Two decades after the September 11 attacks, a clip that most people had never seen has turned up on YouTube. Running for almost nine minutes, the footage was filmed from a boat. It shows the second plane striking the World Trade Center’s South Tower from an angle that had not been documented before.
In the years after 2001, thousands of photographs and videos emerged from the morning when nearly 3,000 people died. For twenty years the public believed it had seen a fairly complete collection. The clip, uploaded by Kevin Westley, is described as the first new footage from a previously undocumented vantage point.
What the camera sees
The camera looks up at the towers from within a crowd of stunned witnesses. At first it concentrates on the blaze in the North Tower, which had been hit seventeen minutes earlier by American Airlines flight 11. It zooms in on sheets of paper drifting in the heat currents rising from the fire.
Two minutes in, the camera swings around just in time to catch the second aircraft coming in over the water before it slams into the South Tower. Screams of shock can be heard from the crowd in the background.
In a note posted with the video, Westley explained: "I posted this video in the 2000s but accidentally left it private for until now. I noticed the video was private and made it public."
A witness looks back
In a long post, Westley reflected on living through the attack and on his later deployment in the 2003 Iraq war, where he served as an aircraft commander flying combat missions. "In an instant, I saw 2,763 die. 25,000 injured," he wrote.
He also wrote that the man who sat next to him on a flight into Iraq died in a mortar attack the next day. "That was my welcome to Iraq," he said. His conclusion was stark: "In war a piece of our soul is lost on the battlefield and it can never be replaced in this life."
Another image from that morning
One of the best-known photographs from the day shows firefighter Mike Kehoe climbing the North Tower while office workers streamed out. For years many people were amazed to learn that he survived. He recalled that people on the stairs called out "good luck", and that he was frightened even then, before his boss, Roy, radioed that everyone must evacuate. The lobby they reached, he said, "was like Beirut, there was rubble everywhere."
All six members of his Engine 28 company got out safely. Yet 343 of their fellow firefighters died in the attacks, and several of his friends have since died of cancer linked to working in the debris of both towers.
Asked in 2021 why he stayed in firefighting after all of that, he answered simply: "I just love it."
Now the newly public clip sits online for anyone to watch, adding one more view of a morning that people thought they already knew in full.
Image credit: Kevin Westley/Youtube
Source: Daily Express US
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