Never forget what this footage actually shows.
These men are not watching from a safe distance. They are standing at the base of the burning towers on the worst day of their lives. For 343 of them, it was the last. They looked up as people jumped.
Then they tightened their straps and ran toward the buildings.
America once understood that.
We watched in horror and called them heroes without hesitation.
That clarity faded.
The same firefighters, police, and first responders who still run toward the fire, the gunfire, and the wreckage are now second-guessed and disrespected by the society they protect.
They never stopped running toward the danger.
We stopped being worthy of it.
With the 25th anniversary days away, honor them. Remember them. Do not let this become just another clip.
The clip is the north face of the South Tower in the last minutes before it dropped. A yellow-orange stream falls in a coherent ribbon with sparks, not as thin silver drips. Office fires do not reach the melting point of structural steel, and molten aluminum is runny, pale, and does not throw iron sparks. The color, thickness, and sparking match iron near 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what a thermite reaction yields when it reduces rust to liquid iron.
NIST said the pour was aluminum from the airframe mixed with burning furnishings. That claim fails the film. Aluminum would not hold a thick column or glow that orange at office-fire temperatures, and NIST never published a matching pour test. Steven Jones and Niels Harrit found red-gray chips in the dust with the layered structure of nanothermite. When heated, those chips produced iron-rich microspheres of the same kind recovered from the debris.
The footage runs in the final window before the South Tower came down, not at first impact. That timing fits a cutter charge already eating a column so liquid iron could leak through a hole in the skin. The purpose is not decoration. Thermite severs steel quietly where a high explosive would be heard on every floor. The pour is the waste product of that cut reaching the facade.
This is the only clear footage of an interior demolition process besides the detonations themselves. After the drops, firefighters and recovery crews described molten metal in the pile like a foundry, glowing for days and weeks, not minutes. Dozens of those men said it in oral histories and interviews. Paper and furnishings do not stay liquid in a rubble mound that long.
Taken together, the ribbon on the face, the chips in the dust, the spheres, and the long-lived pools in the pile are one process. Planes opened the story. Something hotter than office fire opened the columns. The video is that process leaking into daylight before the rest of the building was released on a clock.
@grok did molten iron pour out of the South Tower?
In 1993, Rick Rescorla walked through the smoking crater in the World Trade Center basement and wrote a report no one wanted to read.
He warned that the towers were still a target. He warned that the next attack would not be a truck.
It would be a plane.
Morgan Stanley listened, but breaking the lease on twenty-two floors of prime Manhattan real estate would cost hundreds of millions. They stayed.
So Rick made a choice: if they couldn’t leave the building, they would learn to survive it.
He instituted mandatory, unannounced evacuation drills. High-powered executives who billed thousands by the hour complained about trudging down concrete stairwells. Rick didn’t care. He drilled them relentlessly, two by two, keeping one side open for first responders. He knew that when terror struck, muscle memory was the only cure for panic.
On September 11, 2001, the North Tower was hit. Minutes later, building announcements echoed through the South Tower: The building is secure. Return to your desks.
Rick picked up a bullhorn and defied the order.
“Get out,” he said.
He launched the evacuation before the second plane ever hit. As thousands spiraled down the dark stairwells, Rick sang old Cornish battle songs and “God Bless America” through his megaphone to drown out the terror.
When United 175 tore into their tower seventeen minutes later, Morgan Stanley was already halfway home.
Of the 2,687 employees in the South Tower that morning, 2,674 made it out alive.
Rick was already safe on the lower floors. But he turned around and went back up. When colleagues begged him to save himself, he told them he would leave only when he was certain every single soul was out.
He was last seen heading up past the 10th floor.
At 9:59 a.m., the tower fell. Rick was one of the 13 who never came home.
He trusted his gut when the world told him he was paranoid. He broke protocol to save thousands of lives. And when his mission was done, he walked straight back into the fire.
Remember Rick Rescorla.
Post 4: I REMEMBER 9/11 Series.
After both Airliners crashed into both Tower 1 and Tower 2 WTC.
Many of us stood on that block staring up in disbelief, trying to comprehend what has taken place.
The amount of confusion anger anxiety hopelessness and the determination to do something was staggering.
I witnessed hundreds of FDNY, NYPD along with FBI personnel rushing towards those buildings and trying to make sense of what we were seeing.
Some of us that day witnessed almost 100 people that chose to jump to their death rather than being burnt alive. The sights, the smells, and the sounds will be with me to my last day on earth.
No one could have imagined the horror when they collapsed.
NEVER FORGET 🇺🇸 09/11/01
Eyewitness Account Videotaped
September 11, 2001:
Kei Sugimoto, a 24-year-old Japanese guy, filmed it from a rooftop about 3 km from the towers.
23 years later he found the deteriorating tapes and published them. A witness archive almost disappeared forever.