2. The morning of September the eleventh two thousand and one was just
another morning at the Ten House. It was shift change at the house so there
were extra firefighters there. Ten house is located at 124 Liberty Street, the
only station located inside ground zero. At 8:46 am American Airlines flight 11
hit the World Trade Center. Firefighter Serge Pilupczuk was the first to see
this and he ran back into the kitchen where the other firefighters were sitting
and told them that a plane had just hit the Trade Center. The color in his face
was completely drained, he was scared.
NEXT
3. Ladder ten was the first out. They made it about ten yards and the driver, John
Morabito, stopped. He turned to his Captain and said “it’s a body”. His Captain
said “you gotta go. They're dead, you gotta go”. So he drove over them. The
next hindrance they encountered was a lincoln town car that had stalled. The
woman driving it couldn’t get it started, so a NYPD police officer hopped in and
tried to start it. He couldn’t get it started either. So Morabito rammed the car up
onto the sidewalk, and onward they went. As they got done with pushing the
town car out of the way they turned off of Liberty Street and onto West Street
on the way to the entrance to the north tower. As they were driving on West
Street a man fully engulfed in flames walked right into the path of the ladder
truck. Morabito skidded to a stop and jumped out with another off duty
firefighter and doused the man.
NEXT
4. Once ladder 10 got to the tower they sent in five out of the six guys that were on
the ladder company. Morabito waited in the lobby, directing people and helping
people. In the lobby there was a woman that had been severely burned with no
clothes and her eyes sealed shut. She sat up and Morabito yelled to her “its going
to be alright, were going to help you”, she died right then and there. Not long after
that woman died, the south tower was struck by another plane. By this time there
were over two hundred firefighters on the scene and there were more coming. After
finding out about the second plane hitting the firefighters knew that this was a
terrorist attack.
When the plane hit the north tower it blew the elevators out of their shafts.
All the people in the elevators were incinerated. Morabito was still in the lobby and
he and a few other firefighters decided to start directing people down into the
subway so that they didn’t have to come out onto West Street and risk getting hit
by bodies and other falling debris. Many of the people that were coming down the
stairs were burned or severely wounded. The firefighters were telling them to walk
not run because they could slip and fall on the marble floor. The people listened to
the firefighters and walked. Morabito saw someone he recognized. It was another
firefighters wife. He told her that her husband was still alive and that she should
just go into the subway.
NEXT
5. Right after Morabito told the people to move off of the veranda, the south tower
collapsed. The wall behind Morabito collapsed and the air from the collapsing
tower picked him up and threw him around the room. He was screaming “god
please, please don’t let me die god”. There were beams falling and dust swirling.
But after the eight second hell ride he was alive. He was starting to panic though.
It was getting hard to breathe, so he turned on his SCBA and took a couple of
breaths. He started to search for a way out, a window or a hole or something. He
found one, and before he crawled out of it he turned on his light and called out
and asked if anyone could see his light or hear him, that he had found a way out.
A firefighter named Girard Owens came out of the darkness with five other
people. As they were exiting from the window the north tower was starting to
collapse, Morabito ran for his life, he was thinking that he was going to die in the
street. After running about a block he realized that the tower went in on itself and
that he was going to be okay. He searched for the remaining members of his
company and found them near the Hudson river.
NEXT
6. Later on that day the firefighters from the ten house found out that they had lost
five of their members. Harrell, Tallon, and Olsen were lost when the tower
collapsed. Lt. Gregg Atlas, the officer on engine 10, died running up the stairs
ahead of his hose team trying to get to the fire before they did. Paul Pansini was
covering for engine 26. He died and so did every other firefighter on that engine.
NEXT
7. After the attacks on September 11th 2001 there were 343 dead firefighters, 70
dead port authority police officers and NYPD officers , and 2795 civilians dead.
After the attacks President Bush launched the war on terror. The object was to find
Osama bin Laden and detain him.
