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| DATE | 2005-08-14 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] 9-11 Archive
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/13records.html
August 13, 2005
Vast Archive Yields New View of 9/11
By JIM DWYER
This article was reported by Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn and Ian Urbina and written by Mr. Dwyer.
Faced with a court order and unyielding demands from the families of victims, the city of New York yesterday opened part of its archive of records from Sept. 11, releasing a digital avalanche of oral histories, dispatchers' tapes and phone logs so vast that they took up 23 compact discs.
For the first time, about 200 accounts of emergency medical technicians, paramedics and their supervisors were made public, revealing new dimensions of a day and an emergency response that had already seemed familiar.
In details large and small, the accounts of the medical personnel - uniformed workers who were often overlooked in many of the day's chronicles, but were as vital to the response and rescue efforts as any others - provide vivid and alarming recollections.
They spoke of being unable to find anyone in authority to tell them where to go or what to do. Nearly from the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, they had little radio communication. As their leaders struggled to set up ordinary procedures for a "mass casualty incident," the crisis gathered speed by the minute.
With the lines of command sundered, many of those interviewed said, they became their own bosses. They found themselves shepherding crowds away from the towers, serving as trauma counselors, bandaging people inside a bank lobby, and packing their ambulances with the dazed, the bleeding, the burned.
As scores of city and private ambulances arrived, an orderly system for treating patients never developed.
Some medical triage centers were set up blocks from where the injured were leaving the towers. A medical chief arrived at the main fire command post and found the chief of the Fire Department cursing his nonfunctioning radio.
A team of medics told how they tried to treat a firefighter, Daniel Suhr, who had been hit by a woman falling from one of the towers, but realized he had no vital signs and had catastrophic injuries.
Nevertheless, they continued to work on him, carrying out hopeless resuscitation efforts, in deference to two shocked firefighters who accompanied him in the ambulance.
"They kept yelling, 'Danny, Danny, Danny!' " said Richard L. Erdy, an emergency medical technician who treated Firefighter Suhr.
Another paramedic recalled seeing one of his colleagues, Carlos Lillo, helping patients, staring at the North Tower and breaking into tears. Mr. Lillo's wife, Cecilia, worked there. She survived. He did not.
The newly released records capture a moment in history as seen through thousands of eyes, and as told in hundreds of voices - some halting, some confident, almost all disbelieving. No single document could be definitive about an event that swept across so many lives, but the release of these accounts - one CD alone encompassed more than 12,000 pages of oral history transcripts - begins to fill in major parts of the day's history.
The oral histories were gathered in 2001 on the instructions of Thomas Von Essen, who was fire commissioner on Sept. 11. The New York Times sought copies under the freedom of information law in early 2002, but Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's administration refused, leading to litigation. Earlier this year, the state Court of Appeals ordered the release of most of the materials.
Eight families of people killed at the trade center, represented by the civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel, joined the suit to seek the release. Since then, the interest has grown, and the Fire Department has sent CD's to 460 families.
"Today we are one step closer to learning what happened on 9/11 in N.Y.C. - where we excelled, where we failed," said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, died in the South Tower.
In particular, the records released yesterday provide the most detailed view yet of the operations of the Emergency Medical Services, which became a division within the Fire Department in 1996.
"I just think a lot of people don't realize what we, E.M.S., went through," Alan Cooke, an emergency medical technician, told interviewers for the Fire Department.
A spokesman for the department said major changes had been made since the terror attacks. "There has been vast improvement in communications," said the spokesman, Francis X. Gribbon. "There is no question that E.M.S. personnel are more prepared today to handle a large-scale emergency in this city."
In his 64-page oral history, Zach Goldfarb, who had just finished an overnight tour of duty as the citywide chief of operations when the first plane struck, said that even the deaths of some medical workers were overlooked in the tally and recognition of the responders who died.
The Fire Department lost 341 firefighters, officers and a deputy commissioner. In addition, two paramedics employed by the department died, bringing its total losses to 343. But Chief Goldfarb said six emergency medical responders from private hospitals also died.
"We keep talking about the losses on this job from an E.M.S. standpoint and we say there were two, Carlos Lillo and Ricardo Quinn," Chief Goldfarb said. "There were six other E.M.S. professionals that died in this incident on our mission."
He said the emergency medical network was "a hodgepodge of voluntary hospitals and voluntary ambulances and commercial ambulances."
He added: "But you know what? They all came in to do our mission and I think that they need to be recognized as such, and I think it's a disgrace to us that we're not counting the names of these six dead people."
In his account, Chief Goldfarb said he decided not to report to the South Tower, as ordered, believing that it was too hazardous to cross West Street. Finding about 30 paramedics and E.M.T.'s on West Street, he sent them into the World Financial Center. A few minutes later, the South Tower collapsed. Mr. Quinn, who died, had originally been among those 30 people.
