We Were There, March 3, 2015

well hello I am actually stunned that there are not only three people in the audience that's what we were fully expecting this is a mob scene thank you this is great so welcome welcome to the 9/11 tribute center presentation of we were there my name is Judith Pucci I am one of many tribute center walking tour guides so this afternoon you're going to hear stories told you by two of my fellow guides these stories are interesting to me I think because they do not focus on the big historic events of that day the events that we all know and that changed the way we all live instead they explore the personal costs of September 11th so let me introduce you to the women sitting next to me they are Rita pearl and Pam maja now Pam who is down at the end there contrary to the way she looks she is a corporate attorney she is an attorney with a company called the SMA group it is a financial services firm and they run one of the largest options and futures exchanges if that means something to you wonderful if it doesn't we don't have any time for me to explain it to you Rita who is next to me is a now retired lieutenant with the New York City Police Department during the 1993 attack the first time the Trade Center was attacked and on September 11th Rita was a sergeant at the time and she was assigned to the 6o precinct in Brooklyn Rita retired from the police department in 2004 and when she did so she had given 20 years of service to this city today she works in the airline industry I had assumed that she worked as a security professional she doesn't the woman loves traveling so he's a flight attendant and if you're lucky you'll have her on your plane now on September 11th Pam was an attorney we're going to start with pan first so on September 11th Pam was an attorney with a different company than the one she works for today in fact it wasn't a company it was the city of New York Pam worked at that time for New York City law department and it was located just two buildings away from the Trade Center so it was just a very short distance from where we are all now all yours thank you everyone I began the morning of September 11th feeling as if I had nothing left in the tank I had suffered two traumatic events in the weeks leading up to September 11th the first being a man that was really my mentor and like a second father to me had passed away very suddenly just a few weeks prior and shortly after that we had to put our six-year-old dog to sleep very suddenly he became ill so as that morning unfolded I was sitting at my desk and I really felt like I had nothing left in the tank I felt like I was just emotionally and physically exhausted and all I could really think about was the upcoming vacation I was scheduled to take so as I was sitting there at my desk of the New York City Law Department that morning I felt the impact of the first plane hitting the North Tower it felt like a punch in my stomach and I looked out the window and I was just two buildings north of the North Tower and I saw people staring up at the North Tower with their jaws dropped and really just stunned and in utter disbelief I grabbed my cell phone and I went outside and I got outside and I was standing just a couple hundred feet from the North Tower and I saw the second plane as it banked in to the South Tower and as I was watching this unfold and not being able to get my arms around it there in front of me I saw a female officer with absolute fear written across her face running in the opposite direction of the World Trade Center and I knew what what was unfolding at this point was horrific and beyond our imagination and I began to just get out of that area get away from the World Trade Center and as I walked just a couple of feet I ran into my boss Francis and Francis and i Doan to a nearby store and we went to the basement and I said to Francis let's get down there this should be safe and we were down there was a couple of dozen other people and as we're down there a couple of minutes I began to look around and I thought this building is not safe and I remember thinking to myself this looks like it was put together with spit this is we have to get out of here so I said to Francis let's get out of here so we walked the half a block to City Hall Park and we got there and there a couple of hundred other people there and everyone was kind of just standing around no one really could get their arms around what was unfolding no one was really saying anything people were pretty much unsure of what we were supposed to be doing and what really was happening here and as we were all just standing around this man climbed the fence at City Hall Park and said what seemed to be so absurd at the time he screamed out to all of us the towers are going to fall the towers may give out and we all kind of looked at each other like what is this man saying but we knew this is the only person who's saying anything here let's get out of here so Francis and I got out of there and began walking north and Francis was kind of sleepwalking her way as we headed north and I knew that I had to take charge and get us to a safe area and Frances just kept saying to me that you want to stop somewhere and get something to eat she wanted to buy fruit and sit down and have something to eat so we got near Grand Central and we stopped into a small store and we were sitting down and all of a sudden dozens of people just started running by screaming at the tops of their lungs and they were screaming someone's trying to bomb Grand Central and I knew at that point I had to get us to somewhere safe and at that point all I could think of was whoever was behind these horrible events I didn't think they would take on the UN I didn't think that they would take on all those countries so as Frances was sitting there I literally just reached back and grabbed her hand and started running through the streets dragging her her fruit fruit went flying she fell off a sidewalk but I just said to her we have to get out of there and we did we made our way out and we got ourselves to safety and about a year later another unimaginable event occurred the love of my life who's here today my husband suffered a massive massive stroke at a very young age and he was in the hospital for seven months and I don't think I could have gone through that event if it wasn't for the strength that I found on September 11th thank you very