Maybe it would be helpful if I just outlined quickly what I did in the first hour or two that morning, why I did it, and then you know, whatever questions that you have.

The morning of September 11, 2001 was a primary day in thecity of New York. The Democratic party and the Republican party were voting to select the next mayor of the city. And I was having breakfast that morning at the Peninsula hotel on 55th Street with two old friends and colleagues, Dennison Young who was my counsel, and Bill Simon who was an Assistant United States attorney who had worked with me.

As we finished breakfast, the police notified Denny, the two police officers that were on my detail that morning, were notified and then they notified Denny Young, my counsel, and Denny walked up to me and he said the following. That it's been reported that a twin engine plane has crashed into the North Tower and there's a terrible fire there.

So I left immediately, walked out into the street, and as I walked out into the street, Denny and I looked up in the sky, and what we saw was a beautiful clear day, about as clear as we had had in a long time, and came to the immediate conclusion that it could not have been an accident, that it had to have been an attack. But we weren't sure whether it was a planned terrorist attack, or maybe some kind of act of individual anger or insanity or some person angry at some business in the building or whatever. But we knew it was an attack.

We began to proceed south as quickly as we could, and maybe this is helpful on the telephonecontact, we started to make telephone contact in order to get more information. I tried to reach all the people the mayor would generally be in contact with at that point including, we attempted to reach the White House and the Governor's office. I was successful in speaking with the Police Commissioner, was able to get through to him on the phone, he gave me an initial briefing. I was able to speak to some members of my staff that gave me information. I was not able to reach the fire commissioner. I was not able to reach the head of emergency services, Mr. Sheirer, we were not able to make a call outside the city, to the White House, which led me to believe that we had to have hard lines available in order to do that.

As we were coming down very, very close to this building, just a few blocks from this building on 6th, we passed St. Vincent's Hospital, and I looked outside and I saw outside many, many doctors and nurses and stretchers. And it registered in my mind that we were looking at a war zone, not a normal emergency. That was probably the first thing that said to me, we're into something beyond anything we've handled before.

A little below St. Vincent's hospital, we could see the fire in the tower, but we saw a big explosion, and we didn't know what it was. We probably concluded that it was just an after effect of the original attack. But within seconds of seeing it, we received a phone call from the police, and were notified that a second plane had hit, and realized at that point that obviously it ws a terrorist attack. We then proceeded another half mile, we were about a half mile to a mile away when that happened, got to about Barclay Street where we could go no further. I got out of the van and I was approached by Police Commissioner Kerik and my deputy Mayor for Operations, Joe Lhota, and they had a group of people behind them. Commissioner Kerik walked up to me, explained to me, and so did Deputy Mayor Lhota how terrible the situation was.

The deputy mayor pointed to the sky and said, people were jumping from the buildings. And I looked up and I thought he was wrong, and I thought I saw debris. And then the Police Commissioner pointed to an emergency truck that was pulling up to in front of 70 Barclay
Street, and he said, that will be our command post. We're attaching hard lines into this building, and we're taking over this building. And they were literally taking people out of 75 Barclay Street and setting up a command post. And I said, is that going to be our main command post? And he said yes, that will be our command post, we'll operate out of there, we've evacuated 7 World Trade Center.


I said okay, I said where is the fire department set up, where are they fighting the fire? He said over on West Street. So we began to walk and talk going toward West Street, which is a block and a half to two blocks away. What we talked about at that point was the Commissioner pointing out to me the other things that he was then doing. He went over a checklist of, we've closed the bridges and tunnels to stop people from coming into the city. We're letting people out, no-one is coming in. That came off a protocol that we had and really the intelligence that we had available, was that was probably the most likely way in which we would be attacked, the bridges and tunnels of New York City. Because they would be--plans for that would be found very, very often when terrorists were arrested.

He then went through a list of buildings that he was covering, we're covering the Empire State Building, we're covering the Stock Exchange, we're covering--went through a whole list of--and he said, I have brought back the entire force, they're all reporting back for duty. We arrived, as we got very, very close to the World Trade Center, one of my police officers said to me, and all of us, keep looking up, keep looking up, because things were falling down around us. And I imagine that was for our own safety. But when I looked up at that point, I realized that I saw a man, it wasn't debris, that I saw a man hurling himself out of the 102nd, 103rd, 104th floor. And I stopped, probably for two seconds, but it seems like a minute or two, and I was in shock.

