photo: Angel Franco/The New York Times
photo: Angel Franco/The New York Times
A rich vein of city records from Sept. 11, including more than 12,000 pages of oral histories rendered in the voices of 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians, will be made public today.
The histories a mosaic of vision and memory recalling the human struggle against surging fire, confusion, and horror were compiled by the New York City Fire Department beginning in October 2001, but to this date, no one from the department has read them all or used them for any official purpose.
|
Mindfully.org
note: |
The city has announced that it will also release today a written log of calls to the 911 system, many from trapped office workers, as well as tapes of fire dispatchers. Other records, including tapes of 911 operators, are being assembled and are not yet ready for release, city officials said.
The New York Times sought the records under the freedom of information law in February 2002, but the Bloomberg administration refused to make them public and the newspaper sued the city. Earlier this year, the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, ordered the city to release most, but not all, of the records.
Over the last three and half years, The Times has obtained some of these records through unofficial channels, and they can be found on the Web at www.nytimes.com/sept11. These include the dispatch tapes, nearly 100 of the Fire Department oral histories, and a log of calls to Emergency Medical Service dispatchers that were channeled through the 911 system.
A group of families of people who died in the attack intervened in the suit brought by The Times, also urging release of the records. One of those family members, Rosaleen Tallon, noted that Zacarias Moussaoui, an admitted member of Al Qaeda who is accused of plotting with the Sept. 11 hijackers, long ago obtained the same documents in preparation for his criminal trial that were being denied to her and other families by the Bloomberg administration. The city also initially refused access to the records to investigators from both the 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, but relented when legal action was threatened.
In the Fire Department accounts, the testimony of many fire officers and firefighters was both moving and blunt. When the accounts obtained by The Times were made public, they opened a new dimension to the discussions about fire operations that day and pointedly raised questions about whether some of the department's deaths might have been avoided.
In the histories, the firefighters recalled losing touch with one another that morning and being unable to deliver or hear warnings about the imminent collapse of the towers. They described the physical toll of climbing 20 and 30 flights of stairs, laden with gear and outfits that weighed nearly 100 pounds. They included descriptions of a loss of command of the firefighters going up the stairs, the lack of communication between the police and fire departments, and the small measures by which people survived or died.
The accounts include such serendipities as an aide to a chief, who stood by his side in the lobby of the south tower at the Trade Center site, then left for the adjoining hotel to use a bathroom. Shortly after he left, the south tower collapsed, killing everyone inside.
For all their power, the oral histories are individual narratives, the accounts of men and women who saw the day, at times yards from death. They were originally gathered on the order of Thomas Von Essen, the city fire commissioner on Sept. 11, who said he wanted to preserve those accounts before they became reshaped by a collective memory. He was succeeded as commissioner in January 2002 by Nicholas Scoppetta. Some of the oral histories were reviewed, but not all, a spokesman for Mr. Scoppetta said last night. Mr. Scoppetta declined to be interviewed.
Sally Regenhard, the mother of Christian Regenhard, a firefighter killed that day with his engine company, had been one of those who joined the suit for the release of the records, in hope that the oral histories might provide some clue on where her son had been.
"It has been almost four years, and I've been waiting for any information on my son," Mrs. Regenhard said. "He disappeared that day with his entire engine company. No one can tell me what happened to him not even the smallest detail."
Early in his administration, Mr. Scoppetta refused to release the oral histories because he said he had been advised by federal prosecutors that their publication might impede the prosecution of Mr. Moussaoui. The department also advanced the position in court that the firefighters who had provided the oral histories did so with specific promises of confidentiality.
The department withdrew that claim. Mr. Scoppetta later found little support from federal prosecutors, judges, or defense lawyers for the position that Mr. Moussaoui's right to a fair trial would be hampered by publishing the recollections of firefighters or paramedics.
The city found more success in another line of argument: that release of certain records would violate the privacy of the dead, or cause emotional distress to the living. The Court of Appeals allowed the oral histories to be edited under a limited set of circumstances. It also refused to order the city to release all of the 911 tapes, saying that the callers' voices should not be made public. The other half of the conversations, involving the operators who spoke with the callers, will eventually be made public.
"We're gratified that it's finally being done," said David E. McCraw, a lawyer for The Times. "We believe it should have been done a long time ago. We believe the public is ultimately the beneficiary. We hope the city will move quickly to release the 911 tapes."
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/nyregion/12records.html?ei=5088&en=b245bfd8ba497f9a&ex=1281499200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print 5feb2006
This article was reported by Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn and Ian Urbina and written by Mr. Dwyer.
Faced with a court order and unyielding demands from the families of victims, the city of New York yesterday opened part of its archive of records from Sept. 11, releasing a digital avalanche of oral histories, dispatchers' tapes and phone logs so vast that they took up 23 compact discs.
