Never-before-seen 9/11 footage to be released to public years after tragedy
Warning: This article contains content which some readers may find distressing.
Never-before-seen footage of the 11 September terrorist attacks and the following hours and days will be revealed in a new archive at the New York Public Library.
Today (11 September) marks 24 years since the horrific terrorist attacks, which have been estimated to have killed over 2,000 people.
On 11 September 2001, four planes were hijacked by al-Qaeda, with two planes hitting the World Trade Centre in New York, while another plane struck the Pentagon.
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Meanwhile, a fourth plane, which was set to hit Washington DC, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers overthrew the hijacker.
Since 9/11, there's been a whole lot of new footage released from people who were there, and now there's said to be an astonishing 500 hours of unseen footage which will be unveiled in a collection called the CameraPlanet Archive.
The footage is said to include scenes of the recovery efforts at Ground Zero.
As reported by The New York Post, footage titled 'Nighttime Recovery' features smoke rising from Ground Zero as first responders desperately search for signs of life.
They are shown using an orange excavator to dig in the rubble, while a firefighter tackles smouldering sections of the wreckage with a firehose.
Other footage features a subway tunnel at Cortland Street Station, close to the World Trade Center. It shows workers trying to repair the blast-damaged subway tunnel, shot on a handheld camera.
Altogether, the archive will feature more than 1,200 hours of video; however, the public won't have access to it until 2027.
Brent Reidy is the director of the research libraries for the New York Public Library.
He told the Post: “By preserving these firsthand accounts, we are ensuring that future generations can study 11 September as it was experienced by New Yorkers in real time."
The vital collection of footage was donated to the library by Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder.
Rosenbaum said: “At a time when misinformation, denialism, and revisionist history circulate widely, timestamped and contemporaneous video records carry renewed civic importance. The CameraPlanet Archive is not simply a record of tragedy; it is a safeguard against forgetting and distortion."
They explain that the archive is 'ensuring that one of the largest primary-source video collections of 9/11 and its aftermath is preserved and made accessible for future generations.'
According to CBS News, the filmmakers were in Manhattan that day, filming a dating show, when the first plane hit the North Tower.
"I said to these seven crews, if anyone needs to go home and be with their family, that's fine. And everyone said no, we're going," Rosenbaum recalled.
"One – I'll never forget – he turned to me, one of the shooters, and he said, 'What do we shoot?' And I said, 'There will be all of these news crews down there. Just look and see where they're pointing, and point in the opposite direction.' And that turned out to be pretty good advice.
"My wife and I have seen more hours of 9/11 footage than any other two people on Earth. I'm positive of this. We still will look at a drive and be stunned at something we've never seen before."
NYPL Curator Julia Golia added: "Archivists have an incredibly thoughtful attention to questions of privacy and violence, and it's a very challenging tightrope that we walk because it is not our job to censor, but it is our job to create structures of safety so that people can watch them in the right environment."
Jen Thomas