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by Associated
Press
August 12, 2005
In thousands of
pages of oral histories released Friday, firefighters describe in vivid,
intimate detail how they rushed to save fleeing civilians from churning
smoke and fire before the World Trade Center collapsed in a monstrous
cloud of debris and choking dust.
The histories,
recorded in the weeks after the September 11 attack, offer some of the
most detailed descriptions of the day's horror as seen through the eyes
of firefighters who lost 343 of their brethren.
Firefighter
Maureen McArdle-Schulman recalled hearing someone yell before the
collapses that something was falling from the towers.
"It turned out it
was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other,"
she said. "We didn't know what it was at first, but then the first body
hit and then we knew what it was."
"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."
September 11
family members pored over the records Friday, some tearing up at
descriptions and sounds of the attack and response. At an office
building in midtown Manhattan, a half-dozen family members and two fire
officers bent over laptops to examine the material.
Fire Lt. Jerry
Reilly, who escaped the trade center, said the transmissions were almost
too painful to hear. "I never heard any of this before -- the chaos," he
said, his eyes tearing up.
Another
firefighter who was in the north tower, Paul Bessler, recalled seeing a
fellow firefighter going up the stairs as though he were "on a mission."
"Just at that
point, my radio came clear as day, 'Imminent collapse. This was a
terrorist attack. Evacuate."'
"We relayed that
again, hoping that the brothers would hear it above us, and I remember
the look on Andy's face, like apprehension that we were going to leave
this building," he continued. The north tower collapsed moments later.
Timothy Burke of
Engine 202 said a firefighter from another company had a cell phone, and
he and others used it to call their families.
"It seemed pretty
bad that everybody was willing to get on the phone and try to call their
wives to say goodbye or say whatever," he said. "Just the faces of
people -- you kind of knew that some of us were going to get hurt
because it was too too too much going on."
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