Total Collapse (Full Episode) | 9/11: One Day in America

MAN: This is insane. How did they hijack the planes? My sister said she was watching the news. One plane hit. MAN 2: What? MAN: Then, about two minutes later, the next plane hit. MAN 2: You're joking? MAN: Right into the front of the World Trade Center. Isn't that crazy, man? MAN 2: That can't be real. MAN: I swear to God, it happened, dude. We're gonna see 'em on fire right over here. (siren) ♪ ♪ REPORTER: Erin, we can see over your left shoulder there the, the building's still smoldering of the World Trade Center. ERIN: Well it is a... ERIN (over TV): Grotesque sight to look at from about 30 blocks away from where we are. For those of you just, uh, joining us, let's just briefly recap what we know. REPORTER (over radio): About an hour ago, about 8:45 eastern time, one plane crashed into, uh, the tower. TOTI: Watching this unfold on TV, in the outer ring of the Pentagon. REPORTER (over TV): On the right, the tower you can see behind me, uh, and then about a half hour later, uh, a second plane crashed into, uh, the tower. TOTI: And we had a call from my friend and classmate from the Navy Command Center, and all he says is, "Another plane has been hijacked from out of Dulles, it's turned around and it's heading for Washington." So immediately speculation begins. Is it going to be The White House? The White House is too small, too hard to find from the air. The Capitol Building's easier to see but, you know, there aren't a lot of people in the Capitol Building at any one time. The only building that is easy to find from the air that has a lot of people in it, the largest office building in the world, The Pentagon. Within a couple of minutes, began to hear the sound of a jet engine, and it was pretty clear this plane was on full throttle, as if it were taking off, but instead of the sound diminishing with time, it just kept getting louder and louder and louder and we realized this is really happening. They're coming for us. (rumbling) (explosion) (beeping) (theme music plays) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (whistling) MAN: Get back! Everybody get back! This way! (overlapping chatter). (sirens) TOTI: I probably arrived at the scene about five minutes after impact. MAN: Hey, hey, hey, hey! TOTI: And initially we were way overwhelmed by the casualties. (overlapping chatter). TOTI: Every 20, 30 seconds you'd see somebody stumble out of this open doorway. (overlapping chatter). MAN: Let's go! Move, move now! TOTI: But there were people that were still trapped in the building, and so I ran down to the doorway. I got a few feet inside and I trip over somebody. And I could feel there's a, what I think is a woman. Two army guys ran back in with me and the three of us half dragged, half carried her just a few feet outside the building and laid her down again. MAN: Everybody out. Everybody out. TOTI: I asked her what her name was and she said her name was Antoinette, and she said, uh, "Am I going to die?" And it was clear that she was struggling to breathe, so I told her, "No, Antoinette, you're not gonna die. You're gonna be fine." And I just stayed with her and, and talked to her. REPORTER (over radio): The FBI is investigating reports that there was a hijacking of an American Airlines 767 out of Boston that was perhaps one of the planes that was involved in the, this disaster this morning. Apparently both towers of the World Trade Center were hit by aircraft and, additionally, a report that a plane has crashed into The Pentagon this morning. West Wing of The White House has been evacuated. President Bush was not there. He was at a school in Sarasota, Florida. The New York City Fire Department is issuing a call for a total recall of all officers and fire fighters. Drop what you're doing, report to your company. A major disaster is occurring in New York City this morning. BURKETT: I stepped into the news room and the Assistant News Director turned to me, and he pointed his finger at me and he said, "NJ, grab a cameraman, grab a crew and go downtown." I said, "Who do I take?" I turned to the Assignment Editor and I said, "Whom do I take?" and, and he said, "The first guy out of the garage. Get in the truck and go." (sirens) BURKETT: At that point, I was still looking at this as a story, as a news story that we were gonna tell on the 6:00 news that night. On our way down, we resolved we were gonna go into the towers. We wanted to document the