Ground zero responders remember 9/11
On 9/11, Dr. Benjamin Luft prepared Stony Brook University Medical Center on Long Island for the massive number of casualties he expected to overwhelm the emergency room. But none came through the door that day, so few had survived.
As it turned out Dr. Luft's casualties were coming, but they would arrive much later. Although nearly 3,000 people were killed at the World Trade Center, 70,000 others responded to Ground Zero and worked for months amid toxic smoke and dust.
Dr. Luft helped start a clinic to treat the chronic illnesses and psychological trauma suffered by the 9/11 responders. Over time, Luft discovered something that he never expected - he began to hear their stories, honest, raw, irreplaceable stories. And almost two years ago, he began to record the definitive history of Ground Zero - remembering 9/11 in the words of the people who lived it.
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Eyewitness: Interviews with 9/11 responders
"The problem that came up was that our society began to look at the responders in terms of their disease," Dr. Luft told correspondent Scott Pelley. "They became an issue in terms of their liability. And my feeling was that, that's not who the responders were."
Dr. Luft said that he wanted to "find out who they are as human beings, what their motivation was, what values they had, what sacrifices they made, how they were able to renew themselves."
He told Pelley that it was like "taking a civics class as to what is important about being a citizen. What is important about being a human being? What is important to being an American?"
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Stacey Goodman, a suburban Suffolk County police detective, is one of the voices Luft recorded in what is now called the World Trade Center Oral History Project. Goodman worked at the makeshift morgue.
"We took in all the bodies. You know? Saying, 'I'm sorry for your loss' was very difficult, because that almost got to be like rote, you know?" Goodman said.
"At one point, this senior, I think, he was a retired fireman," Goodman continued, holding back tears. "He comes in. His hands are cupped. And he's got bones in his hands. And he goes up to the medical examiner and he puts the bones in front of him and he goes, 'This is my son.' What do you say to that?"
No one could possibly know 9/11 the way these responders do. "60 Minutes" asked several of the people who gave testimony to Dr. Luft's project to give a sense of what they went through.
Carol Paukner was a cop on the scene before the towers fell. She said that the debris and people rushing out made it difficult for her to get to Tower One, so she positioned herself at the base of Tower Two.
"This big, brawly FBI guy had his shield around his neck. And, you know, I looked up at him and he's telling, there was about six officers there with me, and he's like, 'If you want to live, you, you might as well leave now.' He said, 'We're all gonna die,'" Paukner recalled.
"And I'm like, 'I can't, we can't leave. I'm, I'm not leaving.' And the officers that I were there with, 'We're not leaving either.' And we continued to evacuate and do our jobs, but, you know, we were all like, 'Wow, we're gonna die,'" she said.
Paukner was trapped when the first tower collapsed, but she was able to pull herself out of the wreckage.
So few were saved, but Nassau County Long Island Emergency Services Unit police sergeant Richard Doerler helped pull out one, rare survivor - a fellow cop named John McLoughlin.
Doerler said that McLoughlin was given morphine because "the plan was that if we couldn't extricate him, they were gonna cut his legs off."
"John screamed in pain while we pulled him initially," Doerler said. "So, we let him rest. And, we simultaneously pulled again and we broke him free. And, pulled him out."
Benjamin Luft is a medical doctor who volunteered to help create a clinic for the 9/11 responders at Stony Brook University Medical Center, part of the State University of New York.
More than 6,000 responders enrolled in his World Trade Center Health Program. One study shows that nearly a third of those who worked at Ground Zero have asthma, 42 percent suffer with sinusitis, nearly 40 percent have gastro esophageal reflux disease, known as GERD, and many have reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, that patients simply call "RADS."
Luft listened to their stories in the examining room for eight years when he realized that his patients were the authors of one of the most dramatic chapters of American history.
With his own money, a few donations and a small, mostly volunteer staff, Luft started the interview process - so far he has recorded 137 testimonies.
