Richard Picciotto, a 29-year NYFD battalion commander trapped in the WTC rubble after the South Tower’s collapse (May 2002), recounts evacuating 50 disabled individuals and survivors from stairwells A, B, and C while fearing over 100 feet of debris buried them. His book, Last Man Down (300 pages), details structural failures and communication breakdowns, including the Pentagon attack and reports of more planes. Picciotto dismisses Saudi-specific blame but warns future high-rises could become targets again, advocating for smaller memorial-focused buildings instead. The attacks exposed systemic vulnerabilities, proving even meticulous planning couldn’t prevent tragedy—yet resilience, not revenge, defined the response. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, in whatever time zone you may be residing in at the moment.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
And I'll tell you, we have had a year.
My family has really had a year.
And I come to you this night with one hour's sleep since actually, since you last heard me.
And then, of course, all the time before that.
So, I haven't been to sleep in a long time.
Maybe one hour of sort of sleep.
Almost sleep.
Here's what happened.
During the program last night, as you know, taking back, you may recall I had this really horrible, mysterious fever that they still have no idea, really, frankly, what it was.
They don't know.
It came, it ravaged for two weeks on end, and then it went.
Now, about eight days into this odyssey of having this incredible fever, my wife caught the fever too, which to me suddenly said, it's not the darkest things the doctors might think it might be.
It's not that.
It's a virus, some kind.
Still, they have no clue.
It just brought a fever, nothing else.
Well, my wife got it eight days in.
She still has it.
And during the program last night, she began to have an asthma attack.
She has real serious asthma.
And it went on during the program last night.
And then when I got off the air, it really took a turn south.
And she couldn't breathe.
And so we immediately began what we do when she has asthma.
And we gave her theopolin, which is a drug she takes for asthma.
Of course, the rescue inhaler, she also takes pregnisone when it's really bad.
And so we started on all of that right away.
And it went on and on and on, all night and all day.
And at one point last night, she started turning color, started turning blue.
And we were rushing to call the ambulance.
But here in Toronto, Nevada, we don't have a hospital.
So if you call an ambulance, all they can do is take you to Las Vegas, which is about an hour away, 40 minutes maybe in a speeding ambulance.
I don't know.
No, more like an hour to the hospitals.
And so we were that close, you know, and we just did all kinds of things to try to get her air.
And it began breaking just a hair, enough so that I didn't pick up the phone and call the ambulance.
And I just gave her massage after massage after massage for, you know, muscles that were contracted and really sore and bad.
And then this morning, I began a trek to get her oxygen, and I did.
I got her some oxygen.
And that's helped a lot today, too.
So some of the drugs are taking hold, and the oxygen definitely helped.
And so she's better tonight.
But boy, I'll tell you something, folks.
It was really close.
It was really, really damn close.
You spend time with the ones you love because our time here is all coin toss and a dice throw and all the rest of that baloney.
Scary stuff.
Really scary stuff.
So I'm here with you tonight with about an hour's sleep.
In a moment, we'll look at what happened in the world today.
Some pretty interesting stuff, actually.
In the next hour, we're going to hear from a New York Fire Department battalion commander, Richard Pagiotto.
And Richard was in the World Trade Center when it collapsed.
He was in it when it collapsed.
When it came down, and it's some story.
You're going to hear it's really some story as we live with the continued threat of just about everybody for everything and every mass kind of killing that one can imagine hanging over our heads.
But that was yesterday's speech.
In a moment, we'll look at what's going on tonight.
unidentified
*Sounds of the wind*
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2002.
Music By the way, you will not see an updated photograph of me on the website tonight because I look like hell.
Unshaven, unkempt, unwashed, and having come through quite a battle.
I'll tell you.
All right, what's going on in the world?
Well, this is incredible.
Bones found in a Washington park today are, we now know, the remains of Chandra Levy, the federal intern who disappeared about a year ago, right?
Police announced all this today.
The police chief said the identification was made through dental records.
This is incredible.
Levy's disappearance riveted the nation for months, contributed to the political demise of her hometown congressman, Representative Gary Condit.
Discovery of her remains did not end the mystery of her death.
Ramsey said the manner and cause were still unknown.
The remains, get this now.
This is what gets me, and I don't understand.
The remains were discovered in Washington's Rock Creek Park by a man walking a dog.
Now, those of you who follow the predictions correction, the seeings of Major Ed Dames, may say, well, then he was wrong, and he may be.
It's not where he said they'd be.
But there's a couple things about, and he may be wrong, but there's a couple things about this that don't make sense to me.
Go back with me a little bit, if you will, and remember the whole Chandralevy thing.
Didn't they have like hundreds, if not thousands, of police and volunteers and dogs going through these parks?
You know, dogs that are trained to go for bah-human bodies.
They can find them.
And didn't they comb park after park again and again and again and again?
And then some guy walking a dog finds her, you know, remains that have to be identified.
They're so far gone by dental records.
I tell you, something's wrong here.
Probably.
I guess it could be that they all could have missed this body, this decaying body.
They could have missed it, but it doesn't seem logical to me.
Maybe it's the way it happened.
I don't know.
After a Senate panel voted to issue subpoenas today, the White House turned over summaries of dozens of contacts between Bush administration officials and Enron execs.
