[FONT=arial,sans-serif]Lobby & 3rd floor: Firefighter Peter Blaich
As we got to the third floor of the B stairway, we forced open an elevator door which was burnt on all three sides. The only thing that was remaining was the hoistway door. And inside the elevator were about I didn’t recognize them initially, but a guy from 1 Truck said oh my God, those are people. They were pretty incinerated. And I remember the overpowering smell of kerosene. That’s when Lieutenant Foti said oh, that’s the jet fuel. I remember it smelled like if you’re camping and you drop a kerosene lamp.
The same thing happened to the elevators in the main lobby. They were basically blown out. I do’nt recall if I actually saw people in there. What got me initially in the lobby was that as soon as we went in, all the windows were blown out, and there were one or two burning cars outside. And there were burn victims on the street there, walking around. We walked through this giant blown-out window into the lobby.
There was a lady there screaming that she didn’t know how she got burnt. She was just in the lobby and then next thing she knew she was on fire. She was burnt bad. And somebody came over with a fire extinguisher and was putting water on her.
That’s the first thing that got me. That and in front of one of the big elevator banks in the lobby was a desk and I definitely made out one of the corpses to be a security guard because he had a security label on his jacket. I’m assuming that maybe he was at a table still in a chair and almost completely incinerated, charred all over his body, definitely dead. And you could make out like a security tag on his jacket. And I remember seeing the table was melted, but he was still fused in the chair and that elevator bank was melted, so I imagine the jet fuel must have blown right down the elevator shaft and I guess caught the security guard at a table, I guess at some type of checkpoint.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/9...gz/blaich.html
Brian Reeves, a 34-year-old security guard, was nearly killed while making the rounds in the lobby of 1 World Trade Center on September 11. He started to run after hearing an explosion that he said sounded like a missile, but he was knocked down by a fireball that roared down the elevator shaft.
Reeves suffered third-degree burns to 40 percent of his body before he was able to pat out the flames. He was one of 20 critically-injured patients rushed to New York Presbyterian’s burn unit that day.
http://www.ny1.com/pages/RRR/911special_survivors.html
Ronnie Clifford and Jennianne Maffeo
At around 8.45am, Ronnie walked into the lobby of the Marriott, which was connected to the lobby of the north tower by a revolving door. As he was checking his yellow tie in a mirror, he felt a massive explosion, followed several seconds later by a reverberation, a warping effect that he describes as the "harmonic tolerance of a building that's shaking like a tuning fork". He peered through the revolving door into the lobby of the north tower. It was filling with haze. People were scurrying to escape what had become a "hurricane of flying debris".
Then the revolving door turned with a suctioning sound followed by a hot burst of wind, and in came a mannequin of the future. A woman, naked, dazed, her arms outstretched. She was so badly burned that Ronnie had no idea what race she was or how old she might be. She clawed the air with fingernails turned porcelain-white. The zipper of what had once been a sweater had melted into her chest, as if it were the zipper to her own body. Her hair had been singed to a crisp steel wool. With her, in the gust of the door, came a pungent odour, the smell of kerosene or paraffin, Ronnie thought.
Then the mannequin became a person, crying for help. Ronnie had little idea what had happened to her, or where exactly she had come from, but he knew that whoever she was, she was his responsibility now.
With no medical training, Ronnie Clifford scarcely knew what to do with the helpless woman who stood before him. He sat her down on the cool marble floor, then dashed into the bathroom and ran water into a clean black garbage bag that he found. He hurried back out and dribbled the contents over her body. Then he sat down on the puddled floor and tried to comfort her. Despite her condition, she was lucid.
He took out a pen and notepad and jotted down her information. Her name was Jennieann Maffeo. She was Italian-American, from Brooklyn, single, 40 years old. She worked for USB PaineWebber. She was an asthmatic, she said, and had an extreme intolerance to latex. She could not adequately describe what had happened to her.
She had been standing outside the north tower next to a man she knew, waiting for a bus, when she heard a loud crash above. In an effort to protect them from falling debris, a security guard herded everyone inside the tower's lobby. Suddenly, she told Ronnie, something bright and hot enveloped her, a vapour maybe. She thought it could have dropped down the elevator shaft. She was worried about the man who'd been next to her. Surely he was dead, she feared.
“He thought he was the lucky one, but then tragedy struck” Irish Independent, Sept. 11, 2002. (The above is an excerpt. Ronnie Clifford was able to get Jennieann Maffeo to an ambulance. She died in the hospital on October 12, 2001.)
http://www.unison.ie/features/911oneyearon/stories.php?ca=261&si=823151
I have a badly burned lady at the lobby of …they need an ambulance ASAP…One World Trade Center. [/FONT][FONT=arial,sans-serif]
(Port Authority Transcript WTC Ch. 15 EMS direct line, p. 5)[/FONT][FONT=arial,sans-serif]
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