much [Applause] you know the tires before you speak riddle let me just put something in perspective for them when the planes hit those buildings pieces of the planes just flew in all directions and these tires from one of the planes were actually recovered from the roof of Pam's building now this is a building that she and her colleagues were unable to return to until the following spring Rita story focuses on what happened after the attacks her story takes place at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island about one third of the rubble from the Trade Center was sent to Fresh Kills and Rita and many other dedicated police officers searched through this debris looking for the remains of those who died here at the Trade Center that day so now Rita please tell us good afternoon your story was very emotional so I'll try to start my story when I was a teenager I was very idealistic my mother died when I was a teenager and I wanted to join the Peace Corps the person who took care of me and who became my mentor said to me instead of traveling halfway around the world why don't you try to help people in your own backyard and join the NYPD so I did on September 11 2001 I was a sergeant in Brooklyn and that morning I was working a part-time job as a lot of my colleagues did to make extra money I was doing security at an electronics store and I went outside to roll up the gates and when I came back in it was just the manager and I she was a little redheaded woman and she was very pale to begin with her face was ghostly white stricken and she said to me a plane just hit the World Trade Center I ended up going into work that day because I knew they would do what they call a mass mobilization call everybody into their closest precinct and the expressways were like a ghost town I'm a native New Yorker as if you couldn't tell but I've never seen the expressways like that before then or since then my first time at Ground Zero was that Friday and I was marching down the West Side Highway with a contingent of NYPD personnel and the streets were littered with debris with papers with dust and my heart sank but the streets were also lined with hundreds of volunteers hundreds of them holding up flags cheering clapping giving us motivation and inspiration for the difficult job that we were about to endure and that did end up going on for nine months so although my heart was filled with grief it also soared with pride the devastation of my city it was so loud marching down that West Side Highway so loud there was so much machinery trying to gingerly pick up pieces of twisted metal in order to find a body because by that time it was a third day so no more survivors were found find the body or at least a body part to give the family of one of the victims a little bit a little bit of closure so loud the thousands of rescue workers construction workers volunteers the hoses attempting to douse the flames so very loud but in my mind there was deafening silence and I went to the world financial center all of the windows were shattered and all the stores were abandoned and I specifically remember looking at the gap with all their rows and neatly folded sweaters and t-shirts and pants and it was lined inches thick with World Trade Center dust the dust of the thousands of victims and all of their surroundings I spent weeks on standby at my precinct and every day I heard the mournful sounds the strains of Amazing Grace because every day there were funerals and one of the band members worked with me and he practiced every day and every day boxes and boxes of cards drawn by children across the country arrived at the precinct colorful cards cards of horrible devastation they drew the towers with flames coming out of them but also cards that had sunshine and blue skies it reminded me of artwork that I saw when I went to Prague in the Czech Republic artwork that was drawn by children during the Holocaust surreptitiously there our teacher let them draw and they also drew scenes of devastation because what they were going through was like a 9/11 but they also drew scenes of joy scenes to give us inspiration through the eyes of the innocent but what really brought me to an extreme personal connection with the victims was when I worked at the Oak Hill landfill which is where they brought a lot of the debris for the NYPD to go through to try to find something something that could identify a victim something that could produce DNA to tell somebody's mother father sister brother loved one whomever yes your loved one was definitely there and take that little grain of sand away in the back of their head that thinks well maybe they got hit in the head with a piece of rubble and there they don't know who they are and they're living somewhere else I was assigned to the small stuff so if you were assigned to the small stuff you put on a suit you climbed up into this tent and a dump truck dumped out debris onto a conveyor belt and there were a few of us on either side and forever more I will hear that clackity clackity clack of that conveyor belt as all the stuff past most of it not able to be identified rubble lots and lots of burnt paths tickets some charred ID cards and then I remember one guy picking up a piece of cloth that had brown at the end of it and we all said that looks like part of somebody's clothing put that in the bucket and then another guy picked up a little gold Buddha and he held it up like this in his hand and it gleamed in the light and I remember thinking to myself how in the world did this thing survive completely unscathed not a scratch on it and thousands of victims and everything was just reduced to dust and then he went and he put it in his pocket and to this day I regret not telling him put that in the bucket maybe somebody would recognize that as being a possession of their loved one maybe somebody had it on the desk but I didn't do it and the faces of the victims the faces of the victims spoke to me they spoke to me then after 9/11 when all those posters were plastered across fences and buildings especially in lower Manhattan the faces of the victims of their desperate families trying to see if anybody has seen their loved one has have you seen him have you seen her those very faces shouted to me again after 9/11 because after I retired I actually worked on the World Trade Center site as a security director and there they had a family trailer and if