9-10: The Day Before (9-11 tribute film)

LISTEN WITH HEADPHONES FOR FULL EFFECT. Actual FDNY radio transmissions from 9-11 with video footage taken on an earlier family visit to the World Trade Center; how so much changed on one day. Hours of radio dispatches and communications were studied from the fateful 9-11 day to compile transmissions into a timeline from the dispatchers’ perspectives of just before the first plane hit the tower until shortly after the second tower fell. In addition to the many human tragedies that morning, there were a small number of FDNY dispatchers who had to piece together the events unfolding from only the radio calls coming in from the WTC area. Trying to coordinate, move, respond to and communicate with the hundreds of emergency workers involved in the WTC attack was an almost unimaginable task. Having been above the floors where the planes hit the towers, I still can’t imagine what it must have been like to be there. To have no way out. To feel those giant structures buckle and collapse. Terror is the only apt word. As I watched on TV as the buildings burned and then collapsed, my heart sank thinking about all the people inside those structures. There was only small solace to me that the observation tower had not yet opened for visitors, so there were no families, tourists, or young children on the 107th floor. An hour later and hundreds of tourists might have been admiring the wondrous view from the once-tallest building in the world, just like my own family had done as seen in this video. I kept this video stored away for a long time. Here was my family, captured on a day full of life and wonder, in a place that soon after experienced total obliteration. How could I look at that again? This film is representational. The video here was shot before 9-10, but in the context of this film is meant to convey what happened on and what would have been seen from the observation deck on 9-10 (and all the days before.) Less than 24 hours later the amazing views from the 107th floor were gone forever, fallen and crushed in the deathly collapse. I present this film as my commemoration of an event where tragedy and terror marked the line between eras. 9-11 was both the end of an era, of a more innocent time, the naive world view by Americans, as symbolized by the children in the video; and the beginning of a new, darker era that began the moment the towers were hit, indicated by the audio track as the events unfolded. The WTC towers are gone. Forever. Perhaps some of the workers in my video also perished. Certainly some of the voices heard on the FDNY dispatches are gone as well. They exist only as ghosts in my computer. So in a sense, this is a ghost story. Not told as entertainment, but simply as one more entry to the record of that day: 9-11.