Hi, I'm William Rodriguez. I'm not with the FDNY. Actually I’m the last survivor pulled from the rubble.
I worked in the building for 20 years. I'm kind of here to pull NIST ears a little bit ‘cause I was with you guys in Congress. I was here when you came the second time. And I was never called. I was never called for my testimony. In a sense, I’ve been the expert for the media, for the actual media, on everything related to 9/11 and the last moments of the people that were there. I worked in the building for 20 years. And I have one of the few master keys that were available on 9/11. And I was being followed by the fire department and the police – the Port Authority department on that day. I was opening the doors. And I know for a fact that you haven't called people that worked for structural employees.
If you go, obviously, to the supervisors, and you go to the company, they’re going to try to keep this information. You should go directly to the employees that worked there for so many years. And get their experience. For example, I still have the pictures that I offered the NIST in Congress, on the hearings, of the stairs in the building. I still have them here. And I’ve never been called. I’ve got them all here.
Also, we told – ask the people from the asbestos removal business, because it was going on constantly. And that was one of the problems that I had with the – I was the person that cleaned the stairs in the building on the North Tower. And cleaning the stairs in the building gave me a personal look at what was going on. And I'm not an expert, but it made me an expert of what was happening that was wrong with the Port Authority. I remember on the 21st floor, on the 13th floor, there was structural damage on the staircases. I told this personally to Gene Morragio (ph) and Ed Strauss (ph) who are dead now, building operation managers of the Port Authority. And nothing was done with the structural damages. The stairs were cracking. The sheet rock, when I went up opening the doors, was falling on top of me and on top of the firemen constantly. And the
swaying of the building made it easier for that to come off.
I remember listening to the fluorescent lights, the emergency lights that were in the building, cracking up in line; pop, pop, pop, pop, pop all the way to the bottom
because of the swiveling. And one of the things, I mean, the sound of fear of the people on the floors was a constant reminder of what the fire department was trying to do that day, and the problems that we were experiencing. Not all the sprinkler systems worked. Not all the warble alarms on every floor worked.
The fire, the ball of fire, for example, I was in the basement when the first plane hit the building. And at that moment, I thought it was an electrical generator that blew up at that moment. A person comes running into the office saying explosion, explosion, explosion. When I look at this guy; has all his skin pulled off of his body. Hanging from the top of his fingertips like it was a glove. And I said, what happened? He said the elevators. What happened was the ball of fire went down with such a force down the elevator shaft on the 58th (50A) – freight elevator, the biggest freight elevator that we have in the North Tower, it went out with such a force that it broke the cables. It went down, I think seven flights. The person survived because he was pulled from the B3 level. But this person, being in front of the doors waiting for the elevator, practically got his skin vaporized.
And so what I'm telling you this is, as I went up – from that moment, I got this guy out. I went up, I went back inside the building through the basement. And there was people stuck on the lower elevators, the lower freight elevators that were in the other basements. And I saved two guys from there, they are alive right now, and they haven't been called to testify what they went through either. The problems they have when they went into the elevators, how they stopped working and things like that.
The fire escapes, as being the person in charge of cleaning them, I had constant problems with the Port Authority, constant problems because they didn’t enforce, for example, the no-smoking law inside the stairs. I would have people in groups of five smoking on the stairs with trashcans inside the staircases, trashcans from the floors on a constant basis. And I will tell them, “You got to get out.” They’d say, you're not a cop. Only on two occasions, because I took pictures, and that’s the reason I have the pictures on the stairs because I didn't want to get – I was getting warnings from my cleaning company, constantly. You didn’t clean these areas. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. But they will go back and they will do it. They will leave and they will do all these problems over there.
http://wtc.nist.gov/media/Public%20Transcript%20021204%20Final1_withlinks.pdf
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