(Finally) Families Sift Through New 9/11 Documents ("4 more years! 4 more years!")

Families Sift Through New 9/11 Documents

By SARA KUGLER and ERIN McCLAM,
Associated Press Writers
19 minutes ago

NEW YORK - The families of fallen firefighters revisited the heart-rending morning of Sept. 11 with the rest of the nation as the Fire Department opened a trove of finely sketched recollections of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Relatives pored over more than 12,000 pages of oral histories and hours of recorded radio transmissions in which firefighters described in vivid, intimate detail how they rushed to save fleeing civilians before the twin towers collapsed in choking clouds of dust and debris.

For some families, the documents — released after a three-year court battle with the city — offered hints of their loved ones' last whereabouts, and confirmation that equipment problems contributed to their deaths. The attack killed 343 firefighters.

Sally Regenhard, mother of 28-year-old Christian Regenhard, said a breakdown of communications led to her son's death and that the response to the attack "has been sanitized by the city of New York in an effort to put all this under the rug."

She and her husband, retired police Sgt. Al Regenhard, learned a sliver of information about their son's last minutes during the three-hour session. He had been filling in that day for a firefighter in Engine 279 of Red Hook, Brooklyn, which was told to head toward the south tower; she even learned the name of his commander.

"It's very emotional. It's very difficult," she said. "But it's no harder than knowing every day that my son is gone."

The histories, recorded in the weeks and months after the attack, offer a glimpse of firefighters battling their own fears as they fought to save others.

Trapped in the mall below the trade center after the collapse of the south tower, James Murphy and a group of fellow firefighters started hunting for the exits. Frightened civilians began grabbing onto them, he said.

"We were saying, `Don't worry, we're with the Fire Department. Everybody is going to get out,'" Murphy recalled. But, he said, "We were just as scared as anybody else. We were just victims, too. Basically the only difference between us and the victims is we had flashlights."

Firefighter Kirk Long, whose Engine 1 was sent to the north tower, spoke of climbing upward in the north tower as civilians fled in the opposite direction.

"I was watching every person coming down, looked at their face, just to make them happy that they were getting out and we were going in, and everything was OK," Long said in his oral history.

The radio transmissions added new texture to the historical record of the day, beginning at 8:46 a.m. with an urgent description of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

"The World Trade Center tower Number One is on fire!" one firefighter radioed.

As the depth of the crisis became clear, the voices on the radios thickened with panic.

"Send every available ambulance, everything you got to the World Trade Center," a firefighter calls from Engine 1. "Now!"

Another firefighter, Maureen McArdle-Schulman, recalled hearing someone yell before the collapses that something was falling from the towers.

She said she thought it might have been desks coming out.

"Then the first body hit and then we knew what it was," she said. "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."

The records shed some new light onto lingering questions and long-standing complaints about the response. Firefighters described faulty communications equipment and some orders that weren't obeyed.

Some city officials, including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, have suggested that firefighters ignored the mayday call in acts of personal heroism. But a group of activist families has sought to lay blame on the city for providing firefighters with radios that didn't work.

Firefighter Paul Bessler recalled a colleague storming up the north tower's stairs as if he was "on a mission."

"Just at that point, my radio came clear as day, 'Imminent collapse. This was a terrorist attack. Evacuate.'"

But Thomas Piambino said he heard "absolutely nothing" ordering him out. He and others nearby left the tower before it fell, but he said he didn't know why.

"It was just the culmination of intuition or what," he said. "I just decided it was time to go."

The transcripts reinforced the perception that some firefighters dropped protocol and simply acted according to their best instincts.

Firefighter Patrick Martin of Engine 229 said that after the south tower had collapsed and before the north tower came down, his lieutenant ordered him to a boat taking people to hospitals across the Hudson River.

"I told him I wasn't leaving," Martin said. "We were still missing one guy."

The New York Times and families of Sept. 11 victims sued the city in 2002 to release the records, which were collected by fire officials in the days after the attack.

The city withheld them, but in March, the state's highest court ordered their release, allowing the city to leave out potentially painful and embarrassing parts. Portions of 911 calls have yet to be released.

The Fire Department, in a statement, said it hoped the release of the records would not cause firefighters and their families additional pain.

"The department believes that the materials being released today ... will serve to further confirm the bravery and courage of our members who responded to the World Trade Center," the statement said.
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Associated Press Writers Michael Weissenstein, Frank Eltman, Tom Hays, Verena Dobnik, Amy Westfeldt and Jennifer Bogar contributed to this report.


SOURCE - http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050813/ap_on_re_us/sept_11_firefighters