Chief Joseph Pfeifer/Pfeiffer and Deputy Chief Peter Hayden: Big Twitter or SharedCopy This at Your Peril!

In the year following the September 11^th attacks on the World Trade Center, an attempt was made to analyze why the New York City Fire Department suffered such a grievous loss of life that day---343 uniformed personal dead. But determining if operational dereliction was at fault, whether of communications, or of command and control, was impossible under the political and emotional circumstances that prevailed in the aftermath.

A case in point: when the Port Authority released a 78-minute recording of firemen’s radio traffic that had been boosted by an electronic device in the complex called a repeater, it was evidence which conflicted directly with the conclusion in the officially sanctioned study by McKinsey & Company that blamed the repeater’s failure for missed and lost communications---so the parties simply agreed to disagree. The study’s author sided with the fire chiefs in the North Tower “who had tested the system and believed it was not operating,” while the audio tape proves fire chiefs in the South Tower had no problem working with the system---with one fire chief, Orio Palmer, being in both towers, and apparently, being of a different mind in each.

But I think the key to understanding the discrepancy can be found in a November 2, 2002, New York Times article about the issue, which tells us

“...the tape, which recorded transmissions as they were passed through the repeater […] contains the only permanently preserved voices of firefighters from the tower stairwells.”

I submit, the chiefs in the north tower purposefully chose not to utilize this equipment---both to avoid producing just such a permanent record of their work inside, but more importantly, to serve as a convenient scapegoat on which to blame the dramatic loss of life that day. For I further submit, the inexplicable volume of deaths we saw in the north tower was a necessary part that served a larger purpose, and it was calculated to that effect. Moreover, in my opinion, it is quite likely that many of the 343 deaths that day, especially in the north tower, were faked to boot, with the victims rendered into witness-protection-type programs.

Even without such tapes, other records do exist---evidence which reveals hidden behind the “fog of war” of a supposed surprise attack of an unprecedented nature, with its resulting Münchausen syndrome by proxy halo effect---are the fire chief’s true intentions in the north tower that morning: this was a fraudulent, faked, faux firefighting response to a false flag attack that only meant to approximate the real deal. Made up of inconsistencies, anomalies and narrative conflicts, they now add up to a smoking gun.

My thesis isn't as shocking as it might seem at first glance. Reading between the lines, I think the authors, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, get it right in their Times article, 9/11 Tape Raises Added Questions on Radio Failures, which closes with the sort of disconnect from ordinary reality that's really at stake here:

Despite a public position that the repeater did not work, the city's top officials now want to replicate the trade center's system in high rises all over the city. Indeed, two weeks ago, Mr. Scoppetta sent a letter to the Port Authority saying that the mayor wanted the technical plans for the trade center's repeater system.

When I say the chiefs in the north tower, I specifically speak of Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer and Deputy Chief Peter Hayden of Division 1; along with Hayden's aide, firefighter Christian Waugh of Ladder Co. 5 (Chief Pfeifer's aide, Ed Fahey, was on his first day of a new job, and is thus absolved of responsibility.) These men, and others, were the operative level of a major component in the 9/11 conspiracy. There may be other, lessor, components of faked death and/or real, premeditated, sacrificial death within the department that day---in the south tower, and the Marriott hotel and elsewhere, but a lion's share was scripted here.

It was such "selfless" casualties as those of the New York City Firefighters, which meant to galvanize America's fighting forces to seek revenge, and seek revenge we did indeed. Not only were our mercenary wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq illegal and immoral, they were especially vicious and punitive assaults on two of the poorest and most war ravaged nations on the planet, and the overlap between the fire department and the Marine Corp is pronounced.

My hypothesis has a likely breakdown of about 200 faked "strategic" deaths---rendering the "victims" into alternate identities elsewhere---primarily drawn from the devastated elite rescue units and the departmental upper echelons, which would leave 143 mostly "grunt" deaths as the tactical reality on the ground. Scripted elements with public relations value, such as the deaths of Father Mychal Judge, and Firefighter Danny Suhr, were carried out as specific acts---indeed, Father Judge was murdered in the north tower lobby by these very men.