I mean, I said to the Police Commissioner, that we're in uncharted territory, we've never gone through anything like this before, we're just going to have to do the best we can to keep everybody together, keep them focused. And the Commissioner said that's right, Mayor, that's right.

That was the last thing I saw when I approached Pete Ganci. His operations center, his command center was set up outdoors on West Street, in a position where he could see both towers, where he'd get a view of both towers, which is typically the way a fire is fought in New York City. You set up an outside command post at
least as the advance command post, where you can get the best view available of the fire. And he was there and he was in charge and he had the board in front of him, the board is an attempt to try to figure out where resources are located.

He was accompanied by Deputy Commissioner Bill Feehan, between the two of them they had 80 years of fire fighting experience, and they were the two best. And then off to the corner, I didn't get a chance to talk to him, was Ray Downey, who was the head of our search and rescue effort, and Ray was the best in the country. He trained most of the search and rescue teams and handled a lot of the search and rescue at Oklahoma City.

So we had the very best people there. My first question to Chief Ganci, maybe because of what I had just seen was, can we get helicopters up to the roof and help any of those people? Because I could see people hanging out the windows, and I thought I saw people on the roof. I didn't, I don't think because I don't think there were any people on the roof. But at least my observation was there were people near the top of the building.

And Pete pointed to a big flame that was shooting out of the North Tower at the time, and he said to me, my guys can save everybody below the fire, but I can't put a helicopter above the fire. And he didn't say the rest of it, which was do you see the flame, the helicopter would explode, but by pointing I knew what he was saying. He was saying if I put a helicopter near there, these flames that are coming out unpredictably and the helicopter could just blow. And he did say it would be too dangerous and it would not accomplish the result.

I then asked him if he had everything that he needed and he said yes, and he had a conversation with the Police Commissioner who went over with him how to do evacuations. His concern was to get people out of the area for two reasons, and then he reiterated that to me. He said to me, whatever you do, tell people to go
north, get them out of here.

And then he pointed to south and you could see while he was pointing that things were falling off the building and hitting people, and you could see other bodies that were coming down. That also posed a danger to other people that were on the ground. And it seemed to me that his major concern at the time was that it was very, very dangerous to exit the buildings, and that had to be done carefully, and it had to be done to the north, because it appeared as if the way the debris was falling, the more the damage was going to happen to the south and to the west. And then he wished us well, and I told him I was going to communicate this, and that I would be back. And I shook his hand, and I said, God bless you, and he said the same. I then walked up with, at this point, the police commissioner, the deputy police commissioner, the chief of the department.

I asked my chief of staff who was now with me to get the fire commissioner. He told me the fire commissioner was in the advanced command post inside one of the buildings, I don't remember which one. I said, it's really important that we all be together at the command post so that we can make decisions, get him and bring him to us. And then we proceeded up West Street, two and a half blocks again, back to where we had originally been. On the way up I saw Father Judge, and it was the last time I saw him, and I asked him to pray for us, which he assured me that he was doing, and I shook hands with him.

And then I walked to 75 Barclay Street, I was really brought inside 75 Barclay Street and told this would be our command post, it was set up with telephones, there were police on the phones, and I was brought into a--like a cubicle inner office and told that we had reached the White House.

I had already been informed by my chief of staff that he had reached the White House, and by the police commissioner, who I think had reached the Defense Department, I'm not sure exactly. But both of them had assured me that we had gotten air support, because that's why I wanted to reach the White House. I wanted to make sure that we had air defense for the city, and my chief of staff told me that he was informed by the White House that there were seven planes that were
unaccounted for.

And at this point I knew of two, and I had heard reports that the Pentagon had been attacked, that the Sears Tower had been attacked, and several other buildings. So I got through to the White House, Chris Henick was on the phone, who was then the deputy political director to President Bush, and I said to him, Chris, was the Pentagon attacked?" And he said, "Confirmed." And then I asked if we had air support? I said, "Have you--do we have air support, do you have jets out, because I think we're going to get hit again." He said that the jets were dispatched twelve minutes ago and they should be there very shortly, and they should be able to defend you against further attacks. And then he said, "We're evacuating the White House and the vice president will call you back very, very shortly." And I put down the phone, and within seconds got a call in another room from the vice president. I walked over to that room, picked up the phone, the White House operator was on the phone and said Mr.Mayor, the vice president will be on in a moment.