No instance has yet been found of any Enron person asking anybody in the White House for help before Enron's bankruptcy last December.
So this story is going to be with us for a very long time, this Enron story.
It's what I told you when I first read it.
Another suicide biodex.
Really, they're not suicide bombings, are they?
They're murders.
There's a suicide involved, but they're really homicide bombings, and that's the proper name for them.
Another one in Israel.
He blew himself up in the central Israeli city of Rijon, is it?
R-I-S-H-O-N, late Wednesday night, killing two other people, wounding 27.
It'll probably never stop, huh?
The death toll from a heat wave that has gripped southeastern India, brace yourself, rose to 1,030 Wednesday.
As reports trickled in from remote rural villages, most of the dead were older people, unable to bear temperatures that were topping 122 degrees.
It's the highest one-week death count on record for any Indian heat wave ever.
Said one official, there seems to be no end to our suffering.
Our weather, of course, is changing.
We will have more stories like this.
Here's an interesting story.
L.A. voters, to decide on secession, a panel voted 8 to 1 Wednesday to allow Los Angeles voters to decide whether the sprawling San Fernando Valley, home to 1.3 million people, should be allowed to leave the nation's second-largest city.
The decision puts the measure on the ballot, but the whole thing's probably going to get challenged in court.
Nevertheless, that whole San Fernando Valley area would like to simply secede from Los Angeles.
Leave.
I wonder how it would be different if they did that.
Yet another new iceberg has broken away from the Antarctic.
According to the National Ice Center, this berg named D-17 broke off the Lazarus Ice Shelf, a large sheet of glacial ice and snow extending from the Antarctic mainland into the southeastern Weddell Sea.
The new iceberg is 34.5 miles long and 6.9 miles wide, of the same size as St. Lucia Island in the Caribbean.
Icebergs are named for the quadrant of Antarctica where they appear.
D-17 is the 17th berg reported since record-keeping began in 1976.
You know, that's interesting.
We didn't even begin keeping records of all this until 1976.
Just last week, an iceberg nearly as large as the Chesapeake Bay called C-19 broke away from the Antarctic.
In March, another giant berg broke free in an adjacent area named B-22.
It measured 2,120 square miles.
Oh, my.
That's bigger than the state of Delaware.
So they continue to break away in the Antarctic.
By the way, I should note, and this goes back about a week or so, but the day following Stan Deo's appearance on the program, you may recall he said there was a heat bloom that had appeared over Japan.
Actually, two.
One in the Antarctic, as a matter of fact, and the other over Japan.
And the one in Japan, he suggested, was about to cause an earthquake very quickly.
And I had the news the next day, but you know, it's been so busy that I haven't had time to get it on the air.
Well, there was a moderately strong earthquake which hit eastern Japan Sunday morning.
When was the prediction made?
I think that was Friday night, wasn't it?
So the earthquake occurred Sunday morning.
It was 4.7 and about 50 miles below the ground in the northwest, about 18 miles actually north of Tokyo.
So looks like Stan hit that one right on the head.
There's a picture, if you can find it on the web, I really should have sent the link ahead to Keith of the first meteorite that scientists believe may have come from Mercury.
NWA011 found in the Sahara in December of 1999 was immediately regarded as something unusual.
It clearly had molten, a very molten past, and was formed from lighter materials than most meteorites.
This implies it had once been part of a much larger body.
It was originally classified with a group of meteorites thought to be from an asteroid.
But look at this.
A detailed analysis showed it to be different.
Now researchers believe that it is the first known meteorite from our solar system's innermost planet, Mercury.
Rocks blasted off Mercury by a large impactor would have a difficult journey to reach the Earth, say the researchers, but not impossible.
Nevertheless, calculations show such rocks would be extremely rare to find here on Earth.
NWA011 has an oxygen isotope ratio that indicates it came from a body much larger than a big asteroid.
Japanese researchers say the basalt in NWA011 suggests the body from which it did originate had a core of molten iron with an outer covering of silicon and aluminum that formed a basaltic crust.
And that means a planet-sized body.
It could be Mercury.
So.
There you have it.
Let's move into open lines for what time we have between now and the top of the hour and see what's going on out there.
They certainly have enlisted the help of the Mexican Army in the past.
There's no question about it.
Corruption is pretty vast in Mexico.
I mean, it's the way that business is done down there.
And throughout several other countries, I might add, south of our border, that's the way business is done.
So it could be that.
but that would be if true you know extremely to just one more thing we need to worry about right along with everything else that we've got going right now uh...
we need to be in worrying about our work We need to worry about our border anyway.
Our borders.
And we've got an awful lot of miles of borders.
My God, there's a lot of borders.
And they didn't find Chandra Levy until just today.
i just like can't believe that i again i don't know how many of you are with me on this book They went over them with a fine-tooth comb and dogs and people and hundreds of people searching.
And then a guy walking a dog finds the body just about completely decomposed.
I don't know.
Maybe that's just the way it happened.
Amazing things do occur.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
All right, Bill.
That would be true.
Yes, turn your radio off, please.
unidentified
On my way.
What the lady was just talking about is absolutely true.
A couple of items that have been computer blasted to me here.
John Boyd, Muscle Shoals, Alabama says, heard about the border dispute today with Mexico.