heroism of the fire fighters. OFFICER: Hey, step off. Grab your guy and get 'em out. BURKETT: Don't tell me this. I've got press credentials. OFFICER: I, I don't care. I don't care. Get out. BURKETT: What's your badge number? OFFICER: Get out. Don't worry about it. Go! It's 44. Get out. FIREFIGHTER: Who is that guy? Get that guy out of there? BURKETT: I understand... BURKETT: When he confronted us so quickly and, and immediately we were sort of taken aback. Um, but then it was clear, really, like, almost instantly that, you know what, he's absolutely right. We'd better not go any farther, um. But, yeah, I mean, he might have saved our lives. To the right. Look at that. BURKETT: So we crossed West Street and we saw the fire command post there. The top two fire commanders were both there, like generals organizing a battle plan. So, so we, we felt like we were safe there. (overlapping chatter) BURKETT: And there was this whole battalion of fire fighters, um, in rows, standing there. I mean they looked like soldiers who were gonna go into a battle. But you look at their faces. And they looked frightened. They looked scared to me. REPORTER (over radio): Certainly people are streaming out of buildings in lower Manhattan. We can now tell you that there's not going to be trading on the New York Stock Exchange, they're evacuating the New York Stock Exchange. NASDAQ was hoping to start its computerized trading day about two minutes from now at 10:00 We don't know if that's going to happen. To this point, the White House, the Capitol Building, the State Department, the Treasury at Washington, all evacuated after the blast struck the Pentagon. Manhattan is sealed off. If you wanna get in, you cannot at this point in time. (sirens) (overlapping chatter) BURKETT: We both just kind of stood there and I said to Marty, I said, "Well, you know, let's shoot a stand-up here, while we're here." And so I did, okay, take one, and two, one. BURKETT: This is as close as we can get to the base of the World Trade Center. You can see the two towers, debris continues to fall and to rain on the people below. there are people hanging from the windows, 90 stories up, and a number of bodies have actually hit the pavement. I did the first take on the stand-up and I didn't like it at all. I thought, "Oh, that doesn't sound right. I don't like that." And I said to Marty, "You know, let me do another one." Take two and two, one. This is as close as we can get to the base of the World Trade Center. You can see the firemen assembled here, the police officers, FBI agents and you can see the two towers. A huge explosion now, raining debris on all of us. We'd better get out of the way! (rumble) (overlapping chatter). (screams) (screams) BURKETT: God. Look out behind you, look out behind you. Please. Run, run. (screams) WOMAN: Help. Help me Jesus. MAN: Anthony you okay? ANTHONY: Yeah. WOMAN: Yes, please. Oh my God. (screams). (crying) (overlapping chatter) (screams) (overlapping chatter) MAN: The whole site. It's gone. The whole tower. It's gone. Holy crap! They knocked the whole friggin' thing down. Holy god-damn. They did it! It's down. The second tower's down. Holy god-damn. MAN: No. MAN: The whole top of the building fell off, dude. MAN 2: Holy, dude. It's ... gone. Look, they say it was a bomb in there. MAN: Oh my God, man. MAN 2: Look, it's gone man. MAN: This is not happening. MAN 2: This is not happening. WOMAN (over radio): The entire World Trade Center on the, the south building just fell. I just saw the whole thing. Oh my God. Oh my God. (gasps). I can't see anything up. The whole thing went down. REPORTER (over radio): That the... WOMAN (over radio): Oh my God. Oh, I saw the building crumble. It's all the way down. I can't see, I can't see what's still standing. Oh my God. (gasps) ♪ ♪ REPORTER (over radio): A situation that, uh, started bad just gets worse and worse and worse. The World Trade Center, South Tower, has totally collapsed. Again, uh, we've had no reports of, uh, casualties. Obviously, there are... BURKETT: Everybody was running away, and we didn't know where we were running to. I turn around and there was this door and it's a way to escape. (screams) (overlapping chatter) BURKETT: Marty, on me again. MARTY: I'm rolling, I'm rolling. BURKETT: Alright. We don't know what's happened inside. What we know we have to do is just keep running the other way. The firemen are going this way, so are the police officers, and we don't know