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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