If we can't keep Mexican military generals who are corrupt from firing on border patrol, how secure are our borders to terrorists?
Well, John Boy, you've answered your own question.
They're not.
We have so many miles of border with Mexico and with Canada that the answer to your question is obvious.
They're not secure.
And I'm not going to run over the whole thing I did last night, but as far as I'm concerned, and I've thought this through pretty carefully, one more big terrorist incident, and there's only one way to handle it.
And that's to meet force with force.
You meet force with force.
If you have people arriving at your borders with murderous intent, and that's what we've got, then you act.
You act.
And what I'm referring to is the use of nuclear weapons.
You don't screw around.
You just don't screw around.
This can't be our future.
Suicide bombers, buildings collapsing because airplanes are floating into them, poison chemicals, all the rest of it.
It can't be our future.
That's no sort of future for us and for our children.
So sometimes you've just got to do what you've got to do.
And the Bakaw Valley in southern Lebanon, perhaps the Pakistan-Afghan border area where we know there's a lot of rats, certainly Iraq where they're building things to destroy us by the millions.
Kaboom.
Nuclear devices going off.
That's what I see.
That's the way I see it getting settled.
And I took, you should have seen some of the messages I got today, you can imagine.
But I say, this is it.
We don't screw around with them.
And we don't face, I don't want to face a lifetime of terror for myself and my children and their children, growing worse, more dire all the time, mass destruction of people in cities.
Uh-uh.
No, Sir, we have the power.
We have not used it since the Second World War.
We know what it means.
We know how horrible it is.
And still, having thought that out and knowing all of that and knowing how it might disturb the world, the sensibilities of the world, that we would do such a thing, I say that's our only answer.
That's what it's going to come to.
And I hope before a lot more people die.
On the first time, caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
That's a hard topic to follow, Art.
It's an honor talking to you.
This is Grant calling from Largo, Florida, listening on 970 WFLA.
Well, when you get a cookie notice, that means you're trying to do it too quickly.
You've got to wait like, I forget what it says every half hour or whatever.
unidentified
Oh, okay.
Well, here's my thought.
Instead of the brain being used to store all our information and operating system, RAM, and hard drive, how about if the brain is just the RAM and the operating system and the hard drive is remote somewhere and we're communicating with it constantly, interdimensionally or interdimensionally?
Moreover, whoever is up there in charge of the hard drive, they may be getting really fed up with what's going on down here, and they may be reaching for the reset button right now.
unidentified
Well, that's the point.
I call it a psychic modem, and I think that the idea that we are all inputting to this big thing, I do believe that the people are unique and that everybody is inputting to this.
And then unfortunately, what's going in, you know, garbage in, garbage out.
And it's just a thought.
And I do have a personal website I'd like you to see.
Anyway, I wanted to tell you or talk to you about I used to have a dream as a kid that somehow I was in a khaki uniform.
I could only see through my eyes, right?
Just I couldn't see myself, but I could see my hands and everything.
And I figured that it was sometime during the Pacific War, during World War II.
I used to tell my dad, who had fought in Europe about things, that he went, how the hell do you know that?
I said, Well, I don't know.
Well, anyway, as time went by, my mother, and it was my mother, brother, and father, and my brother died, and my mother was adamant that I not go overseas, being sole surviving son.
Well, after she died, my father signed the papers.
I went over with a SITS of 46, hooked up with the Ameri-Cal Division in 68, 69, and was on a place up by Kwangnim, Kwang Tin Province, and we got overran.
No war stories, but there were only 14 of us.
But during the heights of everything, I heard my mother's voice as clear as a bell, and that's why I wanted to mention this, about if there are spirits.
I heard her voice, clear as a bell, saying, you're going to be all right.
Go this way.
And I did.
And out of 14, well, I was wounded, but out of 14, I was one of four of them that actually was able to walk off the hill.
At the time that it happened, was there any question at all, any question in your mind, even instantly, did I just really hear my mother or did I produce that in my mind?
unidentified
Well, you know, I've thought about that time and time again.
And no, it was my mother's voice.
She was from England originally.
And it was her voice just as clear, as clear as a bell.
All right, well, then you add to the evidence then.
I don't know what to tell you.
It really, really seems to appear.
You see, there's a really good example of a contemporary event.
A lot of times we argue about whether ghosts or spirits or those who are departed, who in some way communicate with us, are just endless tape loops or whether they're really conscious spirits that at some stressful, incredible moment like that get through to tell us what to do.
Or, you know, could it have been inside his own brain?
He certainly didn't think so, did he?
So there must be a hereafter, and there must be a continued consciousness that adds to that evidence.
But what I'm recalling, ma'am, is that they searched every square inch of those parks, like again and again and again.
I saw armies of people and dogs.
How could they have missed it?
unidentified
Well, the only thing is, unless someone had had her there before when they found out that they were searching, they took her body out and brought her back in again after they figured they weren't going to look in there anymore.
Because I find it so hard to believe that they could have missed it.
I mean, I remember watching every single day on the news, just bands and bands of people, you know, arm's length from each other searching these parks with dogs that, you know, are trained to find human remains.
I mean, there are not many instances in which I would, but in this instance, if we are hit again, we should use our own weapons of mass destruction.
And we shouldn't use them on cities.
We don't need to do that.