That no records were to be kept of the members who entered the north tower can be demonstrated beyond the existence of an empty repeater tape, which was useful in establishing an alibi at least:

"On Sept. 11, it did not seem to be working well to Battalion Chiefs Joseph Pfeifer and Orio Palmer, two of the first chiefs to respond. They tested their radios but could not hear each other, an effort that was recorded by the repeater tape."
9/11 Tape Raises Added Questions on Radio Failures, The New York Times, November 9, 2002, By Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn

In his World Trade Center Task Force interview, Chief Joseph Pfeifer plays dumb and disingenuous:

A: But right before the south tower collapsed, I noticed a lot of people just left the lobby, and I heard we had a crew of all different people, high-level people in government, everybody was gone, almost like they had information that we didn't have. Some of them were moved across the street to the command post.
Q. Who were you with at this time?
A. You name them, they were there.
Q. With you?
A. Yes, in the lobby. They were moving the command post. So, I guess, after that companies were coming in and we were listing them on the command board so we had an account of everybody. Unfortunately, the command board is not around any longer.

By implication, Pfeifer is saying the assignment records were destroyed in the collapse, but who is to blame for that? In the revealing transcript of Firefighter Michael Beehler, from Ladder Company 110, he says

"We had gotten the order to evacuate the building. Lieutenant Mera told us all to stay together and as we started making our way down, we, like I said, we piggybacked floors with another truck company, forcing each door on the way down. Like they took the odd floors, we took the even floors, to make sure there was nobody on that floor and make sure that everybody heard the evacuation order. We got down to the 9th floor and from there down it was very congested. It felt like we waited on each landing for about 30 seconds to a minute, because the staircases were packed with members of the Fire Department that were evacuating. So you did get to 9, then you got down to 8-1/2. Felt like you waited another 30 seconds to a minute. Got down to 8 and continued to go down.

"When we got down to the lobby I just remember seeing all the windows in the north tower on the lobby floor blown out and there was like dust and debris everywhere. As we were walking out, we walked out the same place where we came in, and I remember seeing the board there by itself with nobody there. There was a guy actually standing outside the building telling us if it was safe or not to come out because he said there were jumpers coming down at that time. He said come on, come on, go."

Since Beehler is speaking of a time just moments before the north tower collapsed, apparently Pfeifer had abandoned the lobby command post with the command board just sitting there. Since he himself had issued the order to all personal to evacuate the building after the collapse of the south tower, he must have had a reasonable expectation the north tower would collapse too, and that the only record of assignments in the building would be destroyed in the process.

This is a failure of command and control, but not of the membership---this one is a failure of the chief. He is provided with aides for just these sorts of purposes, but it is the chief's job responsibility to keep records safe. Likewise, with the command post established in the ramp of a parking garage outside on West Street, there was no reason that debris would have "destroyed" the command boards. Their recovery was essential, tantamount to finding the black boxes from the airplanes, or the Port Authority finding the tapes in the ruins of the Trade Center. But that could be problematic:

Q. Did they give you a specific task? In other words, when you came in, did they tell you to go to the 30th floor or the 50th floor?
A. Yes, there was a chief, I guess it was at the staging area. There was basically just one chief standing there saying, "All right, you guys make your way up to the north tower." I don't know-
Q. He didn't tell you to go to the 30th floor or the 50th floor?
A. No. He just said make your way up to the north tower. That was it. We got our rollups and gear and everything else and that's it. That's about it, then.
Barry, Albert Engine 65 Firefighter

"We went into the tower, we were in the lobby a couple minutes. There was only one chief there. We really had no direction what to do. Captain Burke decided we would either go up on our own or wait for someone. We went up, started our way up."
Byrne, Robert Firefighter Engine Company 24

That a decision was made early on to not attempt to fight the fires is evident---one justification being the many rescues that were being necessitated.

"We made a conscious decision early on that we weren't going to try and put the fire out, for a number of reasons. One, there was too much volume of fire. Second, the building systems were probably not functional. We had too many distress calls coming in. We didn't think the standpipe system was even going to be intact up there. We had to forgo the whole idea of trying to put any fire suppression efforts in there. This was strictly a search and rescue operation. Hayden Firehouse.com Interview

"I specifically remember telling Commissioner Von Essen that we were not attempting to extinguish this fire. It's just strictly a search and rescue operation. We were not trying to put this fire out. We had thousands of people coming down the stairs, and that was our focus, to answer as many distress calls as we could and complete whatever searches we could. That was the focus of our strategy there at the time." Deputy Chief Hayden WTC Task Force Interview Transcript

So if they weren't going to put out any fires, why did Pfeifer instruct at least half the men to go up carrying 30lbs of hose?