For the first time, about 200 accounts of emergency medical technicians, paramedics and their supervisors were made public, revealing new dimensions of a day and an emergency response that had already seemed familiar.
In details large and small, the accounts of the medical personnel uniformed workers who were often overlooked in many of the day's chronicles, but were as vital to the response and rescue efforts as any others provide vivid and alarming recollections.
They spoke of being unable to find anyone in authority to tell them where to go or what to do. Nearly from the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, they had little radio communication. As their leaders struggled to set up ordinary procedures for a "mass casualty incident," the crisis gathered speed by the minute.
With the lines of command sundered, many of those interviewed said, they became their own bosses. They found themselves shepherding crowds away from the towers, serving as trauma counselors, bandaging people inside a bank lobby, and packing their ambulances with the dazed, the bleeding, the burned.
As scores of city and private ambulances arrived, an orderly system for treating patients never developed.
Some medical triage centers were set up blocks from where the injured were leaving the towers. A medical chief arrived at the main fire command post and found the chief of the Fire Department cursing his nonfunctioning radio.
A team of medics told how they tried to treat a firefighter, Daniel Suhr, who had been hit by a woman falling from one of the towers, but realized he had no vital signs and had catastrophic injuries.
Nevertheless, they continued to work on him, carrying out hopeless resuscitation efforts, in deference to two shocked firefighters who accompanied him in the ambulance.
"They kept yelling, 'Danny, Danny, Danny!' " said Richard L. Erdy, an emergency medical technician who treated Firefighter Suhr.
Another paramedic recalled seeing one of his colleagues, Carlos Lillo, helping patients, staring at the North Tower and breaking into tears. Mr. Lillo's wife, Cecilia, worked there. She survived. He did not.
The newly released records capture a moment in history as seen through thousands of eyes, and as told in hundreds of voices some halting, some confident, almost all disbelieving. No single document could be definitive about an event that swept across so many lives, but the release of these accounts one CD alone encompassed more than 12,000 pages of oral history transcripts begins to fill in major parts of the day's history.
The oral histories were gathered in 2001 on the instructions of Thomas Von Essen, who was fire commissioner on Sept. 11. The New York Times sought copies under the freedom of information law in early 2002, but Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's administration refused, leading to litigation. Earlier this year, the state Court of Appeals ordered the release of most of the materials.
Eight families of people killed at the trade center, represented by the civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel, joined the suit to seek the release. Since then, the interest has grown, and the Fire Department has sent CD's to 460 families.
"Today we are one step closer to learning what happened on 9/11 in N.Y.C. where we excelled, where we failed," said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, died in the South Tower.
In particular, the records released yesterday provide the most detailed view yet of the operations of the Emergency Medical Services, which became a division within the Fire Department in 1996.
"I just think a lot of people don't realize what we, E.M.S., went through," Alan Cooke, an emergency medical technician, told interviewers for the Fire Department.
A spokesman for the department said major changes had been made since the terror attacks. "There has been vast improvement in communications," said the spokesman, Francis X. Gribbon. "There is no question that E.M.S. personnel are more prepared today to handle a large-scale emergency in this city."
In his 64-page oral history, Zach Goldfarb, who had just finished an overnight tour of duty as the citywide chief of operations when the first plane struck, said that even the deaths of some medical workers were overlooked in the tally and recognition of the responders who died.
The Fire Department lost 341 firefighters, officers and a deputy commissioner. In addition, two paramedics employed by the department died, bringing its total losses to 343. But Chief Goldfarb said six emergency medical responders from private hospitals also died.
"We keep talking about the losses on this job from an E.M.S. standpoint and we say there were two, Carlos Lillo and Ricardo Quinn," Chief Goldfarb said. "There were six other E.M.S. professionals that died in this incident on our mission."
He said the emergency medical network was "a hodgepodge of voluntary hospitals and voluntary ambulances and commercial ambulances."
He added: "But you know what? They all came in to do our mission and I think that they need to be recognized as such, and I think it's a disgrace to us that we're not counting the names of these six dead people."
In his account, Chief Goldfarb said he decided not to report to the South Tower, as ordered, believing that it was too hazardous to cross West Street. Finding about 30 paramedics and E.M.T.'s on West Street, he sent them into the World Financial Center. A few minutes later, the South Tower collapsed. Mr. Quinn, who died, had originally been among those 30 people.
As the E.M.S. workers set out for the trade center that morning, more than a few went without being called. Still others decided to make extra preparations. Among them, Chief James Martin recalled the lack of supplies after the 1993 bombing of the trade center.