We can, I think, make a really good demonstration in basically unpopulated areas, at least by innocent civilians.
There are always going to be some killed.
But basically, there are areas in, for example, southern Lebanon that can be targeted, the Pakistani-Afghan border that can definitely be targeted, and certainly in Iraq.
In all those areas, we could use nuclear weapons, I believe.
unidentified
Absolutely.
By the way, how does my evil cell phone sound right now?
Well, the events of 9-11 are ingrained as heavily in the American mind as anything for this entire generation will likely be.
only got a wonder what's ahead still in all these events uh...
to our children and our grandchildren will be seen on videos and probably three d vision or whatever they have by then you know these events uh...
were They changed our nation.
They changed us probably forever.
Big event coming up in a moment is a man, Richard Picciotto, New York Fire Department Battalion Commander.
Actually, he was the highest-ranking firefighter to survive the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Pitch, he's called, I guess, is a 28-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department.
For the past nine years, he's Presided over Fire Department New York's Battalion 11, covers Manhattan's Upper West Side.
In 1993, as a battalion commander assigned to Lower Manhattan, he was the second chief on the scene immediately following the first attack on the World Trade Center, coordinating operations and rescue efforts in the North Tower.
It was there, under those frontline circumstances, that he became keenly aware with the building's entire layout, the substructure of the World Trade Center complex, an insight that indeed served him very well on September 11, 2001.
It's an amazing, amazing story you're about to hear.
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*Dramatic Music*
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2002.
Music Richard, it is an honor to have you on the show.
93, when I got there, which was different from this time, smoke enveloped the whole building because the bomb went off in the sub-basement.
Smoke filled the whole North Tower.
So the evacuation was, it took a lot longer, and people were panicking a little bit more because almost everyone that was coming down had to come through the smoke.
This time, in the North Tower, the plane hit on the 93rd floor, and anyone below that came down in relatively clean air.
And they were able to proceed much faster because they weren't coming down in the smoke.
Did you know I this is something to ask since you were involved in what happened in 93 did you expect I mean you must have known at that point they wanted that building.
That they would try again, especially not in the same fashion because they closed the parking lots, the public parking lot.
What they did the last time is they just drove a panel truck filled with a bomb, fertilizer, and they just parked it in the parking lot underneath the World Trade Center.
That's been closed off.
You're not allowed to do that anymore.
There's no public parking in the trade center.
So that, after it was eliminated from them, obviously they had other ways of doing it like they did.
I don't think anyone foresaw that hijacked planes would run into the trade center.
There's a big argument going on about that right now, actually.
But really, I sure didn't think about it, and I'm sure a lot of other people didn't think about it, and obviously you weren't thinking that was going to happen.
There were people above, you know, on the fire floor, stuck above, and the immediate minutes after smoke was coming up, heat was coming up, and they couldn't get down.
And they were doing what they were trying to do, calling 911 or the fire department and asking for help.
Yeah, I think people in the World Trade Center were to into a bomb being there because of 93.
And then that's what happened, too.
When the plane hit the North Tower, people immediately in the South Tower started evacuating.
At one point, they say, you know, it's before I was out there, some building personnel told the people in the South Tower that it was okay to stay because the emergency was in the North Tower.
You're a fireman, so your first, I would think your first assessment when you arrive on a scene would be, you know, strategically, how do we go at this?
I saw it like most people on television when it first happened, turned on television, saw the first tower.
And from that point on, I'm saying, you know, what do we do?
If we're down there, what do we actually do?
From the beginning, it was almost impossible to put out a fire of that magnitude in a high-rise building.
If a plane, if a jet like that crashed in the middle of a field next to a lake that we had an unlimited water supply, it would still be tough to put the fire out because it's jet fuel burns, very intense.
You know, you could surround and protect the exposures, but actually putting the fire out would be a very daunting task.
Hopefully, what I was thinking on the way down and even as I was going up the stairs, if we could possibly, if the stairwells are still intact, that the plane didn't pierce one of the stairwells, one of the three, we could try to contain, just, you know, contain that stairwell, beat the flyer back, you know, have one stairwell, at least one stairwell viable that people could get down and we could get up to try to help them.
It sounded like something was literally crashing through the building I was in, floor by floor, from above, like a huge boulder or a bomb was dropped and was just crashing through the floors.
So we did finally pick up a transmission that the tower came down, the whole building came down.
So at that point, a few things flashed through my mind.
the first thing is i realized that there were hundreds of firemen in that south tower um and i lost you know i immediately lost a lot of friends a lot of people who i know along with a lot of civilians died um then my I suppose the psychology was that, you know, like the Titanic, it just can't happen.
And well, you know, we never had a collapse of a high-rise building in the history of New York or to that extent, I don't think, in the history of the world.
So it was something that was, you know, I won't say it wasn't considered because we did consider, you know, people were considering the effect of that heat on the metal structure of the building.
What they were considering as an isolated collapse, a couple floors maybe collapsing.
I don't think anyone considered the pancake collapse that actually did happen, the total devastation that happened.
That wasn't considered in the initial stages.
Later on, it was being considered by some of the chiefs down in the command post or the new makeshift command post.
Some terrorist somewhere must have had an extremely good structural engineer who knew exactly the way those towers were put together and exactly how much heat would be generated from the jet fuel that would be burning and what would happen.
