60 minutes rewind on 9 11 dr benjamin lough 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 love's casualties were coming but they would arrive much later although nearly
3 000 people were killed at the world trade center seventy thousand 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
luff 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
the problem that came up was that our society began to look at the responders in terms of
their disease they became an issue in terms of their liability and my feeling was that that's
not who the responders were let's 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 it was almost
take 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 i worked at the makeshift morgue
we took in all the bodies
you know saying i'm sorry for your loss was very difficult because it almost got to be like
wrote you know stacy goodman a police detective is one of the voices dr luft recorded in what
is now called the world trade center oral history project at one point this senior
i think he was a retired fireman he comes in his hands are cupped and he's got bones in his hands
and he goes over to the medical examiner he puts the bones in front of him he goes this is my son
what do you say to that
no one could possibly know 911 the way these people do we asked several of the responders to
give us a sense of the hours of testimony that they've put into dr lop's project the debris
and the people rushing out at us i couldn't even make it to tower one i made it to the base of
tower too carol parkner was a cop on the scene before the towers fell this big brawly fbi guy
had his shield around his neck and i looked up at him and he's telling there's about six
officers there with me and he's like if you want to live you might as well leave now he said uh
we're all gonna die i'm like i can't we can't leave i'm not leaving and the officers that i
were there with were not leaving either and we continued to evacuate and do our jobs but
you know we were all like wow we're going to die you know parkner was trapped when the first tower
collapsed that's her on the left after she pulled herself out of the wreckage she's with a fellow
cop and a woman that they rescued i was one of the guys that was able to pull something out alive so
few were saved but police sergeant richard doyler helped pull out one rare survivor a fellow cop
named john mclaughlin they were given john was uh giving john mclaughlin morphine because the uh
the plan was that if we couldn't extricate him they were going to cut his legs off
john screamed in pain when we pulled him initially so we let him rest and
we simultaneously pulled again and we broke him free and
pulled them out
boy takes a nice deep breath
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 gastroesophageal reflux disease known as gerd and many have reactive
airways dysfunction syndrome that the patients just call rads when you're a physician and you see
patients you tend to reduce them to their symptoms and signs to medical conditions and that's how you
think of them 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
your story of what happened on 9 11. she became hysterical she got a cell phone call that her
trade center was hit with a plane with his own money a few donations and a small mostly
volunteer staff luft started his interviews so far he's recorded 137 when the building imploded down
it blew me out of the building and i was able to hold on to the doorway with my left arm the first
thing i found was an entire body burned into rebar they uh they put a line around our waist
i'm like well i'm going in this way i'm snaking around on my belly around and says there's no way
you can pull me out and the guy just looked at me it wasn't it wasn't to pull us out
yeah it was just to find us if we died where we expected to see two tall buildings we just saw
a skeleton the most powerful nation in the world how could this happen there's
no clearer rendition of what happened at 9 11 than are in these histories who are these people
so of course we have the firemen and the policemen and the ems workers and then we have the volunteer
firemen and then you have the iron workers and the construction workers and the laborers
on 9 11 all americans responded from all walks of life i was a senior in high school
realized that i have to go down there i don't know how i'm going to help i don't know what it can do
my whole family is cops i'm the 13th in my family to be a new york city police officer
i am a licensed massage therapist 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 worked for new extra highway department
i um you know road work construction stuff like that never trained for anything like this and
i learned quick though we spent a few hours with some of the responders at stony brook university
and as we listened we realized that for them today sunday isn't the 10th anniversary of
something that happened it's the 10th 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
scarring of the lungs that only gets worse the world trade center is still claiming lives
people have had their lives shortened people have lost their fathers
their mothers to cancers to lung diseases anything that you can imagine bloodborne diseases
people are still dying show of hands how many of you have been living
through medical problems as a result of the work that you did in those days
almost all of you bill give me a sense of what you've been working through health-wise i have
asthma i have nodules on both lungs sinusitis rhinitis bill fisher was a new york city cop
now retired i i never smoke i don't drink 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 something during the day this is bill fisher he worked at ground zero for four months
and like thousands of others he was covered in dust that contained carcinogens asbestos
and toxins too numerous to list ken george was there too he helped recover human remains ken
what what is your health experience been oh i got a list everybody's got a list it sounds like
it started with the 9 11 co-of i had which led me to have rads restricted airway disease
which means i can't get enough oxygen in a route like these people said the sinuses i have all that
so it's just snowballing out of control you know what i mean and who knows in five years
down the line if i'm gonna wind up with cancer you know i just want to make sure
my family's taken care of if anything happens you know i don't want them out in the street
any pain 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 yep tyree bacon was a senior court officer who
worked 10 blocks 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 10 minutes of everybody's lives 911
was a hell of a lot longer than 10 minutes long post traumatic stress is something that i have a
issue with spent a month after being 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 this is tyree bacon in the oral history
project remembering a woman who grabbed him by the shirt as one of the towers fell i told her i said
sweetheart don't worry i promise we're getting out of here i flat out live direct that we were
gonna die where we were um if i didn't have her i probably would have crawled up in a fetal position
and just waited to die when that responder went down to ground zero they were
experiencing traumatic events in rapid succession buildings falling girders falling tripping you
know people jumping out of buildings seeing tremendous amounts of carnage the fires the fires
now it's not occurring over a 10 second period of time 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 you know to actually see them jump and and pulverize just in front of you you know
that was just horrible there was a sound yeah that that made that was first i'm like i didn't
know what that sound was at first 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 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. in the three months that i was there we found very very few
victims found pieces but not bodies that was the first time i ever spoke of
my experiences at 9 11. i found it therapeutic how many years was it that you didn't talk about 9 11.
seven years why i didn't want to replay it i didn't want to you know i lived it i didn't want
to relive it i didn't think it was such a great idea because i think a lot of us buried that day
christine famaletti was a new york city cop now retired and to to really bring it up and hash it
up again and really discuss in depth was uh it was a little you know i was a little fearful of that
in the long run i i was glad i did it that's how i've gotten through my
ptsd is by talking about it and sometimes it's difficult sometimes it's not but it
it's helped me a great deal talking about it you know helps me sleep at night i think a lot
of folks at home would like to know after 10 years would you consider in terms of their mental health
would you consider a lot of these patients to be better i do believe that they are better
from the point of view of moving on with their lives and be having become much more adaptable
but i don't think they ever let leave it behind it's a constant part of their life 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 love's interviews are now a documentary and also a book called
we're not leaving the memorable quote from officer carol paulkner to that fbi agent who had urged her
to run the prophets will go to scholarships and job training for the responders and their
families john field was a demolition expert who helped move the wreckage these men and women to
the left and right of me behind me did the best of the best of what america offered 10 years ago
we can't change history and through their eyes they're telling america what they've 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
thank you absolutely they're not here nobody here is a hero we just did what everybody else did
the true heroes of people went into those buildings and they never made it out