailing the terrorist attacks which killed almost 3,000 people in the towers, including 343 firefighters.
The records shed some new light about the city’s response:
* Firefighters described faulty communications equipment.
Amid heavy static and sirens on one tape, a dispatcher says:
“You’re totally unreadable. Your radio’s not coming in.”
“Right now we’re all alone,” says another voice on a FDNY tape.
“The second building came down. I can’t see, so we have no contact with anybody at this time.”
* Calls to other units are greeted with silences, and others with frantic cries and complaints that the smoke and debris was too thick to reach the attack site.
“Have them mobilize the Army! We need the Army in Manhattan!” cried one voice.
* The tapes also showed confusion and uncertainty.
An ambulance driver can be heard saying: “All I want to know is, where is the nearest triage? We got an ambulance full of people, and we are being bombarded with so many we can’t handle.”
The oral histories also show the frustration of FDNY brass as they wrestled with the enormity of the calamity.
“It was evident that we weren’t going to be able to get to people above the fire,” said Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick, who was in the lobby of the north tower.
“Based on the number of jumpers, we could only assume that hundreds of people were trapped.”
A group of victims’ families who have become advocates of building-code and emergency-response reform had eagerly awaited the release of the new records.
Some city officials, including former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have suggested some firefighters ignored the mayday call in acts of personal heroism. But the group of families has sought to lay blame on the city for providing firefighters with faulty radios.
Additional reporting by Frankie Edozien and Post Wire Services
QUOTES
“We saw the jumpers coming. We didn’t know what it was at first, but then the first body hit and then we knew what it was.
And they were just like constant . . . I was getting sick.
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 a wall and we could still hear them hit.”
– Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman.
“There was a lot of bodies, bodies came out of the sky . . . We were hit with debris, which turned out to be human remains.
I remember a gentleman coming to us with a leg screaming to help him. It wasn’t his leg. It was somebody else’s leg.”
– Paramedic Gary Smiley
“There’s people jumping . . . I didn’t count, but at least a minimum of 50 people jumping. I seen a minimum of 50 people jump, couples holding hands.”
– EMT Jarjean Felton
“We saw an EMT, one of our guys, coming out of this cloud of smoke. He was holding his EMT bag and helmet.
We asked him, ‘Where is your partner?’
He goes, ‘I left him. I’m looking for my father. He was in the World Trade Center.’ ”
– Emergency Medical Technitian Soraya O’Donnell
“There were a lot of mothers and babies there. I was ready to leave. They were a little shook up because I was covered up with all this dust.
I was leaving and they started to cry. They didn’t want me to go without them. So I stayed for maybe 10 or 15 minutes until it cleared up a little bit.”
– Firefighter Kirk Long, with Engine 1, who had rushed up a stairway in the North Tower as evacuees were coming down.
“We had more patients than we had ambulances. We were stuffing four and five people in an ambulance . . . it was just to get people out of there with minimal treatment.
– Paramedic Manuel Delgado (Firefighter Carlos Lillo was killed in the collapse)
(Compiled by Marsha Kranes, with assistance from Stephanie Gaskell, Gregory Bensinger, and John Mazor)
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