New Sept 11 photos released

I noticed the headlines online today about new Sept 11 photos being released, but I didn't manage to click though to them until just now. They were released by ABC News, which obtained them via the Freedom of Information Act. They were taken by a police helicopter in the air that day. I do remember the helicopter: at one point I thought it was going to try to rescue people from the tower, and then I wondered if it had crashed into the second tower when it was hit.



These certainly offer a different vantage point from any of the photos I'd seen before. And it's kind of terrifying. The one above lets you see exactly how close we were when the planes hit. If you look in the lower right hand quadrant and see a park, then look just above that where you can see a flat square building with an enclosed courtyard, that's the girls' school.



You can see it in this one too, but now it's in the lower left corner. When this happened we were already gone from the school of course, but we were only a few blocks to the east, near City Hall. When the building fell we thought we were being bombed. We just turned around with the crowd and ran. Before long we were surrounded by people covered in white ash and dust.



And in this one you can actually see the building we lived in. The pointy building in the foreground is the Woolwoorth Building. In the upper left corner you can see the East River, over by the seaport. Our building is the second tower in, if you come in from the corner and move down at a diagonal. We wouldn't be back there, of course, for several weeks.

You can find the rest of the photos here.