Firehouse: Did you formulate any type of plan?
Pfeifer: The game plan was to pair up the engines and to only take half the amount of hose. This way we could switch back and forth. And the trucks to get me some information. Pfeifer Firehouse.com Interview

Q. You were the first highest ranking officer on the scene?
A. Correct. Shortly after I was there, the division came in. They started out the same time we were rolling. So they were there very quickly, and I briefed Chief Hayden on what I knew at the time, which was an approximate floor and we believe we had people trapped. Then we kind of went through a high-rise operation to try and get people up there. We paired the engines. I know I told engines, half the group to take hose, the other half not to, at least early on, and started their way up. Pfeifer WTC Task Force

Since none of his men made it anywhere near to where the real rescue need was---the seriously injured civilians above the 80th floor---in all recorded cases getting, at most, only about half way up there---wasn't his instruction to carry hose an additional, unnecessary burden, which further prevented the firemen from rendering proper assistance?

"I was in communications with members of Engine 6. They were on the 27th floor, proceeding upward. I heard communications from a squad company that informed them that it was an hour's climb to 30." Butler, Michael Assistant Chief Bureau of Fire Prevention

Since the entire time span from the first plane crash into the north tower until the north tower collapsed was only 104 minutes, isn't the maximum firemen could have reached in that time about the 45th floor?

Might not many of the department members have gone down the stairs instead of up?

Firehouse: Somebody said that that stairwell went right up from the lowest lobby. Is that correct?
Hayden: Right. Hayden Firehouse.com Interview

Why didn't they take the elevator? Why didn't Pfeifer know that some elevators were still operating safely in the north tower---just accessed from the mezzanine? I found three such testimonies of firemen before I had even made it out of B's in the index.

"We were only there [lobby of the north tower] for maybe about 2 minutes when Lieutenant Mera came over. He said come on, we are going up to the 21 floor. There are reports of people trapped there."

"He said he thought there was a bank of elevators that were working. So we went up to the mezzanine, I believe it was. We went up the escalator to the mezzanine. There was a bank of elevators there that were still in service, so we took that up to, I believe the 15 or 16th floor. We got up and then we walked up to the 23 floor from there in the B staircase…” Beehler, Michael Firefighter Ladder company 110

“We went with I believe it was Chief Picciotto. We went up to the mezzanine and we took an elevator. The Chief said that these elevators were all right. We took an elevator, which I believe goes up to eight. We got off at eight and proceeded to walk up to 23. We stopped on 23 and then we went up to 25. Then we made our way back. So we were either on 23 or 21, I don’t know, I don’t remember that, I think it was 23. The Lieutenant gave us instructions to make a thorough search, pop all the doors, make sure everybody is out of the building.” Brodbeck, Michael Firefighter Engine Company 210

"We decided to take an elevator up. 13 Truck took us up. I'm assuming it was a low riser. It was one of the only elevators that were clear, and it looked like it was working. 13 took us up to -- first they took a couple guys from my company up. Byrne, Robert Firefighter Engine Company 24

Things start to get much worse at this point. The next failing of Pfeifer & Company should have become legendary, but for some reason, it's not known at all.

A shocking series of articles published in USA Today at the one-year anniversary mark of 9/11, concern themselves with the elevators in both of the towers, and we learn some horrible details about an excruciating reality from that day:

USA TODAY estimates that at least 200 people died inside World Trade Center elevators, the biggest elevator catastrophe in history.

USA TODAY The express elevators in the north tower had eight survivors in two elevators. In the other eight express elevators, nobody is known to have lived.

USA TODAY On Sept. 11, people fought their own way out of elevators or they died.

USA TODAY could not locate any professional rescues of people stuck in elevators. The Fire Department of New York and the Port Authority also could not cite successful rescues. Poor communications among rescue workers meant elevators were ignored even after trapped passengers used intercoms to report their locations, sometimes only a few feet from firefighters. Most passengers could not save themselves: Safety devices designed to prevent people from falling down shafts locked people inside elevators the moment the elevators malfunctioned.USA TODAY

How can this possibly be? Hundreds of firefighters milling about and not one elevator rescue? Did these firemen make no attempt at rescuing civilians trapped mere feet away from them in the lobby? What does this mean? Has nobody cross-referenced these articles and transcripts and highlighted the disparity in the narratives before?

