Also, in NYC, there are a lot of things that are loud. People are loud talking to each other. Sirens are loud. Trucks are loud going down the street. The policeman needed to do something to be heard by a bunch of people, because there were a lot of people talking loudly to each other, and it would have been tough to hear him. He would have needed to raise his voice, but also, the first time(s) he would have given orders, a lot of people wouldn’t have recognized his speech as an official speaking directly to them. He needed to do something to differentiate himself from the crowd noise, and let people know that he was serious and that they needed to clear the street… NOW! I was down there for about an hour, and as far as I saw, nobody acted aggressively towards anybody, police or civilians. The focus was really on the crash, firemen containing the fire, police securing the scene and people trying to see what happened.

As far as being frightened, I can’t speak for other people, but I didn’t see anything frightening about the situation. 72nd street is a residential area. There’s nothing of ‘importance’ in that area for anyone to target, so I assumed that it was pilot error or mechanical failure. As far as the building, it’s relatively wide compared to the area of it that got hit, so there wasn’t any fear of collapse. Actually, officials went on TV that day and said that there wasn’t any structural damage to the building. As far as the people that I encountered on the way there or when I got there, they were more curious than anything else. As New Yorkers, we’re pretty much conditioned by the news to expect ANYTHING to happen here. I think the focus was more on seeing something with your eyes that was on the news than being frightened or worried about anything.

Actually, you can kind of tell in the video, but when I first came around the corner and was facing the building, I couldn’t tell what we were supposed to be looking at. I had seen a close-up on the television of the fire in the windows, and when I looked down the street, I couldn’t differentiate one high-rise from another. From the distance where I was, essentially one block away, if there hadn’t been all that police and fire department activity, I could have walked right by that block and never noticed that anything was going on at all. Except for the people that heard about it on the news (or had friends call them, like I did) and decided to go check it out….. it was “business as usual” around here.

Thank you for your precisions. It’s cool. sorry for my english. Your film is very interesting.

Indeed, in viewing it, these two streams intrigued myself, and so the violence of the policeman who said: “out of the street !”… Can I ask you some questions about the scene ? Were people frightened generally ? How was the “ambiance” in the street, during the way to the place of the crash ?

do you know this other video ?
http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=1597838396234991272

There is an interesting scene too, at 8 min 06 sec: a woman was interviewed by a reporter of NBC4, but it seems that this interview was never brodcasted on TV or on the web…

Aurélien

Aurélien: Yes… that makes sense to me. When I saw the scene on television before going there, the apartments were on fire. When I came back after filming what you watched in this video, the television was STILL showing the apartments on fire. Actually, they showed those fire images for most of the day. :/

You saw the first thing I saw, because I left the camera running the whole time. There was smoke coming out of the apartments, but no flames. At one point, I saw a stream of smoke that seemed to be spraying straight out of the building in a stream instead of coming out of the window in a cloud and rising. I assumed that was because firemen were spraying water from the inside, and the smoke was being carried out of the apartment on the stream.

That’s what I figure the voices were discussing.

We can heard a french voice at the 3/4 of the video: “ça fume déjà beaucoup”, then a person seems to explain that is the water of firemen. Do I have clearly understand the sense of the voices ?

Thanks,
Aurélien