And at that point I heard a click, the desk started to shake, and I heard next Chief Esposito, who was the uniformed head of the police department, I'm sure it was his voice, I heard him say, “The tower is down, the tower has come down.” And my first thought was that one of the radio towers from the top of the World Trade Center had come down. I did not conceive of the entire tower coming down, but as he was saying that, I could see the desk shaking and I could see people in the outer office going under desks, and then all of a sudden I could see outside a tremendous amount of debris and it first felt like an earthquake, and then it looked like a nuclear cloud.

So we realized very shortly that we were in danger in the building, that the building could come down. It had been damaged. It was shaking. So the police Commissioner and I, and the deputy police commissioner, we jointly decided that we had to try to get everyone out of the building. So we went downstairs into the basement, we tried two or three exits, could not get out, I don't know if they were locked or blocked, we couldn't get out. We went back up to the main floor to see if we could go out the main entrance, but at that point things were worse, there had been more damage done and it was blocked, and then two gentlemen, I believe janitors came up to us and said, there's a way out through the basement, through 100 Church Street. I knew 100 Church Street because that's where the Law Department was located, and we agreed that we would go with him. So we all went downstairs. We walked through the hallway. We got to the door that he had selected. He opened the door and there was sort of a sigh of relief, and when we walked outside we were in the lobby of 100 Church Street.

And then we wondered if we hadn't gone from bad to worse, because when you looked outside at 100 Church Street, what you saw again was a tremendous cloud, debris flying through the streets, and people being injured. And one of our deputy commissioners and one of my former security people were brought in at that point injured, bloodied and injured and obviously in a state of shock from what had happened to them, having been hit by debris.

So the Commissioner and I had to make a quick decision. Do we remain in the building and use that as a place to hold a press conference, to give people information, because there were some press right there? Do we remain here and operate here for a while until the cloud passes, or do we go outside? And the choice that we made was to go outside. And the choice that we made to go outside was because we felt we had, you know, a core of New York City government together at this point: the police commissioner, the head of Emergency Services, three of the four deputy mayors, the commissioner of public health, and that if we went outside we had a better chance of more people surviving than if we stayed in the building where if something happened and the building crashed, you'd virtually have all of city government gone. And we could communicate better from outside, hopefully be able to get through on radio or on television.

So we went outside, grabbed a member of the press. I remember Andrew Kurtzman was the reporter that was there, and I said you know, come with us. And we began making telephone calls as we were marching up, asking people to remain calm, and asking people to go north, which were the instructions that Pete Ganci had given me. And as I was doing that, I would stop and look at how people were reacting. Here I was asking them to remain calm, I was asking them to go north, I wanted to see how were they evacuating the building, and what I saw was very, very inspiring. I saw people running. I saw people fleeing, which is exactly what we wanted them to do.

I wanted to get them out of the area, but I didn't see people knocking each other over. I didn't see people in chaos. I didn't see people in panic. I didn't see people hurting each other which you also would expect might happen. And I actually saw acts of people helping each other. Somebody would be running, see somebody fall down, stop and pick somebody up, and the Commissioner and I did that for one man who was having trouble, and put him in the Commissioner's car.

We were able to get through, and now the sequence gets very, very foggy in my own recollection, I'm not sure what happened in sequence, but very shortly after, maybe two or three blocks north of that, we heard another tremendous noise, realized that the second building had now come down, and saw the cloud from the second building come up the streets. And we're trying to determine at this point whether to return to City Hall or to set up operations of city government at the police academy. And we thought of several other sites. The police commissioner recommended that we use the police academy as our command center, because it had all of the communications equipment and it could be outfitted in minutes to be a command center. And my chief of staff told me that City Hall had been abandoned because it had been hit very, very hard by debris.

So we selected the police academy as our command center. We actually, Senator Kerrey, discussed New School as a place to come because we walked right past here, but because the communications equipment was already there, the police commissioner decided on the police academy. We walked up to the firehouse on Houston Street, which is a few blocks north of here, and decided we'd stop there so we could make telephone calls. The police department broke in, not indicating any rivalry between the police department and the fire department, it was the right thing to do, they were not trying to destroy fire department property.

