Transcription Below
James: My name is James Sumner. I was born and raised on Long Island, NY, and lived there most of my life before moving to Middleburgh NY in September of 2012. I served as a Police Officer for 20 years in the Village of Freeport, Long Island – a suburb of NYC with a population of roughly 50,000 people. The Police Department had a little over 100 Police Officers. I worked the night shift, 7pm to 7am.
In response to the World Trade Center terror attack, fifty-two Freeport Police Officers including myself, responded to the World Trade Center site for rescue and recovery efforts. I was there September 13 and September 14.
We left Freeport for NYC early on September 13. We were filled with trepidation and a variety of other emotions on route; we had no idea what to expect but we imagined, rightly, that it would be terrible and beyond belief.
As we got into Manhattan, I was amazed to see crowds of people lining the streets, cheering us and other police vehicles as we drove by. Some people ran up to the cars offering us bottled waters and their best wishes and prayers. That really made an impression on me since police are often not very popular, especially in NYC.
We travelled south in Manhattan towards the World Trade Center site. Southern Manhattan was dark, and we saw an ominous giant cloud of smoke. Here and there in the sky, office papers from the many destroyed offices still fluttered about in the wind. We parked a few blocks away from the site and slowly made our way towards it. There was an awful sense of all the missing people. The thousand we knew to be dead. It was very sobering and heartbreaking. It was shocking to see some crushed fire trucks and other damaged vehicles. The ground was covered in inches of gray dust and debris. The scale of destruction was unimaginable. The main debris pile was about seven stories tall. A few surrounding buildings were heavily damaged and on fire.
We entered the site not far from the winter garden on Vesey St. which was heavily damaged. As soon as we got to the pile we assisted in a bucket brigade removing debris. It seemed like a fruitless task given the size and scope of the destruction. After a few hours of that, we moved toward the area where the wreckage of the Marriot Hotel was near WTC one. The remains of that building were deemed too dangerous at the time to enter, so we dug in the debris in the surrounding area to try to find any survivors – which we knew to be unlikely.