what's happening. MAN: Out. MAN 2: Everybody out! MAN: Everybody out. MAN 2: Let's go! MAN: Everyone out. Keep it moving. He was just in the building... BURKETT: All these years I'm asking myself what if there was no door? MAN: Go, go! BURKETT: And you know there were people behind us that did not make it through the door. (debris thuds) (debris thuds) GIEBFRIED: Both Jen and I ran back across the street where we thought the entrance to the building was. We hit a glass wall and that's where we got buried alive. (overlapping chatter). GIEBFRIED: The ten to 12 people that were with us, we were all banging, clawing, trying to break that window. It wasn't breaking. LAMPERT: And at that point my nose and my mouth were just filling up with dust and whatever else was in the air and I couldn't breathe. Even with my shirt over my mouth, I couldn't breathe and I just, I remember slowly sinking to the ground and, and thinking this is it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna die. And I'm getting upset about it now but, in that moment, it was very peaceful and, even though I didn't know that the tower had collapsed, um, I didn't really know what had happened, I do remember thinking distinctly that at least my parents are going to get my body back. My parents were. You know, I was whole. I was whole. I wasn't damaged, and my parents would get me back. My parents were going to have me and to take home. (overlapping chatter) GIEBFRIED: I stepped back and I basically said a little prayer 'cause I knew we were gonna die. I grabbed Jen, I closed my eyes and then all of a sudden one individual got to his gun. There was this pap-pap-pap noise. Next thing I knew I was being yanked through and over broken glass. (coughing) (overlapping chatter) GIEBFRIED: Later on I found out it was a police officer who got to his secondary gun and shot out the window and saved us all. MAN: In. Yoily. Yoily. In. Deep breath. In, in. Hold it. LAMPERT: I don't think anybody really understood, even then, what happened to the twin towers. (overlapping chatter) (coughing) LAMPERT: I was numb, like in, in, in shock. I still don't remember. It was disbelief. This cannot be real. (radio chatter) (overlapping chatter) (smoldering) CANAVAN: As we exited out of the tower I can hear this rush of air, feeling the heat and then this thumping sound and, and then it was just smack down, just plastered down. Completely buried. A slab of concrete falling at an angle had knocked me down, but it was protecting me. I was sort of in a little cocoon, and it got just dead quiet, to the point where I said, "You know what, I'm dead." At that point, the thoughts going through my mind where "Well my kids, I have a birthday to plan and my, my daughter's going to be born. I'm not gonna be around for my kids. I won't even see my daughter's face when she's born. I have to be there." But as I started to move, someone grabbed my ankle. Said he was a security guard and he said, "If we stay here, they'll find us." I said, "If you stay here you're either gonna smother or you're gonna burn to death". And I started digging, and he followed behind me and finally we saw a little peephole, a light, and I looked at him. I said, "Okay, I'm gonna push you through." He was smaller than I was. I said, "See if you can move some stuff so I can get out." And he squeezed past me and I helped push him out and, uh, I got back down, I was waiting. I didn't see anything happening and, when I stuck my head back out, he had been, uh, walking away down a pile of debris. So I started yelling at him, "Yo, yo." And he just kept waving, like, come on, come on. And I, I was the only one talking, um, and I said, "I can't get out." And at that point I could see he's wearing like his security guard suit, but he just kept going. At that moment, I got really angry and I picked up a piece of concrete that was laying there and I, I actually threw it at him. That's, that's how angry I was, um. I missed him, you know, and luckily, luckily I did because I would have had to live with that the rest of my life. But once he left me there, um, just the next thought is, "Okay, I'm on my own. You're gonna have to do what you have to do." (sirens) (sirens) TOTI: When you're in the military, you're trained for battle. I've been to sea on submarines where we had casualties where I had to run to the scene of a casualty and, and you know put out a fire or something like that. Nothing compared to what we experienced