Newly released aerial photographs of the World Trade Center terror attack capture the towers’ collapse, from just after the first fiery plane strike to the dust clouds that spread over Lower Manhattan and New York harbor.
The images were taken from a police helicopter carrying the only photographer allowed in the air space near the towers on Sept. 11, 2001. They were obtained by ABC News after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which investigated the towers’ collapse.
The still images are “a phenomenal body of work” that show a new, wide-angle look at the towers’ collapse and the gray dust clouds that shrouded the city afterward, said Jan Seidler Ramirez, the chief curator of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which is compiling a digital archive of attack coverage. The photos are “absolutely core to understanding the visual phenomena of what was happening,” Ms. Ramirez said.
The images of the dust clouds rising as high as some downtown skyscrapers “are some of the most exceptional images in the world, I think, of this event,” she said.
ABC said the photographs were among 2,779 pictures on 9 CDs the Institute of Standards gave the network. Some of the photographs had not been released before, it said.
The network posted 12 photos this week on its Web site, all taken by Greg Semendinger, a former detective with the New York Police Department’s Aviation Unit, who was first in the air in a search for survivors on the rooftop. He said he and his pilot watched the second plane hit the south tower from the helicopter.
“We didn’t find one single person. It was surreal,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “There was no sound. No sound whatsoever but the noise of the radio and the helicopter. I just kept taking pictures.”
Source : http://global.nytimes.com/