Lies! Damn lies! They answered ZERO distress calls!

"We discussed with Chief Downey the operations, and that continued for a while. We were making a concerted effort to get the elevators down and answering all the distress calls. We were working with the engineers. We were working the intercom in the lobby between the elevators, trying to get an idea what floors they were on. The engineers told us we have people on this floor, that floor, 66th floor, 71st floor, stuck in the elevators. We answered as many of the distress calls as we could."
Deputy Chief Hayden WTC Task Force Interview Transcript

In the north tower

Seven passengers trapped for 45 minutes pried open an elevator stopped in the lobby. They used force to overcome pressure from a motor pushing the doors shut.

Five passengers trapped in an elevator stuck between floors used a window washer's squeegee to cut through an elevator shaft made of three layers of drywall. They then kicked a hole through a tile wall into a 50th floor bathroom to escape.

Two Port Authority employees stuck in an elevator on the 71st floor were rescued by colleagues who passed wire cutters through a crack in the elevator doors. One of the trapped men then cut a cable holding the doors shut.

A man trapped alone in an elevator at the ground floor lobby was suddenly able to slide the doors open five minutes before the building fell. The south tower's earlier collapse had cut power to the motor that had kept the doors closed. USA Today

The main article in the USA Today series, Elevators were disaster within disaster, By Dennis Cauchon and Martha T. Moore, even uses a photograph of Chief Pfeifer to illustrate the piece. Can this be tongue in cheek or projectile vomiting?

Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer works at a command post in the north tower lobby, in this photo from the CBS documentary 9/11. The elevators in the background were not checked.

None of this makes any sense looked at rationally. Pfeifer and Hayden, along with Kevin Culley, a fire department Captain working in the Office of Emergency Management, refer extensively to the need to rescue passengers trapped in the elevators. Why did it not happen?

Culley was going to work in the OEM office on 23rd floor at 7 World Trade Center on 9/11.

"From the lobby we saw debris falling from above. We could not actually see the impact due to the view. When the debris stopped falling, I left the third-floor lobby, ran out onto the street, looked up, saw fire showing out of two, three floors, on two sides of the building, the north face and the east face of the building. There was no sign that it was a plane, at least not to me."

"...what I'm supposed to do is liaison to any agencies other than Fire with the incident commander. So at that scene you had Port Authority, you had some other federal agencies, FBI is one that I recall, and you also had your building -- the World Trade Center Fire Safety Director and his staff,"

"A:The only report that I remember was that somebody I believe in the FBI had a telephone conversation with somebody on the 51st floor reporting that there's jet fuel on that floor. It wasn't clear to us exactly what floor the impact was on, but I knew it was higher than that."
A: "We were still working on trying to find maybe there would be freight elevators or any kind of elevator that's working. Are all of the elevators out due to the incident or are some just maintenance problems that we may be able to get moving? That wasn't happening for us."
"Q. What were you seeing in the lobby as you got there?
A. In the lobby, all the usual people, the 1st Division, 1st Battalion, reporting in units, I can't remember specifically, the Fire Safety Director, who I recognized, FBI agents, people on the staff, building staff, particularly people that were involved with helping us read the elevator panels."
"There were no elevators in operation. What made it more of a problem is that all those elevators were shut down and there were people in them. So we were actually -- once I had staff that could operate the panel, they could speak to each individual elevator, ask how many people are in the elevator, what floor they were on, and if there's anyone injured, and I was passing that information on to the incident commander.
"Q. Can you describe what you visually were seeing around, like outside or on the concourse?
A. On the concourse? I don't remember on the concourse. In the lobby? As I said, the usual people that would show up. I saw at least three chaplains there."
"Also, I'd note that, once I arrived at the fire command station, I was told by someone who had actually witnessed the plane hitting it that it was indeed a plane. Up until that point, I thought it was a bomb."
"Q. Were there any communications at that point; radios still working?
"A. The radio that I carry is an 800 megahertz connected to the OEM channels. I was transmitting and receiving. All the Fire Department radios that I was aware of were transmitting, you know, you could hear all the conversations going on."
"It was also clear then that there wasn't any control of that building, no elevators, communications above. Except for that one conversation on the 51st floor, as far as I know, there were no other conversations. That doesn't mean I knew everything. We did have conversations with people stuck on elevators and that was it."
"Q. The first building came down. What was the operation line? What was going on?
"A. Nothing really had changed. Like I said, all the elevators were still stuck. I think there were elevators that were on the first floor, the doors closed. Not that I saw it. I looked at the panel and realized that some of these stuck elevators are right here on the lobby floor and people were assigned to go take care of that. Were in a hallway for a while and then ducked into some stairs. My belief is that we actually ran out of the building enclosed. The stairwell we were in was probably inside of 6 World Trade."
Captain John "Kevin" Culley, in the Office of Emergency Management

