First responder's dramatic video after attack

Career firefighters Kevin McCullagh and Jerry Walsh had retired weeks before terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Their years at Ladder 126 in South Jamaica, Queens, were over. But when they heard the news, they didn’t hesitate to drive across the Hudson River and volunteer to support their fellow firefighters.

McCullagh took along his retirement gift: a camcorder. Aware that history was in the making, he started filming snippets of what they saw from a firefighter’s perspective: a giant pall of smoke rising over the Manhattan skyline, ash a foot deep, firefighters sifting through a sea of rubble, little fires burning here and there, trees blown on their sides, gouges in buildings, and, yes, the collapsed Twin Towers.

“It was unbelievable,” McCullagh recalls. “It was surreal. I realized what we were in for when I saw a fireman coming toward us. He was just beside himself. I asked him, ‘What’s it like over there?’ And he briefly described what it was like and I knew it was going to be something quite unique. There was carnage. There were a lot of crazy things.”

One sight especially surprised the two friends. Amid the twisted metal and burning rubble were smashed fire engines, crunched flat and caked with dust. “I had been around fire trucks my whole professional career and you’d never seen anything like it,” McCullagh says, still amazed today. “You see them as indestructible. When the big red fire truck shows up, everything is going to be OK. And seeing them tossed around like little toys, and smashed and burned, it was pretty amazing to see them like that.”

McCullagh, now 52, and Walsh, now 54, worked for seven days -- every day, all day. Fires still had to be extinguished. Search and rescue teams needed assistance. Steel workers, electricians, and heavy-machinery operators needed help moving debris, setting up equipment, and making sense of the chaos.

[ Photos: Veteran photographer's images of the September 11th attacks ]

When he was resting, McCullagh would pull out his camera and shoot a couple minutes of footage. He documented canine units searching the rubble, an ambulance turned into Swiss cheese, a never-ending line of dump trucks rolling into position. He recorded cleanup crews crawling like ants through mountains of jagged, gnarled debris.

Watching McCullagh’s video clips today, the scale of the destruction boggles the mind anew. That the wreckage was removed within months remains a herculean feat. “These guys are risking their lives,” McCullagh says at one point to the camera. “These guys are incredible. My heart goes out to every fireman in this city.”

For a few months, McCullagh and Walsh continued to pitch in, frequently driving back to the cleanup site. But as they found out later, there was a heavy toll for many who worked in the toxic environment of Ground Zero. Many first responders are now suffering or dying from respiratory problems and deadly illnesses such as thyroid, esophageal, and lung cancers that top doctors and epidemiologists say are related to the cleanup.

McCullagh hadn’t looked at his video footage for almost 10 years, until these problems spurred him to take another look. When he reviewed them, he was surprised by how well his shots conveyed the immense toil of the 9/11 cleanup. He felt it was a powerful historical document, and he hadn’t shown it to anybody. But during the fight last year in Congress over health benefits for 9/11 workers, he decided it was time to share his footage.

Reflecting on his retired firefighter comrade Jerry Walsh, he says, “Jerry…was a marathon runner, a great athlete, a young, strong guy, and now he has a rare form of blood cancer. It’s way too prevalent among guys who were down there. There’s quite a lot of it that people are unaware of. I think people were all behind the firemen for a certain amount of time but people do tend to forget and maybe this 10th anniversary people will remember what the firemen, the cops, the steel workers, what they went through. And it was all done without question. Everyone went down there to do the best they could.”

Recently, McCullagh was in Lower Manhattan to visit a friend who works on Wall Street when he made a wrong turn. Suddenly he was again face to face with Ground Zero. He was able to peep through some of the fence but could see very little.

“I just kept walking,” he says. “But it was kind of strange. I realized I hadn’t been back there in nine-plus years. It looked a lot different.”

Since 9/11, McCullagh notes that you can’t go into most buildings in Manhattan without showing ID or passing a security scanner. He feels the country is more uptight and paranoid, that too many people have lost their sense of humor. He also feels the rebuilding of the World Trade Center has taken too long and that too often it has been used as a political football. One bright spot for McCullagh was the death of Osama bin Laden.

 
“Not that it’s going to bring closure to anybody,” he says. “It’s not going to bring back people’s loved ones. But personally, I felt good that whole day. And I was proud of my country. I was proud of the president. I was proud of the military, the way they went and did it.”

McCullagh was a fireman for more than 20 years, including serving as fire marshal and fire investigator. He had friends he saw only a few days before they died at the World Trade Center. He still gets together with other firefighters to share stories and remember 9/11. But on the 10-year anniversary, he says there are no special plans.

“They’ll just be remembering it in their own way,” he says. “It’s not going to be a celebration, that’s for sure. A moment of silence, just remembering all the people, all the great people that were lost.”

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