Indira Singh on Building 7

[jake]

Apologies if somebody has posted this before but I'd never heard it until today....


Extract from Bonnie Faulkner's interview with Indira Singh which aired April 27th, 2005 on KPFA in Berkeley.


BF: How long then, did you work as an EMT and what is it that you were doing?

IS: Well, there was so much chaos Bonnie....when I got there we were setting up triage sites very close to the area, the triage site that I was setting up was....to the East of Building 7, where Building 7 came down, and what we were expecting....as an EMT you’re trained for live survivors....and there were people on the pile, digging and looking for survivors, and what happened is, they would bring someone out to the nearest triage center, we would stabilize them, put them in an ambulance and send them further uptown.

So we were setting up triage as close to the pile as possible....on it, in many cases. So what we were doing was setting up different kinds of stations, IV stations, cardiac stations, wound stations, burn stations....just trying to have an organized space.

What happened with that particular triage site is that pretty soon after noon, after midday on 9/11, we had to evacuate that because they told us that Building 7 was coming down.

If you had been there, not being able to see very much, just flames everywhere and dark smoke, it is entirely possible....I do believe that they brought Building 7 down because I heard that they were going to bring it down, because it was unstable, because of the collateral damage.

That I don’t know, I can’t attest to the validity of that, all I can attest to is that by noon or one o’clock, they told us we had to move from that triage site, up to Pace University a little further away, because Building 7 was gonna come down, or being brought down.

BF: Did they actually use the words brought down, and who was it that was telling you this?

IS: The Fire Department, the Fire Department, and they did use the word, we’re gonna have to bring it down. And, for us, there observing the nature of the devastation it made total sense to us that this was indeed a possibility.

Given the subsequent controversy over it, I don’t know. I’m not an engineer, all I know is that was my experience. We backed off a little bit to Pace University, there was another panic around 4 o’clock because, they were bringing the building down, and people seemed to know this ahead of time, so people were panicking again and running....I went back to One Liberty, which was further south of where I was before and there were triage sites set up in there....we were treating basically people who were on the pile digging for survivors, if there were any.

And it was basically chaos. I asked who was in charge for instance, because I supposed to check in with whoever was in charge, and no one seemed to know. It was complete and utter chaos there, if there was someone in charge....the normal response units around for a multi-casualty incident, they didn’t know.

One of the big problems is that so many people in the Fire Dept and in the Police Dept at a high level had been already killed. There was complete and utter shock and disbelief and they were still trying to sort out the details.

BF: I know you certainly weren’t concentrating on this, but did you happen to notice any fires in WTC7?

IS: Yes....I think there was, I couldn’t get close enough because of the smoke I couldn’t really tell where the fires where coming from, I didn’t have a bird’s eye view, I was down on the ground and there was all this rubble and devastation around me. If someone told me there was a fire in Building 7 I would have likely believed it simply because there were fires everywhere, there were fires because there was so much paper, and litter on the streets, for hundreds of yards around, there were fires everywhere, it was confetti, sort of like a ticker-tape parade. As if someone on the street set fire to a ticker-tape parade. It would all burn, in a line, so there were just flames everywhere.

[jake]

full interview transcript and audio here:

http://reprehensor.gnn.tv/blogs/11292/Indira_Singh_Ground_Zero_911_Blu eprint_For_Terror_Part_One