that day. And at some point, one of the security guards started yelling, "There's another plane coming. Everybody needs to move away from the building." (overlapping chatter) MAN: We need to gather up this paramedic equipment and move it. MAN 2: What have we got going on? MAN: There's an aircraft coming. Let's go, go. Move! (overlapping chatter) TOTI: Two planes hit the World Trade Center. Pentagon is a huge target. (radio chatter) It just made sense for two planes to hit The Pentagon too. So, we took this threat very seriously. (overlapping chatter) OFFICER: Get back, get back. MAN: They've got another inbound plane. MAN: Josh. OFFICER: Everybody get back, get back. Get back. Go, go, go. REPORTER (over TV): Every airport in the United States has been shut down as the FAA and the government tries to figure out exactly are there more attacks yet to come. CNN's David Ensor joins us from Washington. David, where in the capital are you now? ENSOR (over TV): Well Aaron, I'm, uh, I'm in our bureau but I have on the telephone with me Barbara. PENNEY: I remember looking down and seeing the smoke, and I remember thinking if at any point in my life what I did mattered it was now. They lost radar contact with Flight 93. Any aircraft attempting to enter Washington class-bravo airspace will be shot down. (overlapping chatter) PENNEY: But it normally takes ten to 20 minutes to get real missiles loaded up on the jets, so we didn't have any live weapons on board. There's no way for us to shoot this airliner down. (overlapping chatter) (overlapping chatter) PENNEY: I was just a brand new wing man. I had recently earned my combat mission ready status. My flight lead at the time was our Director of Operations, Mark Sassaville. His call sign was Sass. PILOT (over radio): Go for eight-six. Turn right heading 0-8-0. We're gonna bank here for the traffic. PENNEY: And I distinctly remember I run after Sass down the hallway, down the stairs into life support where our flight lockers are and where all of our gear is. And I'm zipping up my flight suit when Sass looks at me and says, "I'll ram the cockpit." And I knew I would ram the tail. We knew without missiles, that this would be a suicide mission. Going after a civilian airliner, with innocent Americans on board. And these were citizens that, that we had sworn to protect. We flew to the northwest and we searched and we searched. We were too late for anything. The passengers of Flight 93, they had to make that choice. (birds chirping) HOAGLAND: On the morning of September 11th, I heard my sister-in-law, Kathy, run out of her bedroom door and down the hall and answer the kitchen phone. And I heard Kathy say, "Well we love you too, Mark. Let me get your Mom." And then she saw me and said, "Alice, come talk to Mark. He's been hijacked." And I took the phone and I heard Mark's voice. He said, "Mom, this is Mark Bingham. I just wanna tell you I love you. I'm on a flight from Newark to San Francisco and there are three guys on board who have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb. You believe me, don't you Mom?" I said, "Yes, Mark, I believe you. Who are those guys?" And then the phone went dead. After Mark's phone call was dropped, the three of us, Kathy, Yvonne and I, stood around in the kitchen trying to figure out what to do. At about that time Kathy, who had been watching the television for a few minutes said, "Guys, come look at this." So we went and, uh... into the, uh, den there and watched, and we saw. We saw images of the North Tower and the South Tower in flames, and we realized that Mark needed to be told that he was part of a much bigger scenario so I excused myself, I went into another room and dialed his cell phone number. VOICE (over phone): End of message. HOAGLAND: He was a young man. He was a force for good in the world. I had never taught Mark how to kill anybody, but I saw him do some pretty rough stuff on the rugby pitch but always in fun and in the spirit of sportsmanship, and now I was hoping against hope that my son could be a killer. But I knew that Mark would be able to seize the moment. MAN: Get out! MAN 2: Hey, come on guys. Let's go! CANAVAN: At any point, it would have been easier to just sit down and that would have been the end of me. But then I just kept thinking I can't just lay here waiting. Don't, don't give up. Just, I don't know if everybody has that don't give up. Most of the New Yorkers I know, they don't give up. They don't. You can