"I filled the car up with several bottles of water, and I brought my little radio charger," Chief Martin said. "Knowing that the new 3,500 radios were out there but we didn't have chargers for them, I threw that in."
Chief Goldfarb had written a report on the 1993 response, and he worried about the effects of merging the medical service into the Fire Department. Just a month before Sept. 11, 2001, he had spoken with a fire chief about the 1993 attack.
"I told him, for reasons I won't go into now, the response would be very different if we had to relive this thing, different not necessarily in a positive way," Chief Goldfarb said in his oral history. "So here we are four weeks later and we were actually living it."
Lt. Rene Davila was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene, unsure if his agency had done any "preplanning" now that it was part of the Fire Department. In any case, he said, he did not relish being in command.
"You know you see that guy on '911' or something like that, and he's a hero or something and he's a big shot or whatever," Lieutenant Davila said. "Well, I was given the opportunity to be that guy, and I immediately did not want it."
He shouted himself hoarse, he said, trying to ensure that patients were not simply loaded into ambulances but were "triaged" that their injuries were evaluated and that the most seriously hurt were taken care of first.
John Rothmund, an emergency medical technician, spoke of the trouble finding any supervisors. "No brass," he said. "So me and my partner tried to find authority figures, and there was really none around."
Improvisation, not routines, became the order of the day. Arriving at the corner of West Broadway and Vesey Street, a paramedic, Manuel Delgado, saw part of an airplane crush the front of a police car. He and a doctor drove a bleeding police officer to NYU Downtown Hospital, then returned eventually to a triage area on the north side of the trade center.
"There was just a stream of people running, running, running, and basically at this point our triage was, if you're walking, keep walking, and if people are being carried or people were falling, we would move forward," Mr. Delgado said.
They collected a badly burned woman in a red dress, he recalled, then a man who had serious burns over most of his body.
"He was carried out halfway and I guess collapsed or someone dropped him and just ran," Mr. Delgado said. "We picked him up and started bringing him out."
He continued: "We had more patients than we had ambulances. We were stuffing four and five people in an ambulance at this point. I mean, it was just to get people out of there with minimal treatment. There was nothing you could do."
The demands of the moment consumed every bit of the attention of the medical workers. "Once you got there, I didn't even notice the time," Lt. Patrick Scaringello said. "Couldn't tell the time."
The relations between city and private ambulance services, always tense, were also badly strained by the surge of ambulances that came to the scene. "Actually, the biggest downfall to this whole thing was probably the communications with the private" ambulances, said Justin Lim, an emergency medical technician. "They had no clue what to do."
A radio system that enabled the private hospitals and their ambulances to communicate with other city emergency agencies had been tested during the preparations for Y2K the millennium but the project languished, according to hospital officials. (The city now hopes to better integrate its medical service with the other responders, in part by having the dispatchers for each agency work side by side. Two new buildings, at a cost of $1.375 billion, will open next year, according to Gino Menchini, the city's technology commissioner.)
With the collapse of the South Tower, the first to fall, at 9:59 a.m., any semblance of an orderly system vanished. Inside a bank on Broadway and Murray Street, medical crews were treating people.
"They all panicked and they all stampede out," said Felipe Torre, a medical technician. "We followed out, because everybody was wanting to get out. The walls shook and then we felt it.".
At a triage area on the corner of West and Vesey Streets, a medical technician, Faisel Abed, worked for an hour on patients, until the collapse of the South Tower. "With the grace of God, we had gotten all the people out of there," he said.
A group of the medical chiefs met, in part by chance, outside the Embassy Suites Hotel in the World Financial Center and went into the lobby to set a new plan for control. But when they tried to communicate the plan to the entire force, they could not contact the dispatchers.
"I think that probably the biggest impression I got out of this whole thing was this is probably as close to being in an infantry unit that gets overrun," said Joseph Cahill, a paramedic. "We are scattered everywhere. Nobody knew where anybody was. Nobody knew who was in charge. It really felt for a moment that I was in 'Apocalypse Now,' where Martin Sheen goes: 'Where is your C.O.? Ain't that you? No. Uh-oh.' "
The first fatality among firefighters had been Firefighter Suhr, hit by the falling woman. As the paramedics who brought him to the hospital headed back to the trade center, a nun and an emergency room doctor climbed into the ambulance. As they drove, they encountered an emergency medical technician walking toward them out of a cloud of smoke. The buildings were now down and he was holding his helmet.
They asked where his partner was, and the wandering medic responded that he had left him. "I'm looking for my father," he explained. "He was in the World Trade Center."
"We said, 'Why don't you get in the back with us?' " recalled Soraya O'Donnell, an emergency medical technician.
Michelle O'Donnell contributed reporting for this article.
