Chaos of 9/11 revealed in vivid oral histories

Emergency messages ignored?
Some city officials, including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, have suggested some firefighters ignored the mayday call in acts of personal heroism. But the group of families has sought to lay blame on the city for providing firefighters with faulty radios.

At least one fire lieutenant, Gregg Hansson of Engine 34, said he heard the call to evacuate while he was on the 35th floor of the north tower, and saw his colleagues leaving.

"I heard a mayday given over the command channel to evacuate the building," Hansson said in his oral history. "He started to tell everyone to evacuate, and I did also. I saw all the units get up, everybody got their gear, everybody started for the staircases to evacuate."

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.'"

A fortunate escape
"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.

The transcripts reinforce the perception that some firefighters throughout the trade center 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 instructed him to go on 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."

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."

City resisted releasing records
The New York Times and families of Sept. 11 victims sued the city in 2002 to release the records.

The city withheld them, claiming the release would violate firefighters' privacy and jeopardize the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, who ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In March, the state's highest court ordered the city to release the oral histories and radio transmissions but said the city could edit out potentially painful and embarrassing portions.

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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