By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAYI wonder what the press hoped to learn here, that was worth suing over. To remember? To remind us of that day? Or did they just want to loot the corpses one more time, to find more comspiracies and more conflicts in the human rubble of 9/11?
Mon Aug 15, 7:21 AM ET
The brown box arrived Friday at Kathleen Lynch's house in Amherst, N.Y., but it's still sitting on the kitchen table: 23 CDs with more than 15 hours of radio transmissions and transcripts of hundreds of personal accounts of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, which killed her brother, firefighter Michael Lynch.
" I don't know when or if I will listen to them. I just can't say," Lynch said Sunday. Even hearing excerpts on news reports left her "very disturbed. Very sad. It really brings it back. It makes it very real again."
A huge trove of information about the emergency response to the World Trade Center attacks, released Friday after a three-year court fight, is emotional material for the families of 341 firefighters and two fire department paramedics who died there.
"Anything that would shed light on something would be healing. But I know that it reopens wounds for a lot of people," says Russ Siller, whose brother Stephen, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center. Stephen's body was never recovered. "Because we don't even know which tower he was in, it would be nice, it would be a good thing if we were to find something out."
Fire department radio transmissions and interviews with more than 500 firefighters and paramedics, conducted in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the direction of then Fire Commissioner Thomas von Essen, were released Friday as the result of a lawsuit brought against the fire department in 2002 by The New York Times and eight families of those killed.
The new material largely confirms what those families knew: The scene at the World Trade Center was one of chaos, terror and bravery.
The interviews reveal the horror and helplessness felt by many of the firefighters and paramedics. Trapped workers jumping from the highest floors of the Trade Center were a gruesome danger: Firefighter Daniel Suhr died after being struck by a falling body.
Twice, they ran for their lives from the collapsing buildings and choking black dust.
"It looked like a giant wave behind us," Assistant Fire Commissioner Stephen Gregory recalled. "I got down on one knee, I put my hands over my head to hold my helmet on. ... It got very black. It got very quiet. It was very peacefully quiet, so peaceful that I thought I was dead."
The new material is being reviewed carefully by family members who joined the lawsuit. They include Sally Regenhard, mother of a lost firefighter, who believes that faulty radios did not allow firefighters to hear orders to evacuate the towers before their collapse.
In the interviews, some firefighters say they were ordered out of the north tower after the south tower collapsed. Others say they were not told to leave but decided on their own.
"No one told me to get out," said Lt. Thomas Piambino, who had climbed to the 22nd floor of the north tower. "I don't know what it was. It was just the culmination of intuition or what. I just decided it was time to go."
Lydia Mozzillo, whose son Christopher died in the north tower, has begun listening to the recordings. "It's difficult. It is," she said Sunday. "Because you just picture in your mind where they all were. Try to wonder what floor they were on. Did they ever get the message to evacuate?"
Tapes of 911 emergency calls were not released, although the lawsuit ruling says they may be released if families consent. A log of calls to the Emergency Medical Service dispatch shows the desperation of the thousands of workers trapped inside the towers: "Female caller states they are stuck in the elevator. States they are dying."
Does it still resonate for you? Do you still feel it?
Almost four years later, it still breaks the heart and enrages the soul. All of those people, murdered simply for existing.
And four years later, people still have the gall to say there is no evil in this world.
And that they somehow deserved to die.
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