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/13records.html?ei=5070&en=10e483fa60d5dcfb&ex=1139288400&pagewanted=print 5feb2006
Two frozen moments from Sept. 11, 2001, continue to haunt Richard A. Pecorella, a managing director on Wall Street. There is the image he believes to be that of his fiancιe, Karen Juday, an administrative assistant in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center's north tower.
She is standing by the window. Behind her, there is fire. "And I'm pretty sure there is another picture of Karen, falling," he said. "I can't be sure that she was a jumper. But it looks like her."
That is why, he said, he is grateful that more than 12,000 pages of oral histories rendered in the voices of firefighters, paramedics and emergency medical technicians became public yesterday, three and a half years after the terrorist attack.
The much-awaited release of information - variously anticipated with eagerness, dread and denial - has elicited especially complex responses from the families of the 2,749 victims. They reacted in ways no less disparate than the chasm that has divided those relatives who are ground zero activists, and those who have never set foot on what many consider sacred ground.
"I don't know if these tapes will reveal any details, but perhaps they can help me better understand the reality of what happened," Mr. Pecorella said. "It seems to me that the firemen might be descriptive about, say, what was happening with the jumpers. I would like to better comprehend the intensity of the panic, and the threat of the fire."
And so for the most part yesterday, family members reacted as they always must when new reminders - like the sudden discovery of remains, yet another terrorist alert, or the inexorable approach of another Sept. 11 anniversary - call them home to their grief.
Some 470 relatives of firefighters had requested the histories in advance, and received boxes of transcripts and audio recordings on compact discs yesterday by overnight mail, fire officials said. Margaret Arce, whose son, David, of Engine Company 33, died in the attack, said that the very arrival of the box on her front porch in East Williston on Long Island was a wrenching experience.
"It's like you have a scab on a wound," she said. "Every time something triggers it, that scab comes off." She has now moved the package to her dining room table. Psychologically, she said, she has to prepare herself. "It's not going to be today. There's too much hubbub. I need the quiet of my soul."
The histories, compiled by the New York City Fire Department, were sought by The New York Times under the state's freedom of information law. The city was ordered to release the information by the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court.
"This is a long grieving process, and I think each individual has to make a decision about how to deal with this information," said Mary Fetchet, whose son, Bradley James Fetchet, died in the south tower. "I don't think I'll expose myself to this. I have to be very careful. I think that to know what happened inside that building is not healthy for me, personally."
Others are compelled to read the histories. "We owe it to our loved ones to know what happened, because they went through such an incredible ordeal," said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles F. Burlingame III, was a pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. "We need to witness for them. I am going to read through every single one of them."
One group of mothers- part of a bereavement group on Long Island that continues to meet every week nearly four years later - headed into Manhattan yesterday to wade through transcripts and recordings. Rosemary Cain, Barbara Hetzel, Christina Evans Serafin and Antonia Fontana all lost sons on Sept. 11, 2001.
They huddled in a conference room at a Midtown law firm, using donated laptops to scroll through oral histories. They were invited there by Sally Regenhard and her husband, Alfred, who lost their son Christian that day and who were among the eight families that joined in the New York Times suit to win release of the information.
They were all there, they said, to make sure that 9/11 mistakes were not repeated. "I owe my son to make sure that I did my best to find out what happened so we can do better in the future," Mr. Regenhard said.
To others, the histories brought "a modicum of being close, and being with them on those last moments," said Christina Evans Serafin, whose son, Robert Evans, of Engine Company 33, died in the attacks.
But Jennifer Gardner, whose husband, Douglas, died in the north tower, is troubled by the invasion of privacy the release of the documents represents. "I'm not sure these further emotional details are necessary," she said. The information "has to be public," she added. "We must know. But I don't want to know. I will never look at them or listen to them. I already live in horror every day."
She continued: "It is useful to know what went wrong. But it is not useful to hear a crying father say goodbye to his family." She fears, too, that the release of the histories will unleash "more made-for-TV movies, more fictionalizations, all the new negative exploitation that will come."
Ms. Fetchet, a clinical social worker who founded Voices of Sept. 11, which has provided counseling and support to 4,500 people linked to 9/11, said the timing was unfortunate. "We are getting close to the anniversary, and that is a hard time for many family members," she said.
Most families have little knowledge of the last moments of their loved ones; others have scraps of information. The Regenhards were buoyed yesterday when they heard their son's engine company mentioned by a dispatcher.
"I learned my son was assigned to the south tower with a chief," Mr. Regenhard said. "I did not know that until now."
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/13families.html?ex=1139288400&en=0a8f80f2a8cfa497&ei=5070 5feb2006
|
To
send us your comments, questions, and suggestions click
here |