NEW YORK — A trove of aerial photographs of the collapsing World Trade Center was widely released this week, offering a rare and chilling view from the heavens of the burning twin towers and the apocalyptic shroud of smoke and dust that settled over the city.
The images were taken from a police helicopter — the only photographers allowed in the airspace near the skyscrapers on Sept. 11, 2001. They were obtained by ABC after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that investigated the collapse.
The chief curator of the planned Sept. 11 museum pronounced the pictures “a phenomenal body of work.” The photos are “absolutely core to understanding the visual phenomena of what was happening,” said Jan Ramirez of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. They are “some of the most exceptional images in the world, I think, of this event.”
“I almost didn’t realize what I was seeing that day,” Greg Semendinger, the former New York Police Department detective who took the 12 pictures posted on ABC’s site, told The Associated Press. “Looking at it now, it’s amazing I took those pictures. The images are . . . stunning.”
The attack and the collapse of the World Trade Center were well documented on live TV and amateur video. But more than eight years after the nation’s deadliest terrorist attack, the images still had the power to shock and disturb. They were an instant sensation on the Internet.
“Some survivors may find these pictures too painful to look at,” said Richard Zimbler, president of the WTC Survivors Network. “But they are an important part of the historical record.”
ABC said NIST gave the network 2,779 pictures on nine CDs. Semendinger was first in the air in a search for survivors on rooftops. He said he and his pilot watched the second plane hit the south tower from the helicopter.
“We didn’t find one single person. It was surreal,” he said. “There was no sound. No sound whatsoever but the noise of the radio and the helicopter. I just kept taking pictures.”