I was going back to 1993 and saw the devastation the bomb did and said, well, you know, they got a more sophisticated bomb or a few bombs and they took the building down.
And then I said, well, they probably have the same plans for the North Tower, the tower I was in.
So we already evacuated most of the civilians out in the North Tower.
The North Tower was the first tower hit.
So I gave the order to evacuate, to get all the rescue workers out, all the firemen out.
And that's why it's a big decision, because we've had literally hundreds of people working their way up.
And when I make that call, they stop and now they're working their way down.
That's what happened for the people who heard.
Because I gave it over to radio.
And I also had a bullhorn.
I went to all three stairwells and yelled up the stairwells to try to get people that were further up to make sure they heard it or hope that they heard it.
I've talked to a lot of people who heard it and said thank God they heard it because they didn't know what was going on.
There were people above me.
I was on the 35th floor.
There were people above me.
I don't know how high the fly even got because I wasn't up there, but I do know there was some high than 35 into the 40s that heard the order and they evacuated.
I was going down the stairwell, and because now everyone's going down the same, you know, the three stairwells, It was, you know, we weren't running, we were just orderly going down.
And I was trying to clear every floor on the way down, being, you know, literally being the last man down.
I didn't want to leave anyone behind on any floor.
Most of the people were leaving, but occasionally there were people still in their floors or at their desks.
I ran into one guy at his desk.
He was working at his computer, and I tell the story in the book how when I yelled to him, he put his hand up and told me he was doing something important.
And I gave him an incredible look and yelled at him again, just, you know, we're leaving.
Now, this is over an hour after a plane had hit his building.
And he didn't even look at me the second time, just put his hand up to shake me off.
So I marched over to him with a few firemen in tow, and I just grabbed him by the lapels, yanked him out of his seat, and kind of tossed him to the fireman and said, if he doesn't walk down the stairs, throw him down.
He looked at me with this, I had a look in my eye that, and the firemen had looks in their eyes that they would have thrown him down.
So he just scurried away, like incredible that anyone would dare touch him.
I mean, I came across firemen that were reluctant to leave because some of them were slow going on their way up and their companies like, you know, were going a little faster than them.
You know, they were taking a break and they wanted to wait till their company got down.
Whatever brought the other one down, I didn't know if it was, you know, like I said, I initially assumed it was a bomb, but it could have been a third plane hit or, you know, I didn't think that it was actually structural failure due to the flying, you know, the way it actually was.
But, you know, it really didn't matter why it came down.
The reason, you know, to me is it came down and this one could come down also.
Right, pushing up, you know, I wasn't going to let anyone stay behind on any floor, and I could say from the 35th floor on down, when we were at the floors, we left no one behind.
I know there were people above us that were trickling down as we were going.
So there were people above us, but they were trickling down the stairwell as we were going.
Some horrendous stories that I could go into how a company split because some of them tried to go down.
Say a company was on the 15th floor, almost to the 15th floor.
So they didn't want to go back up to the 16th to go down.
So they're going to, you know, they're waiting for the 15th for that to clear out.
But if they would have gone to the 16th, which a company split, one of the companies I know split, and some guys, you know, ran up to 16 and ran across on 16th to get to B and then went down B. And, you know, when I'm talking about a company, I'm talking about a company of firemen.
Right.
And half of the guys lived and half of them didn't.
You know, that's the last they saw each other in one of the stairwells when they split, some guys, you know, going down different ways.
Eight seconds for that building to collapse on top of them.
Now, I saw, like you all did, I saw the zillion tons of wreckage, and I would not imagine how anybody, anybody on the seventh floor or whatever could come out alive.
We're going to find out how.
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up
If you could read my mind, love, what a tale my thoughts could tell.
Just like an old-time movie, about a ghost from a wish him well.
In a castle dark or a fortress strong, with chains upon my feet, you know that ghost is me.
And I will never be set free.
As long as I'm a ghost, you can see.
If I could read your mind, love, what a tale your thoughts could tell.
Just like a paperback novel, the kind of drugstore sell.
When you reach the part where the heartaches come, the hero would be me.
The hero of the field.
Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
My guest is a New York Fire Department Battalion Commander, the highest in command, one of the World Trade Center buildings, when it came down on top of him.
That's exactly where we were in the story.
Eight seconds it took that building to fall.
Richard Piggiotto has written a book called Last Man Down.
And that's in the literal sense.
He was the last man down with the building.
And we'll continue with that story.
You might want to check out, you definitely might want to check out his book on my website.
There'll be links over to Amazon.com and so forth.
We'll get right back to, uh, to Richard.
unidentified
Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2002.
Because the way it was, once I realized the other one came down, and it's actually funny because some of the guys that I was trapped with, we were, you know, I'll go into it in a minute, didn't realize that the first building had actually come down.
Well, we've all, you know, everybody has seen the pictures a million times of that wreckage, and it does not seem possible to me that anybody, period, could have survived being inside that building when it came down.
Well, what happened is in the stairwell where we were, the stairwell stretches from a little bit above the lobby because where the lobby was was crushed, so a little bit above that, maybe half a floor above, till approximately almost the fifth floor of the C stairwell basically was intact.
Now, it wasn't really intact, but it was semi-intact.