you lost somebody in the attacks you were able to go in there twelve hours a day seven days a week put up pictures of your loved one flowers cry pray whatever you wanted to do and those faces shouted to me look at me I am the diversity of New York City because my city New York City is the most hands-down diverse city in the world I do classes also and I tell people stand on a corner in midtown Manhattan for 10 minutes and people speaking 50 different languages will most likely pass you every race if Miss nationality religion on 9/11 there were so many stories so many that we know and so many that we don't know so many untold stories of a hand reaching out to help one another across those unimportant boundaries of race religion whatever on 9/11 it happened and it happened to me personally in my life when my mentor a person of a different race taught me to reach your hand out across those boundaries and look into a person's heart instead thank you I think Fresh Kills landfill I mentioned to you and Rita just did also that it's on Staten Island which you probably know is one of the five boroughs that makes up New York thousands of forensic specialists along with police officers like Rita worked for over 1.7 million hours at Fresh Kills the result it is estimated that the remains of over 700 people were identified because of their work 1.7 million hours when I first read that I didn't even know what to do with it in terms of what does that mean in terms of days or weeks so I divided 24 into 1.7 million hours and the result is 708 days so just shy of two years that means that two years had people worked non-stop 24 hours a day that was the amount of time it was put into going through the debris and the remains that were in the Fresh Kills landfill what we'd like to do now is just take a moment or two we have some time if you have any questions for either of them this is your moment don't be shy no you're being shot did you all hear the question should I repeat it I like to emphasize to people that extremism runs across the board it comes in every race religion age group nationality gender so that people understand that it's it's all about hate for no reason because there still is a lot of ignorance and by doing what I do here I feel that I'm doing my part to erase that ignorance I would say that fewer to have asked me on September 11th Ballard my individual strength I probably would have tilted my head and said I don't know how much I have and looking back now I certainly know that we all have so much individual strength and we know what we can rely on and getting ourselves through the life events that we experience and also to just the beauty and incredible support that we all have whether it's family friends but they're the ones who get us through what when life hands you something that you're not expecting and the community support that we all experienced here in New York City was really born on and I know that all of us New Yorkers see that with among ourselves and also certainly being a volunteer with the tribute Center we see you know across the world the respect and support that people bring to the events that we all experienced on that day and continue to experience anyone else we have time for one more please interesting I was gonna take that one first Wow I visited him I've actually been to this museum one time and I listened to a lot of recordings and I do work for the airlines now also working for the airlines had has made me realize that the true first responders were the crew up there and I listened to some of the phone calls and also I had the privilege to work with the husband of one of the flight attendants he became a flight attendant afterwards because it was always their plan to work together they were both actually police officers she left early he stayed his whole time and I listened I listened to her phone call and it made me think over and over what would I do if I was in that situation and it made me realize that I think I could be in control until the very end and would I be scared I'm sure I would be scared who wouldn't be but I think that if I was in that situation that my training would kick in and I would automatically be able to comfort the passengers even though we knew we were all going to die anyway I also thought and I still do think about it if I was working that day or there was one police officer from the NYPD who died that was actually putting in his papers to retire at one Police Plaza which is only a few blocks away from here he was going to become an actor he was leaving early and when the planes hit he dropped everything and he ran over and I knew that I would do the same thing your training kicks in I would have run in to go help people and put all that stuff to the back so I hope that answers your question that's an incredible question I think that the events of that day and certainly in the year since then I think that my approach has changed I think you have to look at life as an absolute gift and I think you need to whether we you follow it religiously each day but you really have to feel like I'm doing everything I can everything I want to do and you're surrounding yourself with friends family and pursuing things that give you absolute joy but I it really is just treat life with absolute respect and it is a gift each and every day interesting interesting question thank you both very much really I know this isn't the easiest thing to do so it was generous of you to do it before we go I want to thank all of you and maybe not for an obvious reason that you might think I want to thank you because you are essential actually to our storytelling because you're here and we're here we together take a piece small but still we take a piece of that brutal day and we make from it here together this a life-affirming experience and it's an experience that we hope will enrich broaden deepen your experience at the Museum today if you would like to hear more stories please take a tribute Center tour they're giving every day throughout the day so with that I want to thank you again and on behalf of the 9/11 tribute Center on behalf of Pam and Rita and me thank you genuinely for choosing to spend some of your time with us [Applause]

Channel: 9/11 Tribute Museum

Views: 22,071

Rating: 4.8583107 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: -pxmvXNpmOM

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019