New York's 9/11 hearings
Sept. 11 Panel Describes Confusion in Burning Towers (Update3)
May 18 (Bloomberg) -- Heroic efforts by police and fire fighters were undermined by tensions between their departments, problems with radio communications and 911 operators who couldn't give fully informed advice to callers trapped in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, says a new report by the federal commission studying the attacks.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which ran the trade center complex,"acknowledges that it had no protocol for rescuing people trapped above a fire in the towers," the interim report by the commission staff says. The report describes the confusion, destruction and miscommunication that confronted emergency workers after terrorists struck the World Trade Center.
The commission intends the report, released at the start of a two-day hearing in New York City, to be the most complete and accurate version yet published of the 100 minutes during which the two World Trade towers were struck by hijacked commercial jetliners, burned and then collapsed.
"Today will be a very difficult day, to relive the loss and the terrible devastation" commission chairman Thomas H. Kean said as he opened the hearing, attended by about 500 people, many of whom lost relatives on Sept. 11. "Our purpose in presenting this information is to obtain the perspective from those who responded to the attacks. We want to know how and why they made the decisions they made, often in the absence of good information, and sometimes under the most adverse conditions."
Difficult indeed.
My brother was watching the hearings on TV and I walked behind him as they showed a video of the second impact that I had never seen before.
I'm a cynical bastard, and I've seen that impact so many times from so many angles that I guess I became numb. But seeing it again, from only a couple of blocks away, a totally new to me angle, was still like a small punch in the stomach.
One of the two commissioners, I think he was from the Fire Department, was pretty testy after the meeting over the blame implications of the questioning. He said you have to remember the scale of the problem they faced, that they had 18 acres of hell to deal with, and he thought the departments did exceptionally well.
I agree. I don't have a flag or an "I heart my cops" sticker on the door…because I don't…but as humans the member of the police and fire departments that responded that day should get nothing but respect for saving the lives they did instead of running into the shadows as their most basic impulses would demand.
