Video Captures Sept. 11 Horror in Raw Replay
By ALAN FEUER
The videotape is raw.
It shows the black wedge of an airplane slamming into the north tower of the World Trade Center. It shows commanders in the building's lobby scrambling to figure out how to send scores of firefighters into the burning building.
It captures the radio transmissions ordering everyone down to the lobby after the second plane hits. It shows the gout of dust and rubble as the buildings suddenly collapse. It shows the booted foot of a Fire Department chaplain who is being carried through smoke and the din of screaming. It shows the faces of anxious men only minutes before they die.
A brief clip of the first plane slicing through the north tower was seen by millions in the days after Sept. 11, but what has never been publicly shown is the rest of the 90-minute videotape. It was made by a French filmmaker who happened to be taping a group of firefighters in Lower Manhattan. It is a document of disaster from the inside: the impact, the rush to the emergency, the frenzied effort to establish a command post, the grays and whites and flaming oranges as both towers collapse.
Copies have made the rounds of city firehouses, and fire officials say they plan to use it as an investigative tool. The filmmaker says he wants to turn the tape into a documentary and give it to the families of the dead. It is anyone's guess whether it will one day be seen by the public.
While there are other tapes of ground zero on that day, none come close to capturing the catastrophe at such close range. It is an extraordinary view of history at the moment that it happens. It is so immediate, so vivid, so graphic, so raw that viewers can almost taste the bitter smoke in their throats and feel the grit of concrete on their teeth.
It begins at the corner of Lispenard and Church Streets, where Jules Naudet, the filmmaker making a documentary about the training of a probationary firefighter, is taping Battalion Chief Joe Pfeifer responding to a report of a gas leak under the street. After a meter reading is taken, the roar of a plane is heard.
The camera pans up to follow the path of the plane as it rams the north tower. There are expletives and flames and smoke.
It cuts to Chief Pfeifer in his squad truck, cruising toward the flames. He is on the phone and smoke is dribbling down the facade like water. The sirens have started already. "It's a big one," the driver says.
The next 20 minutes or so are given over to confusion, as Mr. Naudet and his camera rush into the north tower and capture Chief Pfeifer and his superior, Deputy Chief Pete Hayden, setting up a command post. They issue orders to their men and desperately work the telephones. An eerie calm has filled the lobby as firefighters muster and wait to be deployed. Their faces are filled with fear, with the damp anxiety that comes before a job.
The suspense of watching the tape is excruciating because the viewer knows exactly what is coming: a loud crash, like a bus running into a bridge abutment ? the second plane. "Tommy!" someone yells. "Tommy! Another plane! Another plane!"
There is so much grit on the camera lens by now that Mr. Naudet has to scrub it with a rag.
There is a call to evacuate: "Everybody down to the lobby! All units down to the lobby!"
Smash. The firefighters jump. Another smash. Smash. Smash. Falling bodies or debris?
The men stare at the ceiling, wary, shaking their heads. Their eyes seem moist and bright. The camera pans to the mezzanine where employees, calmly bunched together, have started to evacuate in a long, tight line.
Back to Chief Pfeifer on the phone. A scrap of a nearby conversation: Now they're saying the Pentagon's been hit. Chief Pfeifer shouts to someone off-screen, "Do you have to dial nine to get out on this thing?"
Then it happens. The south tower starts falling.
It sounds like a gunshot. Then a wave crashing on shore. The camera goes up the escalator. The lens fades slowly to darkness, dust leaching away light. The tape is so hard to make out that there are only voices.
"Everybody all right? How's the way out of here?" The images seem as if they are underwater or seen through a wet shower door. Snow, infrared light.
"We've got to get everybody out! Let's go! We need some light!" Radio chatter. Screaming. "Where are we going?" "Sarge." "Hey Pete. Pete." "Chief Hayden" "We're lost." "Hey Joe, where are you?" "There's the escalator, right there." Top of the escalator. "Mike! Where's the escalator? We only got four guys. Mike, I need you. Mike!"
Daylight. Or the ashen gray of that day's light.
It is during this scene that a searing image appears: the booted foot of a dead man who is being carried by his brothers. The men carrying him later said the body was that of the Rev. Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain, who perished.
Mr. Naudet had been with the firefighters on the street that day as he had been nearly every day for about three months, chronicling the life of a probationary firefighter at the downtown firehouse for Engine Company 7 and Ladder Company 1.
"We just happened to be there," he said in a telephone interview last night. "The true heroes are the incredible men who ran into those buildings and lost their lives."
Francis X. Gribbon, a spokesman for the department, said that both fire officials and the F.B.I. have a copy of the tape. For the Fire Department, it will be part investigative tool and part historical artifact.
"For some it has captured the last brave actions of a number of firefighters who went to save others," he said. "For others in the department, it will become what we use to try to definitively know who was where, and we think it has been helpful. It is very helpful. As evidence, it will help us to understand or piece together the activities that occurred in tower one, such as those companies reporting in." Mr. Gribbon added, "There's nothing else like it."
Mr. Naudet nearly lost his life himself when the north tower collapsed. In the tape, his camera lens goes blank in the storm of dust and wind, like a real eye clogged with grit.
"Chuff! Chuff! Chuff!" He tries to clear his throat. "Mayday! Mayday!" someone shouts. "You with me? It's hard to breathe."
It is dark again on screen and there are far-off yells, voices as if coming over water. The camera points straight down and captures a pile of ash-covered paper. It looks like the remnants of a blizzard, like a clip from a Buffalo weather report.
"Chuff, chuff. Chuff, chuff."
Chief Pfeifer lived, as did his superior, Chief Hayden. Capt. Terence Hatton, pictured at one point in the tape, is dead. Father Judge is dead as well. Lt. Kevin Pfeifer, Chief Pfeifer's brother, is also dead. Dozens of the faces in the tape are dead. Among those passing through its frames are Port Authority officials crucial in the evacuation and other civilians who bravely lent a hand.
The tape ends as suddenly as it starts. Mr. Naudet is almost choking, trying just to breathe. Someone shouts out, "Chief?" The camera stumbles through a doorway.
And then the screen goes blank.
