A previously unreleased video recording of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has been made public in the U.S. The seven-minute video was filmed by 25-year-old New Yorker Tuck Nguyen from the fire escape of her home in Manhattan’s Chinatown, The New York Times reports.
On the morning of September 11, Nguyen was awakened by a loud crash. She described the sound as resembling a truck slamming into a building. At first, she did not realize what had happened, but then she saw smoke rising above the World Trade Center.
She grabbed her MiniDV camera and stepped out onto the fire escape of her apartment, located at the intersection of Essex and Canal Streets, which offered a view of the World Trade Center towers.
Nguyen began filming the North Tower, which was already on fire. Her footage captured the burning skyscraper, black smoke rising over Manhattan, and pedestrians stopping in the street to look toward the business district.
The camera constantly shifted between the towers and the people below. As a result, the recording captured not only the unfolding attack but also the initial reactions of New Yorkers who did not yet grasp the scale of the events.
While she was filming, the second hijacked plane crashed into the South Tower. Nguyen captured the moment of impact and the ensuing explosion from an angle not previously seen in publicly available footage.
The full recording lasts about seven minutes. Throughout this time, the camera remained virtually the only barrier between the person filming and the catastrophe unfolding before her.
After the attacks, Nguyen put the tape away in a safe. For years, she could not bring herself to review the recording, as revisiting the footage forced her to relive the events of that morning. Consequently, the footage was never shared with television networks, archives, or the makers of previous films about the tragedy.
After nearly a quarter of a century, the woman agreed to open the cassette and watch her own footage closely for the first time. The New York Times has published excerpts from the video.
The footage will serve as the basis for a short documentary titled My Fire Escape. The film is being directed and produced by Keith Maitland, with Nguyen serving as a co-producer. The filmmakers aim to present not only previously unseen footage of the terrorist attack but also the impact the experience had on the witness’s life.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four passenger planes. Two airliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers, a third struck the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. The attacks claimed the lives of 2,977 people, excluding the 19 hijackers. Twenty-five years later, a cassette preserved by chance has added a previously unseen perspective to one of the most thoroughly documented tragedies of modern times.
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