Originally posted by wormser1971
transcript of an interview
BATTALION CHIEF KENAHAN: Today's date is
December 6, 2001. The time is 3:36 p.m. This is
Battalion Chief Kenahan of the Safety Battalion of the
Fire Department of the City of New York. I'm conducting
an interview with Richard Banaciski of Ladder 22.
We were there, I don't know, maybe 10, 15
minutes and then I just remember there was just an
explosion. It seemed like on television when they blow
up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the
way around like a belt, all these explosions
If there were demo explosions in the lobby then it would have collapsed from the base. Use some common sense. He probably heard explosions but that doesn't mean C4 was being detonated to make those explosions. Also when a building is collapsing you will hear lots of loud noises and booms that could be described as explosions. There still has been no real evidence to be shown that demolition type explosives were used. Basically a massive bomb, filled with fuel and flying at 400+ MPH hit the building. Of course you are going to hear explosions when this occurs. Eyewitness testimony like the ones below talk about the explosions that were going through the building at the time the plane hit as fire was forced down the elevator shafts. The fact is that if C4 demolition was set off at the time of the plane collision then you would have had an immediate collapse. Also you keep bringing up that thermite was used. Guess what? Thermite doesn't create an explosion. So basically you guys need to get your stories straight and come up with a better scenario that can't be so easily debunked.
"It took me exactly 17 minutes to get down 59 flights of stairs because eventually it turned out to be the time difference between the two planes hitting each tower. I exited the emergency stairwell into the 1st floor lobby center elevator vestibule servicing floors 3 thought 43 about eight seconds before the second hijacked plane went through my Tower 2. I didn't think of it until later, but now as I recall, at this point I lost track of Karen.
What followed was unlike anything I have ever experienced, or could imagine experiencing; the only thing that comes close is the movie Die Hard. When that plane blew through upstairs the repercussions only took about 25 seconds, but it all seemed in slow motion to me, as if I was watching myself on a movie screen. All of the oxygen was sucked out of the building and my lungs (like being in a vacuum). I felt doomed because the turnstile exiting the elevator bank would not unlock for me to get out and run for the revolving doors leading out of the lobby and into the mall under the plaza level. I could not have known at that panic-filled moment, but that locked-up turnstile would save my life. Instead I'm thinking, "This is where I will die," because I can hear an explosion roaring downward inside the building. Yet somehow I looked over to see that the end turnstile wraps around a support beam forming about a two-square-foot space, but there is only about six inches to squeeze through between the end of the turnstile and wall beam. Something inside me told me to get in there. I'm about 100 pounds soaking wet, so I pressed myself through and balled up facing the support beam with the steel barrier wrapped around my back giving me a little protected cubby hole.
This is when the explosion came.
It progressed down the building, breaking the windows as it went; the entire building was groaning, an unnatural, unearthly sound, much like a can squeezing, or cracking uncooked spaghetti. By the time it reached the lobby, the marble veneer was cracking and falling off the walls; the chandeliers shattered on the floors along with the plaster ceiling, and the force imploded in at about 50 mph, pulling metal, balled safety glass, and other material with it. The pipes were bursting over my head and dense materials were flying around me as if they were being pureed in a blender. In the next instant came a horrible noise and a flash of extreme heat and light blown directly over my head. I concluded later in the day that this was from the huge airplane fireball sent down the 78-110 elevator shaft that exploded out into the lobby, and blew around the walls and curled into the center vestibule where I was taking cover. The third and last explosion occurred when a huge chunk of burning wreckage fell to Liberty Street, which runs parallel along the south side of the South Tower, and crashed through the building into the lobby behind me, bringing metal, glass, marble and revolving doors with it. There had been four security men and some fleeing WTC workers behind me near those revolving doors; I realized that they were all taken out by either a huge chunk of the building exploding outwards or the tail end of the plane falling to the street. I now know that there were nine of us in the lobby that day when the plane hit, two NYPD officers on the 44-77 elevator side, and two others coming out of emergency stairwells on the 78-110 elevator side. The two officers and I were the only ones who made it out alive.
As the debris and dust settled, water started to rain down, and black smoke began to roll through with the strong smell of jet fuel in what was left of a once beautiful lobby."
78th floor
Ling Young said she believes she was the last person to escape the tower before it collapsed. She was trying to save her boss, who had suffered a broken leg in the attack.
Young said she was waiting to take an elevator down. When the doors opened, a fireball incinerated several people waiting to get on. She finally made her way to the stairs and out of the building.
70th floor, Clyde Ebanks: "I think now, these popping sounds were coming out of the elevator shafts because of the fireball that was coming down. The popping sounds, I think, were the elevator doors opening up because of the fireball." (Richard Bernstein: Out of the Blue. New York: Times Books, 2002. p. 222)
25th floor
Eric S. Levine: Somewhere around the 25th floor, we began to smell jet fuel and a lot of it. I have asthma and it began to become a little difficult to breathe but by the 15th floor it became unbearable due to the amount of smoke that was now entering the stairwell.
South Tower lobby
The doors parted, but the elevator had become stuck just as the bottom of the cab was reaching the lobby of the south tower. Only the feet of the trapped passengers were visible as the burning jet fuel that had cascaded down the shaft ahead of them threatened to broil them alive.
South Tower lobby
Firefighter Timothy Brown: "We finally set up -- prior to this I believe it was the west side of the core of the building there were elevators. Someone had come to me and said that there were people trapped in one of those elevators. So I ran around the corner, and the hoist way doors were open, but the elevator car was only showing about two feet at the top of the door. You could see all the legs of the people that were in the elevator. I would guess there were about eight people in the elevator. The elevator pit was on fire with the jet fuel. People were screaming in the elevator. They were getting smoked and cooked. There weren't a lot of firemen there at the time. I grabbed some of the Port Authority employees and asked them where the fire extinguishers were and told them to get as many fire extinguishers as they could so we could try and fight this fire. As they were doing that, firemen started showing up, and I started asking them to get big cans, let's try to put this fire out."