knock 'em down, they get up again. You knock 'em down, they get up again and I just squeezed through the concrete, the rebar, um. I scraped my body down from the top of my head to my feet. At the moment, that was the only way out. There was no one else there. It was me getting through there or, or not getting out. When I came out through that hole, it was like a blizzard down there. Papers grey, embers flying around. (overlapping chatter) CANAVAN: But when I looked straight up, perfectly blue sky and I could see my tower behind me still standing there. And that's when I realized I'm still around. Whatever had happened to me, it didn't get me. I survived. I was lucky. I was very lucky. (overlapping chatter) Still around, guys. Still around. REPORTER: Want to talk to us a little bit? CANAVAN: I'll make it. REPORTER: What's your name? CANAVAN: Tom Canavan. REPORTER: Tom, what happened man? CANAVAN: Uh, big boom. Come down the steps, everything fine till we got to the basement and then everything just fell in. I gets trapped under there with another guy, crawled out. Kept getting hit in the head, get bounced all around. Finally, we crawled our way out over the rubble. AGENT: Come on now. CANAVAN: We did alright. REPORTER: Alright. Way to be Tom. AGENT: Let's go. FIRE FIGHTER: Amos, right down. Amos, straight down. CANAVAN: Oorah! (overlapping chatter) REPORTER (over radio): Kitty. Kitty, let me interrupt for just a second. The associated press is reporting that, uh, federal officials fear that another hijacked plane is headed towards the Pentagon and I'm looking for the time on this. We will continue to check that out. Kitty, I apologize for interrupting. Why don't you continue? HOAGLAND: The three of us were very quiet. We all knew that it was a very grave situation that Mark faced. My brother tried to cheer me a little bit, he pointed out that since the hijackers had been so successful taking down the World Trade Center, uh, and, and the Pentagon, that maybe Flight 93 would land safely. And even as he was saying it and I was listening, we knew both of us that that just wasn't gonna happen that way. (overlapping chatter) MAN: We've got the patch confirming this plane crash in Somerset, Pennsylvania. We don't know if it's a big plane, small plane... Any relation to this. WOMAN: Flight 93, Newark to SFO has crashed. WOMAN 2: Pennsylvania. Again, United Flight 93, Newark to SFO has crashed in Pennsylvania per United Airlines. REPORTER (over radio): I'm now told that United Airlines is now saying that Flight, can you tell me the number of the flight, 93 has crashed in Pennsylvania. Now I don't. REPORTER 2 (over radio): It crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania near the town of Shanksville. South of Pittsburgh we're told, about 80 miles outside of Pittsburgh. It is not known how many... HOAGLAND: That was hard to take in. REPORTER 2 (over TV): The crew were on board although initial reports... HOAGLAND: But I, I knew that the, that I would never see Mark alive again and none of those innocent people on Flight 93 would see their loved ones again. REPORTER (over TV): The plane that crashed in Western Pennsylvania we are now told was a United Flight 93 out of Newark, and it was headed for San Francisco. Now was that one of the hijacked planes? Did some heroic pilot perhaps save an awful lot of lives in Washington? We don't know at this point, but we do know that it was United Flight 93 out of Newark, heading west on its way to San Francisco. HOAGLAND: Even though our boys were not able to save their own lives, they saved countless lives on the ground, and I'm very grateful for what they were able to do that day. BINGHAM: We saw a lot of bridges and, um, we're drinking beer. We got, bought some toys. And I'm deeply in love and, about it all the good stuff. HOAGLAND: I don't know where I lucked out so much to have a son like Mark Bingham, he was, he was a wonderful young man. I can't take any credit for it, it just was something that Mark had and very grateful for that. (overlapping screams) REPORTER (over phone): You're really seeing a lot of people trying to move north, away from any place downtown near the World Trade Center area. People are just walking. The subways are stopped entirely, all around the area of the World Trade Center. You can't get below 14th Street and there just feels to be like a massive exodus of people walking north to get away from the area. Captioned by Cotter Media Group.