Chief Pfeifer appears to be convinced that the elevators were inoperable

I went into the lobby. There were people injured. I went into the lobby and tried to gather information, where the plane hit, what floor, and the best we could get is somewhere around 80. As the units were coming in, we checked for the elevators to see if we had any elevator service. There wasn't any. Pfeifer, Joseph

Then what we did was I started to send people up to perform a rescue because we knew there were people trapped above the fire and <>we were getting reports in the lobby people were trapped in the elevators and people were trapped, and I believe we started sending units up. Pfeifer, Joseph April 2002 Firehouse Magazine, Interview with Chief Pfeifer, Battalion 1

Chief Joseph Pfeifer Interview, April 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Firehouse: On average, how many times would you go to the Trade Center in a week or a month?
Pfeifer: It’s a complex of buildings, so maybe about 15, 17 times a month.

Firehouse: How many years have you worked down here?
Pfeifer: Five.

Firehouse: What did they have at that command center that’s in the corner? Do you have fire alarms for the building?
Pfeifer: Yes, the fire alarm panel. They have floor diagrams and next to it is the elevator status. And you had the all-star crew. You had me and you had Hayden. You had people in that new era, Orio Palmer, I mean Donald Burns. If you had to pick the all-star crew, you had them. Chief Pfeifer

Firehouse: When you walked in, did somebody give you a rundown?
Pfeifer: We walked in. There was glass, all broken, and there were a number of people burnt in the lobby. I went over to command post and they didn’t have exact information. They were estimating from calls somewhere around 78. But that was just speculation. The elevators were out for the most part. One opened up at one point and let people out. I don’t know how that worked, but the elevators were out. I sent companies to double-check that.

Firehouse: You sent companies to check the elevators. Do they come back and tell you that it was negative?
Pfeifer: Yes, they said there were no elevators working. That was also confirmed by the control panels.

Firehouse: Besides all this rush of companies coming in, there are other people there talking to you, giving you other information. Was there anything else specific that they were giving you?
Pfeifer: People trapped in the elevators, a lot of people trapped. Chief Pfeifer

Firehouse: Under normal circumstances, if the fire alarm went off, shouldn’t those elevators drop down to the lobby?
Pfeifer: Depending on what was activated, so it’s a complicated question to answer.

Firehouse: If the smoke detector goes off on the 102nd floor, they’re not going to bring the elevators down from 17?
Pfeifer: No, and then you have sky lobbies. You had a sky lobby on the 78th floor.

Firehouse: There were a lot of people trapped in the elevators?
Pfeifer: Right.

Firehouse: I know there were jumpers coming down. Were all of those windows broken?
Pfeifer: I don’t know if all the windows, but a substantial amount were. And then what we heard was the jumpers actually hitting the canopy, which was where the battalion car was parked. A number of times, I had to send my aide out to the car to get a radio or turn on the repeater radio. The tracer has a repeater radio which operates on Channel 7 on our handie-talkies and we attempted to use that. I attempted to use that with Chief Palmer. We tried to communicate to each other, since we were very familiar with the system and that failed. It did not work. Chief Pfeifer

Firehouse: Were you monitoring your radio? Could you hear a lot?
Pfeifer: With any high-rise, you get some communications and you miss some. There were messages, urgent messages of firefighters having chest pains as they went up, but there wasn’t a lot of need for handie-talkie communication because there wasn’t any information to be passed either way. A number of times, we tried to contact people and we had difficulty. Then other times there was no problem, which was the typical high-rise.