Produced by Rebecca Peterson
Here are a few of the harrowing memories Luft has captured:
"When the building imploded down it blew me out of the building, and I was able to hold onto the doorway with my left arm," former police officer Paukner said.
"The first thing I found was an entire body, burned into rebar," said former NYPD police officer Christine Famiglietti.
Extra: Realizing the day's magnitude
"They ah, they put a line around our waist," recalled former NYPD Emergency Services Unit officer William "Bill" Fischer. "It wasn't to pull us out, it was just to find us if we died."
"Where we expected to see two tall buildings, we just saw a skeleton," said volunteer firefighter Jim Vaz. "The most powerful nation in the world. How could this happen?"
Dr. Luft told Pelley that he does not think that there is a clearer rendition of what happened at Ground Zero on 9/11 than the histories he has captured.
"Who are these people?" Pelley asked.
Firefighters, police officers, EMS workers, volunteers, ironworkers, construction workers, laborers, Luft replied. "On 9/11 all Americans responded, from all walks of life," he said.
Alex Nikulin was a 16-year-old senior at a high school in the Bronx.
"I realized I had to go down there," said Nikulin. "I don't know how I'm going to help, I don't know what I can do."
"My whole family is cops," said William "Bill" Fischer. "I'm the thirteenth in my family bein' a New York City police officer."
"I am a licensed massage therapist," said Terese Wunderlich. "I just felt like I had to be down there helping these people, knowing what I do for a living can help these people."
"I work for NYC highway department," said Kenneth George. "I, you know, roadwork, construction, stuff like that. I never trained for anything like this. And, I learned quick though."
"60 Minutes" spent a few hours with some of the responders at Stony Brook University. As their stories unfolded, it became evident that - for them - September 11, 2011 isn't the tenth anniversary of something that happened, it's the tenth year of something that never ends. In a sense, it's always 9/11.
John Gallagher is a former New York City fire captain suffering with pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lungs that progressively gets worse.
"The World Trade Center is still claiming lives," said Gallagher. "People have had their lives shortened. People have lost their fathers, their, their mothers to cancers, to lung diseases, anything that you can imagine, blood-borne diseases. People are still dying."
Of the eleven individuals interviewed by Pelley, only one did not raise their hand when asked if they had a medical condition as a result of the work they did during 9/11.
Pelley asked Bill Fischer to give him a sense of what he has been going through, health-wise.
"I have asthma," Fischer said. "I have nodules on both lungs, sinusitis, rhinitis."
Fischer is now retired from the NYPD and says that his medical conditions are not a result of an unhealthy lifestyle.
"I never smoked, I don't drink," Fischer said. "I go to the gym as often as I can and it's not as much as I would like to anymore. I literally have a bucket of about 20 medicines, a plastic bucket that I have to take somethin' durin' the day."
Fischer worked at Ground Zero for four months. In a photograph, he - like thousands of others - can be seen covered in dust that contained carcinogens, asbestos and toxins too numerous to list.
Kenneth George was there too. He helped recover human remains.
"What has your health experience been?" Pelley asked.
"Oh, I got a list," George said.
"Everybody's got a list, it sounds like," Pelley said.
"It started with the 9/11 cough I had, which led me to have RADS, restricted airway disease [sic], which means I can't get enough oxygen in or out. Like these people said, the sinuses, I have all that," George said.
"So it's just started snowballing outta control. You know what I mean? And who knows if five years down the line if I'm going to wind up with cancer, you know. I just want to make sure I'm, my family's taken care of, if anything happens. You know? I just don't want them to be out on the street," he continued.
Paying their medical bills has been a struggle. Funding for the World Trade Center Health Program was never certain until this year when Congress guaranteed coverage. But that guarantee lasts only the next five years - the illnesses and the mental trauma are likely to last a lifetime.
"One thing nobody's mentioned, but we all have it, it's like luggage and we have it forever, is the post-traumatic stress," said Tyree Bacon.
"Yep," Carol Paukner agreed.
Tyree Bacon was a senior court officer who worked ten blocks away from the World Trade Center. He reached the towers before they collapsed.
