Firefighter: Giuliani 'ran Like A Coward On 9/11', Before the Towers Fell? Options

[Timothy Osman]

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Firefighter_...rd_on_0122.html

This Firefighter says our hero was running the wrong way, half an hour before any collapse. I find this to be strange behavior for someone in a position of authority since no steel framed skyscraper had ever previously or subsequently collapsed from fire.

[KP50]

This story has always interested me. It is dated 8 October 2001.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/5270/

On the morning of September 12, Richard Sheirer, director of the mayor's Office of Emergency Management, was scheduled to conduct a biological-terrorism drill in a cavernous commercial warehouse on the Hudson. Known as tripod -- short for "trial point of distribution" -- the exercise was to test how quickly Sheirer's staff could administer treatments at the kind of ad hoc medical centers that would be set up all over the city in the event of an actual attack. For an audience, Sheirer had lined up Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the police and fire commissioners, and representatives of the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He had hired over 1,000 Police Academy cadets and Fire Department trainees to play terrified civilians afflicted with various medical conditions, allergies, and panic attacks. He had even arranged for a shipment of 70,000 M&Ms to be delivered and divided by color into medical packets representing different prophylactics and vaccines. But the M&Ms never arrived.

On the morning of September 11, Sheirer got to City Hall at 8 a.m. for a meeting about the Jackie Robinson-Pee Wee Reese memorial planned for Coney Island. "I was in heaven, sitting between Ralph Branca and Joe Black," he remembers. "We were about to select the statue, and then we heard the pop." At first he thought a transformer had exploded in an underground substation. Then he got a flash report from Watch Command in OEM headquarters.

As his driver barreled down Broadway, Sheirer recalls, "my first move was to clear the streets so we could get emergency vehicles in and people out." He radioed the police department and told them to shut down traffic below Canal Street and close every bridge and tunnel in the city.

Down at the scene, he joined Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen and his chiefs Pete Ganci and Bill Feehan -- old friends from Sheirer's 26 years with the New York Fire Department. They were establishing a command post at the base of the burning tower. Then the second airplane hit. "At that point there was no more doubt," he says ruefully. "We were under attack." He picked up one of the three cell phones strapped to his belt and started giving orders: to the Coast Guard to seal the harbor, and to the State Emergency Management Office to send backup search and rescue teams and get the Pentagon to freeze the city's airspace. Then he lost his signal.

As Sheirer helped move the Fire Department command post, he saw a cloud of smoke and debris engulf his own command center, on the twenty-third floor of 7 World Trade Center. His staff was inside sending alerts to representatives of nearly 100 organizations -- everyone from Con Edison to the Department of Health. One of his deputies radioed him to report that the OEM would have to evacuate.

Minutes after they arrived at Barclay, the second tower collapsed. "It was a tremendous whoosh, roaring like a train in a tunnel," Sheirer remembers. The doors were jammed with piles of debris, but a janitor led the mayor and his commissioners out through the basement. Their cars were crushed, so they trudged uptown to a firehouse at Houston and Sixth Avenue.......

Sheirer clearly states that the OEM was evacuated because it was on fire. But in all other "official" accounts, it was evacuated because of fears a third aircraft was coming. There seemed a determined effort to evacuate WTC7 as quickly as possible.

We also have the notorious Barry Jennings story (http://www.record-eagle.com/2001/sep/11scene.htm) :-

After the initial blast, Housing Authority worker Barry Jennings, 46, reported to a command center on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center. He was with Michael Hess, the city's corporation counsel, when they felt and heard another explosion. First calling for help, they scrambled downstairs to the lobby, or what was left of it. "I looked around, the lobby was gone. It looked like hell," Jennings said. 

There is much more on Jennings here

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity....arry_jennings_1

and indications that the OEM was evacuated around the time that Sheirer indicates - soon after the second plane hit.