It was filled with debris.
It was black because it went black almost instantly.
We lost lights and it was filled with debris, like the stairs were torn aside in some places.
The landings weren't there.
Some places they were.
It was almost like a funnel or a cave.
But in this one little air pocket or void were 12 firemen, myself being one of them.
It was this woman, Josephine, which I didn't talk about before how I came across this group of people.
If you want, I'll explain some of that.
Yeah, sure.
And this one Port Authority cop.
We were all in this one void.
We were the last people to leave, you know, getting out of the building.
And we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
There was a lot on top of us, but what happened, most of the debris spread out, and I don't know if you saw pictures recently of that big excavation.
The towers were sitting in the middle of this big, big hole.
They had a sub-plaza and a mall.
And when the towers fell, they spread out.
So the debris, even though you had 100 floors of towers, the debris filled in this big area.
They call it the bathtub.
And, you know, I don't know how, because it didn't happen in the South Tower, but in the North Tower, just one little area remained standing with debris all over us.
There was, you know, some people responded, others didn't.
Some people were hurt, some people were in shock.
So I identified myself.
I'm Rich Picciato, Fire Department Battalion Chief.
And then other people started identifying themselves, and they were mostly firemen.
some of the firemen carried their flashlights in straps around their shoulders or around their waist.
Those of them that did turn their lights on, and then through all this dust and darkness, you know, we could see a little bit of rubble that was all around us.
But one of the guys below, when he turned his light on, he found my light that I was holding in my hand, and I must have dropped in the process so that I had a light.
Then basically, once we knew people were there, I told everyone, just stay where you are.
We don't want to bunch up, we don't want to move, we don't want to cause a secondary collapse.
On the way down, after we were filtered to the B stairwell, I was still trying to do a quick sweep of every floor.
And on the 12th floor, when I did a quick sweep, there were five men there and that directed me also and said, Chief, we've got a problem in here.
And I go into one office, and there were approximately 50 people in this office, just sitting there, just stunned and just sitting at desks, sitting on desks.
And I'm looking at them and say, you know, this is another surreal experience.
What are they doing there?
What it was, these people were, most of them were handicapped and non-ambulatory.
They were in crutches, wheelchairs, walkers.
They were the real slow ones to get out of the building.
And most of the people, as they got out, passed them.
So it was approximately 20 people like that and maybe another 30 people that were helping them.
And when they got to the lower floors, after the first tower had collapsed and the stairways filled up with debris, they couldn't get by.
So they just started congregating on the 12th floor.
They, you know, met, started talking, and just sitting in an office, waiting for someone to come and help them.
We came by.
And once I realized what happened, I took all the helpers and got them out, had firemen, escort them to the B stairwell.
And then we started taking the wheelchairs and the walkers and whatever, doing what we had to do, putting them in chairs or carrying them, assisted them also.
Josephine was at the end of this group.
That's the woman that we were caught with.
And we were assisting her, walking with her, half carrying her, what we had to do.
And I was pushing everybody, trying to get everyone.
Josephine was going agonizingly slow.
The first few floors, it didn't matter because we were all going slow.
It was like a conga line.
You're only going as slow as the line could go.
But then when we got to a couple of lower floors, like half a landing opened up, then a full landing would open up between us and the people in front of them.
And I'm telling the company that had Josephine, I said, pick her up, get a chair, put her in, we've got to go faster.
Because I'm coming down from the 35th floor, now I'm down to the lower floors.
I said, okay, a couple more minutes, we're out of this building.
And that's, you know, all I wanted to do was get out of that building.
did you have any way of knowing how much debris was around you in other words where you were totally hopelessly buried or there was some No, I knew what tower I was in.
Well, I thought, like I said, my mind had 100 thoughts a minute.
One of them was previously we had a fire last Father's Day, the Father's Day fire, they called it, where we had three firemen in a two-story building that collapsed in Queens.
They were alive.
They were in the basement.
We had radio contact with them.
And we couldn't get to them in time.
Because any type of collapse and any type of rescue is a hand operation.
You can't bring heavy machinery in because if there is a void, you bring a bulldozer or a crane on top of it.
My guest, New York Fire Department Battalion Commander, Richard Pichiota, and he's the last man down.
Where did we leave off?
Well, he was entombed.
He and it turns out 13 others, I guess total of 14, were entombed in what he certainly thought and had every right to think was an area, some little void with hundreds, you know, a hundred floors above him, collapse on top of him.
And that's entombed forever.
It really is.
And that's certainly what you would think.
You'd have no reason to believe anything else at all.
And if it was a lesser number of floors, if you imagine some Collapse outward.
There would still be 50, 60 floors collapsed on you.
There would be no way out of that.
And that's sort of where we will pick up here in a moment.
Stay right where you are.
unidentified
Stay right where you are.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22, 2002.
Coast to Coast AM You noticed it was an extra commercial in there, my.
My sleep-deprived mind missed one a little bit earlier, so you did get an extra one there.
All right, well, so we're back in this building, in this void, in the black, in this impossible area, and you're just radioing another chief, you say, and you're in contact.
He wants to know what building you're in.
I presume you immediately tell him which building.
But I can't imagine how did the communication go from there?
Yeah, it was, you know, I was happy to finally make contact with anyone.
Of course.