Firehouse: Eventually, did you get any reports from upstairs? Do you recall any of the highest reports where you got somebody was upstairs?
Pfeifer: I know talking to people after, they were up around 40. Some of them might have gotten a little farther, but generally around there. One of the things that really should be mentioned is that very early on, Mike Hurley, the fire safety director, asked about evacuating the other tower. I mentioned that to Chief Hayden and we both agreed that it should be evacuated. This is a matter of a couple of seconds. We told them to evacuate the tower and that was very early on, which proved to save a lot of people and that was way before the second plane hit. Chief Pfeifer

Were you receiving any other information? How about the building people, was there any other information that they were passing on at this time, anything else that was important?
Pfeifer: Just basically people trapped in the elevators. They were trying to call. At different points, some of that service came back on and they were able to contact the elevators.
Firehouse: What happened then?
Pfeifer: There was a report of a third plane, but that really wasn’t told too well to us and I tried to confirm that and I couldn’t get anybody to confirm it. That’s when Chief Callan called people down. I was involved in a different part of the operation. And I’m trying to get a hold of the helicopters and that wasn’t working too well because I couldn’t get an outside line or couldn’t get through. Chief Pfeifer April 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Deputy Chief Peter Hayden also appears convinced that no elevators were working that day.

"We found out there weren't any elevators working. Not too long afterwards, we found out we had no communications from the building either. The repeater system wasn't working. We tried to get that going. We were really at a complete disadvantage. We had no elevator. We had no communication systems." Deputy Chief Peter Hayden April 2002 Firehouse Magazine

"We had Port Authority engineers. We're working all the time with the Port Authority trying to get, number one, some communications going and also to see if we can get the elevators up and running. One of the engineers was actually going through the elevator intercom system contacting each of the elevators---there were 99 elevators in each of these buildings---and going through each elevator and through the intercom system attempting to contact each car, to see if anybody was in the car. And if they could tell us what floor they were on, we would send somebody up there to get them out of the cars. There were a number of cars where people were reported trapped. The highest one I remember was the 71st floor. I sent a company to the 71st floor. We had reports of people in wheelchairs unable to get off the floors they were on because the elevators weren't working, so we gave specific assignments for those type of distress calls. We had one report, I think it was around the 40th floor, that as many as 30 people on one floor were severely burned and in need of assistance. So we were at a complete disadvantage." Deputy Chief Peter Hayden April 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Self Dispatching Units and Members

"I really didn't get involved with that because early on we realized that a number of the companies were coming in and were not reporting to any staging area we established. So we were losing some control of the companies coming in. There was also some communication problems later on with companies coming in, units responding to the second alarm after the other plane hit. They weren't sure which was World Trade Center One and World Trade Center Two. So that became confusing. Of course off-duty members were coming in, and they were reporting directly upstairs. So at one point in time -- I want to say that Chief McGovern was still in the lobby -- we had to account for everybody that was going upstairs. It became a critical issue." Deputy Chief Hayden WTC Task Force Interview Transcript

The Murder of Father Mychal Judge

"We stumbled upon Judge. He had no pulse. One of the Chiefs just said we're not going to leave him here. We just picked him up and went up the stairs we came down. I can't tell you how we got outside. It was still dark. We ended up in front of-- we ended up on the west face of 6 World Trade Center, which happens to be up on a pedestrian walkway which is like three stories up. We had no way to get down. So we were still carrying the chaplain. We come around on the Vesey side of this pedestrian walkway. You really couldn't see more than about 60 feet in front of you at best. So I sort of ran ahead of the group to see if we could get over any obstructions, and if it became a dead end, we were going to have to turn around. So that's what I was doing."
"We got to the end of 6 World Trade, there's a gap between 6 and 5. We really didn't know what had happened. We heard all this noise, but we didn't know what actually happened. There was a lot of debris out there. It was unclear. I looked to where 2 World Trade -- the south tower was. You really couldn't see through it. I figured it was a dangerous area. We were going to have to run this gap between 6 and 5. It didn't seem like anything was happening. We took Judge's body in a chair and we ran across that gap. We went down the escalator stairs right there and that gets us down onto the street. Now we can get away from the building."
"A. We get to the corner of Vesey and Church. We turn over Judge's body to some EMTs. I ran into two federal officers, I always think they're FBI, but there's a lot of federal badges, and they said they were going to be setting up -- or somebody had notice that there was going to be a command center set up on either Park Place or Murray, one of those streets just north of the area, and that's where I would normally be assigned."
"Q. So with the secondary collapse, the only persons with you were FBI agents? Were there any Fire Chiefs?
"A. No. I was with a group. When we carried Judge's body out, I was with the 1st Division, a couple of Port Authority cops, one of the aides, one of the firemen. I couldn't tell you who else. I remember another OEM fellow who I had met on the way down.
"Q. Is he a firefighter? Is he Fire Department personnel?
"A. He was an EMT that works in OEM