As the E.M.S. workers set out for the trade center that morning, more than a few went without being called. Still others decided to make extra preparations. Among them, Chief James Martin recalled the lack of supplies after the 1993 bombing of the trade center.
"I filled the car up with several bottles of water, and I brought my little radio charger," Chief Martin said. "Knowing that the new 3,500 radios were out there but we didn't have chargers for them, I threw that in."
Chief Goldfarb had written a report on the 1993 response, and he worried about the effects of merging the medical service into the Fire Department. Just a month before Sept. 11, 2001, he had spoken with a fire chief about the 1993 attack.
"I told him, for reasons I won't go into now, the response would be very different if we had to relive this thing, different not necessarily in a positive way," Chief Goldfarb said in his oral history. "So here we are four weeks later and we were actually living it."
Lt. Rene Davila was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene, unsure if his agency had done any "preplanning" now that it was part of the Fire Department. In any case, he said, he did not relish being in command.
"You know you see that guy on '911' or something like that, and he's a hero or something and he's a big shot or whatever," Lieutenant Davila said. "Well, I was given the opportunity to be that guy, and I immediately did not want it."
He shouted himself hoarse, he said, trying to ensure that patients were not simply loaded into ambulances but were "triaged" - that their injuries were evaluated and that the most seriously hurt were taken care of first.
John Rothmund, an emergency medical technician, spoke of the trouble finding any supervisors. "No brass," he said. "So me and my partner tried to find authority figures, and there was really none around."
Improvisation, not routines, became the order of the day. Arriving at the corner of West Broadway and Vesey Street, a paramedic, Manuel Delgado, saw part of an airplane crush the front of a police car. He and a doctor drove a bleeding police officer to NYU Downtown Hospital, then returned eventually to a triage area on the north side of the trade center.
"There was just a stream of people running, running, running, and basically at this point our triage was, if you're walking, keep walking, and if people are being carried or people were falling, we would move forward," Mr. Delgado said.
They collected a badly burned woman in a red dress, he recalled, then a man who had serious burns over most of his body.
"He was carried out halfway and I guess collapsed or someone dropped him and just ran," Mr. Delgado said. "We picked him up and started bringing him out."
He continued: "We had more patients than we had ambulances. We were stuffing four and five people in an ambulance at this point. I mean, it was just to get people out of there with minimal treatment. There was nothing you could do."
The demands of the moment consumed every bit of the attention of the medical workers. "Once you got there, I didn't even notice the time," Lt. Patrick Scaringello said. "Couldn't tell the time."
The relations between city and private ambulance services, always tense, were also badly strained by the surge of ambulances that came to the scene. "Actually, the biggest downfall to this whole thing was probably the communications with the private" ambulances, said Justin Lim, an emergency medical technician. "They had no clue what to do."
A radio system that enabled the private hospitals and their ambulances to communicate with other city emergency agencies had been tested during the preparations for Y2K - the millennium - but the project languished, according to hospital officials. (The city now hopes to better integrate its medical service with the other responders, in part by having the dispatchers for each agency work side by side. Two new buildings, at a cost of $1.375 billion, will open next year, according to Gino Menchini, the city's technology commissioner.)
With the collapse of the South Tower, the first to fall, at 9:59 a.m., any semblance of an orderly system vanished. Inside a bank on Broadway and Murray Street, medical crews were treating people.
"They all panicked and they all stampede out," said Felipe Torre, a medical technician. "We followed out, because everybody was wanting to get out. The walls shook and then we felt it.".
At a triage area on the corner of West and Vesey Streets, a medical technician, Faisel Abed, worked for an hour on patients, until the collapse of the South Tower. "With the grace of God, we had gotten all the people out of there," he said.
A group of the medical chiefs met, in part by chance, outside the Embassy Suites Hotel in the World Financial Center and went into the lobby to set a new plan for control. But when they tried to communicate the plan to the entire force, they could not contact the dispatchers.
"I think that probably the biggest impression I got out of this whole thing was this is probably as close to being in an infantry unit that gets overrun," said Joseph Cahill, a paramedic. "We are scattered everywhere. Nobody knew where anybody was. Nobody knew who was in charge. It really felt for a moment that I was in 'Apocalypse Now,' where Martin Sheen goes: 'Where is your C.O.? Ain't that you? No. Uh-oh.' "
The first fatality among firefighters had been Firefighter Suhr, hit by the falling woman. As the paramedics who brought him to the hospital headed back to the trade center, a nun and an emergency room doctor climbed into the ambulance. As they drove, they encountered an emergency medical technician walking toward them out of a cloud of smoke. The buildings were now down and he was holding his helmet.
They asked where his partner was, and the wandering medic responded that he had left him. "I'm looking for my father," he explained. "He was in the World Trade Center."
"We said, 'Why don't you get in the back with us?' " recalled Soraya O'Donnell, an emergency medical technician.
Michelle O'Donnell contributed reporting for thi
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