But then, you know, when he's the first thing he's telling me, they have no idea where the North Tower was or is, you know, I could just picture what kind of devastation is out there where you don't know where a 110-story building was.
And we were all, there wasn't a lot of small talk.
And not where I was anyway.
A little bit above me, there was another whole company, Six Truck, with a good friend of mine, Jay Jonas, who was the captain of that.
And he's a friend of mine, and we didn't even see each other face to face for a long time because we didn't want to take the risk of climbing up or down.
And his company was taking care of the woman, Josephine.
So there wasn't a lot of small talk.
And I was focused mainly on the communications out.
What happened then is we were laying there in the dark, and I told everyone to shut off the flashlights, too, because if we kept them all on for, you know, in a couple hours, they'd be gone.
Well, when they got to us, they were at the bottom of this rubble, and we were on this, you know, this high part.
Right.
We did have a rope with us, a lifesaving rope that we carried.
And basically, I tied a rope around myself, and I used a rope to climb down, you know, from point A to B to C and tied the rope off at various spots.
And then the other guys behind me could use that rope as a hand guide to help them climb down.
And then the guys at the bottom used the same rope to climb up, and they were able to relieve us to take care of Josephine and the injured guys and dig for the other two guys.
Then, you know, a couple other things were going on.
The area where we were was outside was Secret Service bunker.
And so they had small arms, ammunition, and, I don't know, grenades or whatever the hell were going off during this.
And the guys that came in, Mark Ferand directed another company, 43 Truck, to come into us.
They came in through Five World Trade Center.
That's eventually how they came in.
And that building was on fire when they came through it.
When we tried to extract ourselves, the way they came was cut off by fire, so we couldn't go out that way.
Some of the previous ways that they tried to get to, we couldn't go that way.
So we kind of just had to hunt and peck on the way out, like try this way, try that way, try a different way, until we eventually just climbed over the rubble up and down these tremendous mountains of rubble.
And that was almost an hour just to get out of the rubble field.
Actually, Chief, are you aware that they have actually measured the energy in the planes hitting the buildings, then the buildings actually collapsing, which is where all the energy was.
They've measured the amount of energy, and it comes out in kilotons.
Once I got out, that was the first thing they had triage areas set up.
I was just taking bottles of water and pouring it on my eyes.
And then I was directing other people into where, you know, where we got out, 43, the guys that came and climbed up, they remained with the injured, you know, the injured that couldn't move and Josephine and were digging for the other two guys that eventually they dug out.
But I had to get them more help because there's only a couple guys there.
So once I directed more people into them, told them where we were, you know, we were the only survivors, then they, you know, put me in an ambulance, caught me off to the hospital.
trip back in time continues with art bell hosting coast to coast am more somewhere in time coming up i used to be your heart beating for someone but the times have changed Yes, I say the more my work gets done.
Yes, I say the more my work gets done.
We were gonna go all the way, and we never had a doubt.
We were running with the night, playing the saddles.
We touched you at last, till the morning light.
We were running with the night.
We were so alone, you and me.
All we're gonna want, want to breathe.
Giving all we got, we laid it down.
Taking every shot, we took the town.
We were running with the night.
Playing in the saddles.
Just you and I. Girl, it was so right.
Girl, it was so right.
Girl, it was so right.
Premier Networks presents Art Bell somewhere in time tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22nd, 2002.
Running with the Knight and New York Fire Department Battalion Commander Richards Giotto.
And we're going to hit questions now.
You have questions for the chief, and I bet you do about all of this.
This has got to be one of the more incredible stories I've ever heard in my life.
And this is what long-form talk radio is for.
Because you will never hear anything in the kind of detail you just heard it like this in any other media.
That's what long-form talk radio is for.
And certainly we've achieved that.
so if you have questions about what this man went through and or what he thinks now now would be the time and those would be the numbers music The new version of the Coast to Coast AM app is here, now available for Android as well as iPhone.
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Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues, courtesy of Premier Networks.
I've just got a couple of other questions for you, Chief, before we go to the phones.
You know, sort of standout questions.
And whenever anything like this happens, and there's never been anything like this, but I mean, in tragedies where a lot of people die and a few people live, you know, like air crashes, airline crashes, that sort of thing, about couple people walk away or a few there's this big deal the psychiatrists talk about about guilt you know you form it
I mean, our own vice president the other day said another attack is likely.
So I wonder, you know, how you feel.
You said we have to defend ourselves.
We're facing this situation now where our generation, probably our children, I mean, now they're saying, you know, we're going to have the suicide bombers here in America, not if, but when, you know, they're coming.
And there's going to be more of this and awful biological threats and nuclear threats.
And oh, God, it's a different world we live in now.
Since 9-11, it's a whole different world.
And so I wonder how you feel about this.
If we're attacked again, Chief, are you willing to say what you think our response should be?
We have to, you know, there are people, and we know who some of them are.
I mean, there are countries that have said that, you know, if given the opportunity and given the chance, if they had the technology, they'll destroy us.
That's right.
You know, they said it.
If someone's going to destroy my family, I'm going to try to destroy them first.
You know, as far as I'm concerned, there are certain areas of the world.
If we're attacked again, the Bakaw Valley, you know, in Lebanon, where a lot of rats are holding up, and the India-Afghan border area, where a lot of rats are holding up.