They broke in, and I was able to get through on the telephone now, first to Governor Pataki who expressed his concern for us because he had heard that we were missing, and thought we had been killed. And then said, you know, what help do you need, and I said, well, we need all the help we can get, and this is beyond anything that we've ever dealt with before, George. And he said I've brought out the National Guard, do you want me to deploy them, do you need them? And I as the mayor of New York City, I think I had always resisted having the National Guard, for reasons that an urban environment is so complex, so difficult. It's difficult enough to police with trained police officers, you really don't want the National Guard. Not because they aren't terrific at what they do but this isn't what they do. But we were in such need at the time, I said absolutely, I need the National Guard and everything else you can send us. And we agreed that they would deploy on Randall's Island so that the police department could train them and deploy them properly, and in essence they could relieve our police officers in the right places.

And then the governor said, you know, I'll meet you, where do you want, where are you setting up, and I said we're going to set up at the police academy, we'll be there in about 15 minutes, and we agreed on something at that point that was very, very helpful. We agreed that we would put our governments together, we agreed that we would in essence sit in the same room in the same place, my commissioners, his commissioners, everybody had to approve things, and we would sit in one room and run the emergency together, and that we would do it at the police academy.

And at that point, I was able to reach the White House and the Defense Department again. I was able to make several other telephone calls to the stock exchange because we thought they had been attacked. I reached Dick Grasso to find out if they had been attacked. We tried to, we had had a number of false rumors of places that were attacked, and the police commissioner was able to make sure that he had deployed his resources to the other places that we assumed we would have secondary attacks. From our briefings intelligence and protocols, we had a group of targets coming out of ten years of analysis of what the terrorists might do, so it was off that list that the police commissioner was deploying resources including ultimately the National Guard.

We then arrived at the police academy and set up a command center at the police academy and the command center at the police academy was complete with everything that we needed, all of the facilities, and were able to have a press conference there about 2:30 in the afternoon in which we could explain to people how the whole thing would be managed from there on in.

Later on I visited the police department, our backup command center, our number two backup command center would have been the police department, 7 World Trade Center was the primary one, the backup was the police academy. The number three would have been MetroTech in Brooklyn which is fully equipped to be a command
center. We made the decision to use the police academy because we didn't want to leave this island, we didn't want to leave Manhattan. We thought it would be a terrible statement if city government left the island of Manhattan.

But then we realized pretty shortly that the police academy was too small, and we selected Pier 92 as our command center. And the reason Pier 92 was selected as the command center was because on the next day, on September 12th, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people here, from FEMA, from the federal government, from the state, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was going to be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there so we were able to establish a command center there within three days that was two-and-a-half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed.

One other point and then I'll turn to questions. When you evaluate the performance of the firefighters and the police officers, in addition to the bravery and the heroics that they demonstrated at the time of initial attack, by standing their ground and rather than giving us a story of men--uniformed men fleeing while civilians were left behind, which would have been devastating to the morale of this country, rather than an Andrea Doria if you might remember that, they gave us an example of very, very brave men and women in uniform, who stand their ground to protect civilians. Instead of that, we got a story of heroism and we got a story of pride and we got a story of support that helped get us through.

The second thing that they were able to carry out through I believe a superb command structure, going from Chief Ganci on down, was a recovery effort that was beyond any expectation that anyone could possibly have. If you had asked me the night of September 11, 2001, how many lives we would lose in the recovery effort at ground zero, I probably wouldn't have told you the number, but I would have said to myself at least a dozen people. We can't put up a building in this city without losing four or five people. And not because they're careless, but because it's exceedingly dangerous.

Well the site at the World Trade Center for 4, 5, 6 months was the most dangerous recovery site probably in the history of this country. There were fires of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit below the ground. I could be standing here and you could be standing there and I could be describing to you, governor, the site and then a fire would break out in between us and it was just by luck or the design of God that we weren't killed. They carried out the mission under great emotion, under great stress, flawlessly. And that's because they have a superb command structure, and a structure in which they know how to deal with emergencies. So I would urge you in evaluating their performance to put it in the context of no one ever has encountered an attack like this. No one ever has had to have dealt with the recovery and search effort or anywhere near this dimension, not to mention the family center that had to be created, which no one had ever even heard of before, a family center, which the Office of Emergency Management had developed with the relief of the people of Flight 800. The family center that they developed and the things that OEM provided for this city.

So I will, maybe I'll make a comment at the end, but I think I've covered most of the things that I want to say and I thank you very, very much for your attention.