Report From Ground Zero, By Dennis Smith

[westprog]

Reading the book at the moment, and will post passages relevant to the CT's.


The heat must be extraordinary, generated by airplanes with fuel-filled wings. I remember a question on the lieutenant's test of many years ago: What is the expansion factor of a one-hundred foot steel beam as it reaches the inherent heat level of 1200 degrees fahrenheit? The answer is nine and a half inches, and I try to guage how hot this fire before me is burning. Is it intense enough to bring the steel to 1200 degrees? The smoke is first very black, indicating the burning fuel, and then white as it rises, indicating great heat. It is not a good sign. If the steel stretches, the floor will collapse, and that will only make the rescue effort more difficult.

[westprog]

....

I hit that corner and I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom. I stand in amazement. I can't believe what I am seeing. This building is coming down.

[westprog]

...

I am taken immediately by the height of the rubble that we have, for it isn't as high as I think it should be. This does not give me a comfortable felling about our ability to find people. I have seen enough buildings collapse to kmnow what should be left of a six storey building, and what is left of a seven story or four storey. It certainly appears to me that if buildings reaching into the sky collapse then it should leave a larger pile. We know about all the levels beneath. Perhaps people were at the concourse levels, and perhaps we will find a few there, unless we are unable to get down there.

[westprog]

...


There are a few men from ESU there, and they had prepared the helicopter at Floyd Bennet Field, rigged with enough rope to get down onto the roof of the building. I am worried [by] this time. I am not scared of doing a rappel, but the fire looks like it is rising up now just a few floors from the roof. It just looked dismal. At this same time, there is a report that comes over the radio that there will be no roof rappels, no roof operations - it is just too risky. So we stand by for another few minutes, and then a crack, like an echo, and then it is like thunder magnified a million times, [and] the south tower comes down.

[westprog]

...

I heard that a number of people were burned in an elevator because of falling jet fuel. It could be true that that happened because there were at least six or eight people right outside the building when we came in that were badly burned. So there must have been some type of a blast somewhere. I was wondering how they got burned, and I remember saying to myself, How did they get down the stairs so fast? Remember [the collision was] eighty floors up, and so they were probably in an elevator. We were getting reports of the strong odor of jet fuel on the fifty-something floor. I was thinking that maybe that jet fuel was pouring down into the elevator shafts.

[westprog]

...

It is very easy to say in retrospect that it was time to leave early on. But, you know, we discussed that. That was all taken into consideration. It wasn't as if we were oblivious to the possibility of a collapse - we were very aware that the building might collapse. I don't think anybody could have forecast that it was going to be so early on and so catastrophic. I think we envisioned a gradual burning of the fire for a couple of hours and then a very limited type of collapse - the top fifteen or twenty floors all folding in, and we would have [pulled] everybody back.

[westprog]

...

We were worried about stability in a lot of the buildings. Guys were searching in front of the Marriott, and you were looking at this thing, thinking the rest of this building could start to fall down again. A lot of guys wanted to get in there. You have to tell them "Hey, look. We lost a lot of guys here today. We lost a lot of guys. Let's not lose any more."

[westprog]

...


...we flattened ourselves against it until the falling debris stopped - I guess the better part of a minute or so. We saw an airplane tyre fall to the ground on fire...

[westprog]

...

Another ten or fifteen minutes or so later, one of my guys said to me "Listen, the north tower is making noise, we're not safe here, that building is going to come down too."

[Lisa Simpson]

westprog - this is skirting both copyright rules and flooding rules. Please do not post any more excerpts.