"Those of us who wear uniforms make a living out of the worst ten minutes of everybody's lives. 9/11 was a hell of a lot longer than ten minutes long," Bacon said.
"Post traumatic stress is somethin' that I have a issue with. Spent a month after bein' caught in the collapse, waking up on the floor, trying to feel my, my way out of my own bedroom. That went on for over a month," he said.
In Luft's oral history project, Bacon remembered a woman who grabbed him by the shirt as one of the towers fell.
"And I told her, I said, "Sweetheart, don't worry, I promise we're gettin' outta here," Bacon said. "I flat out lied to her. I thought we were gonna die where we were. Um, if I didn't have her, I probably would've curled up in a fetal position and just waited to die."
Dr. Luft told Pelley that responders at Ground Zero experienced traumatic events in rapid succession; including buildings falling, girders falling, tripping, people jumping out of buildings, tremendous amounts of carnage and fires.
"Now it's not occurring over a ten-second period of time," Luft explained. "It's occurring over weeks and months. And the same person is experiencing it over and over and over again."
"The jumpers, I think, were the worst," Paukner said. "To actually see them jump and, and pulverize just in front of you, you know? That was just horrible."
"There was a sound," Pelley said.
"I didn't know what that sound was at first," Paukner said. "And then you go to see what that sound was and you realize that it was a person that had just jumped. If it's that bad up there, that you have to jump, you know? A lot we couldn't see."
Luft told Pelley about that one of the outcomes of the oral history project.
"Almost invariably people come to us afterwards and say, 'You know, Doc, this is the first time that I've been able to talk about this. This is the first time that I can tell others what really happened on 9/11.'" Luft said.
In the three months John Gallagher worked at Ground Zero, he recalls not finding bodies, but pieces of bodies.
He told Pelley that he never spoke about his experiences at 9/11 until he participated in Luft's oral history project. Gallagher found the process to be therapeutic.
"How many years was it that you didn't talk about 9/11," Pelley asked.
"Seven years," Gallagher said.
"Why?" Pelley asked.
"I didn't want to replay it and I didn't want to, you know, I lived it. I didn't want to relive it," Gallagher said.
At first, Christine Famiglietti, a retired New York City police officer, had reservations about Luft's project.
"I didn't think it was a such a great idea because I think a lot of us buried that day," Famiglietti said.
She told Pelley she was fearful of discussing her memories in depth but, ultimately, was glad she did it.
"That's how I've gotten through my PTSD," Tyree Bacon said. "And sometimes it's difficult, sometimes it's not, but it's helped me a great deal talking about it, you know? Helps me sleep at night."
Pelley asked Dr. Luft if he considered his patients' mental health to have improved over 10 years.
Luft believes that it has because, for the most part, the responders he treats have moved on and become more adaptable. But, Luft says, his patients have not entirely left their memories behind.
"It's a constant part of their life," Luft said. "I think that that's true for any great event that occurs, but especially true for this event which was etched into their consciousness."
Dr Luft's interviews are now a documentary and also a book called "We're Not Leaving" - the memorable quote from former police officer Carol Paukner to the FBI agent who had urged her to run. The profits will go to scholarships and job training for the responders and their families.
"These men and women to the left and right of me and behind me, they're the best of the best of what America offered ten years ago," said John Feal, a demolition expert who helped move the wreckage at Ground Zero.
"We can't change history," Feal added. "And through their eyes, they're tellin' America what they seen, what they did and what they're going through 10 years later. And, and that is priceless."
Now the Library of Congress is looking into adding the interviews to its permanent collection - to be kept for all time so that generations can hear the unedited, unvarnished reality as experienced by the people who were there.
"One thing I want to say, the real heroes out of this stuff are dead," said Bill Fischer.
"Thank you, absolutely," Carol Paukner said.
"Absolutely," Christine Famiglietti said.
"They're not here. Nobody here is, is a hero," Fischer continued. "We just did what everybody else did. The, the true heroes are people who went into those buildings and they never made it out."