We are asked to believe that the members of these elite rescue and specialist units went into the north tower and ascended beyond the reach of radios delivering evacuation notices; that as a group they would be willing to remain incommunicado as they traveled above the highest floors achieved by any other regular companies---those who were first to arrive at the disaster and had the most time to climb the stairs; that these men would ignore the trauma of the south tower's collapse, remaining oblivious to the changed realities on the ground and in the air; would in fact lose their lives without effecting a single rescue, or saving any building occupants, like anyone from an elevator, for instance.

RESCUE COMPANIES

Rescue 1
Captain Terence Hatton F
Lieutenant Dennis Mojica F
Joseph Angelini F
Gary Geidel M
William Henry F
Kenneth Marino M
Michael Montesi F
Gerard Nevins F
Patrick O'Keefe F
Brian Sweeney F
David Weiss M

Rescue 2
Daniel Libretti F
William Lake F
Peter Martin F
John Napolitano M
Kevin O'Rourke F
Lincoln Quappe F
Edward Rall F

Rescue 3
Christopher Blackwell M
Thomas Foley F
Thomas Gambino, Jr. F
Raymond Meisenheimer M
Donald Regan M
Gerard Schrang F
Joseph Spor M

Rescue 4
Captain Brian Hickey F
Lieutenant Kevin Dowdell F
Peter Brennan M
Terrence Farrell F
William Mahoney F
Peter Nelson F
Durrell Pearsall F

Rescue 5
Captain Louis Modafferi M
Lieutenant Harvey Harrell M
John Bergin M
Carl Bini M
Michael Fiore M
Andre Fletcher M
Douglas Miller M
Jeffery Palazzo M
Nicholas Rossomando M
Allan Tarasiewicz F

SQUAD COMPANIES

Squad 1
Captain James Amato F
Lieutenant Edward D'Atri M
Lieutenant Michael Esposito F
Brian Bilcher F
Gary Box M
Thomas Butler F
Peter Carroll F
Robert Cordice M
David Fontana F
Matthew Garvey F
Stephen Siller M

Squad 18
Lieutenant William McGinn F
Eric Allen F
Andrew Fredericks F
David Halderman F
Timothy Haskell F
Manuel Mojica F
Lawrence Virgilio F

Squad 41
Lieutenant Michael Healey M
Thomas Cullen III M
Robert Hamilton F
Michael Lyons M
Gregory Sikorsky F
Richard Vanhine F

Squad 252
Tarel Coleman M
Thomas Kuveikis M
Peter Langone M
Patrick Lyons M
Kevin Prior F

Squad 288
Lieutenant Ronald Kerwin F
Ronnie Gies F
Joseph Hunter M
Jonathan Ielpi F
Adam Rand F
Timothy Welty M

Tactical Support Unit 1
Joseph Mascali F

Haz-Mat 1
Battalion Chief John Fanning M
Lieutenant John Crisci F
Dennis Carey F
Martin Demeo F
Thomas Gardner M
John Giordano F
Jonathan Hohmann M
Dennis Scauso M
Kevin Smith M

Waters Patrick Captain FDNY Special Op. Found
Stackpole Timothy Captain FDNY Division 11 Found
Simpson Jeff Firefighter Other Other Found
Russo Michael, Lieutenant FDNY Special Op.Missing
Roma Keith Fire Patrol Other Found
Lovero Joseph Firefighter Other Other Missing
Bucca Ronald FM FDNY Fire Marshal Found
Kasper Charles Battalion Chief FDNY Battalion Soc Missing
Higgins Timothy Lieutenant FDNY Special Op. Found
Ganci Jr. Peter Chief of Department FDNY Chief Of Dept.Found
Feehan William First Deputy Commissioner FDNY1st DC Found
Downey Raymond Battalion Chief FDNY Special Op. Found
Barbara Gerard Assistant Chief FDNY Command Center Missing