And then, of course, there's Iraq that's manufacturing stuff to kill millions of Americans.
I think that we should use every power at our disposal.
And if that means using tactical nuclear weapons and sending a message that will be remembered to some of those areas, then I see that as an option.
Well, it seems to me, Chief, if we just let this go and we have generations now of terrorism and we're going to start living like Israel lives every day, then we need to take extraordinary measures.
Because, you know, we'll start to lose our rights.
I mean, as they clamp down more and more, if it's a slow ratcheting up of terror, then our Bill of Rights is going to be at risk.
It's going to naturally be at risk because we're going to have to clamp down on everything.
I know, first of all, I just want to say we love you in South Texas.
I'm coming from South Texas, McCallan.
And we, I mean, what you did out there and what you guys did out there, it's an honor to know that we have people that are so, I mean, awesome, really.
I just want to let you know.
My question was on September 11th, your title was chief, and being a chief is the highest authority in the fire department.
At the time, did you not want to be the chief, knowing that you had to deal with a lot of decisions, and did you regret any decisions that you made at the time?
And believe me, I went through every decision I made numerous times.
We talked before about that guilt feeling, and that guilt feeling is there, but when I step by step go through every decision I made, I'm happy with every decision I made.
I get asked that a lot, and it was a combination of things.
First of all, after any major incident I'm in, I take notes, I write down what went right, what went wrong, lessons learned, just for future reference, for teaching, and to talk to other chiefs, to talk to firemen, for training.
I did it at the first, you know, at the World Trade Center bombing.
I wrote a lot of stuff that I never did anything with it, just had it, you know, I talked about it with other people.
This time, I was doing the same thing, only I had a lot more stuff to write down.
And then once I started writing, it became cathartic for me to put it down on paper, to get timelines, you know, this happened, when I was doing this, what was other people doing, you know, what was happening after the first hour, I was trying to make discommunications, who was hearing me, who wasn't.
I was doing a lot of data gathering, I'll put it.
But then also in the weeks and months after September 11th, I was attending a lot of funerals and a lot of memorials.
Fire department, especially New York City Fire Department, is a very close community.
I spent 29 years in the fire department.
I know a lot of people.
Stories get out real quick.
A lot of people knew that I was in the building when it came down.
I was trapped.
They knew my story.
So at these memorials and funerals, they were coming up to me and talking, you know, asking what happened.
And I was talking to, you know, I must have told the story hundreds of times, you know, and it'd be, you know, an hour, two hours, three hours talking.
And then a lot of firemen were encouraging me, you know, you really should write this so people, you know, more people know it.
So I was already had, you know, I was writing, you know, not writing a book, just writing what went on.
And then I decided to write a book initially just for firemen.
Coast to Coast AM Well, all right, once again, here we go with the Chief, and we'll try and lay in heavily to the telephones this last segment, if we can, Chief.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Chief Richard DeJoswell.
unidentified
First, sir, I'd like to say thanks for taking my call.
I uploaded two of the pictures that the chief was talking about to Keith.
So they're on the webmaster's site.
One was of the wreckage, or all that was left after the two buildings collapsed was the six or so stories where the void was.
That's one of the photographs that you can see.
and the other one was walking out over the debris field with all the white powder so those two pictures are have been sent to keep just the Yeah, actually, hi, Steve.
There are warnings and there are threats coming in every day, hundreds if not thousands of threats a day.
There are people that have to put some kind of, they have to put them in some kind of order and put some kind of validity on every threat.
I mean, if some crackpot calls up and says that there's a bomb on this place, that place, or the other place, do we just close that place down?
New York City yesterday, they closed down the Brooklyn Bridge for hours because there was a threat of a bomb.
Now, I don't know what the validity of it was, but obviously it was pretty good.
New York City gets threats daily.
New York City gets hundreds of threats a day.
I mean, if terrorists know that they could destroy a country just by making threats, they'll make phone calls every day.
And they do.
we have agencies that do things get get uh...
I'm going to ignore it.
I think it's just, based on the volume of threats that we get, it was unfortunately, it wasn't, you know, it's easy to Monday morning quarterback to say, after, oh, you know, this threat should have been taken seriously.
You know, there was a lesson of World War II, the awakening of the giant.
The Japanese feared that and knew that would happen.
Now, that lesson is well etched in history.
So these terrorists, they knew that they were going to do this.
I mean, they knew that there would be a terrible, they had to know there would be a terrible backlash worldwide, which has, of course, occurred pretty much, excepting some countries, of course.
But, you know, they had to know, and they didn't care.
They did it anyway.
I mean, that's the thing you've got to understand.
They just don't care.
They just want to kill us.
They're the ones that have set the way this is going to go.
And I don't think it can go any other way other than to kill them.
Yeah, I live about 20 miles north of the former World Trade Center site.
Was home that day, climbed a hill here in Yonkers and saw the towers burn.
I don't have to say much more than that.
It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life.
Thousands of people lost their lives in Manhattan.
And here in the Northeast, in the New York metro area, we're grieving the loss of those people and will for a long time.
But at the same time, there are millions of New Yorkers who have also lost something very important, a very important part of the heritage that used to stand proudly in Lower Manhattan.
Now, as you know, there's a lot of controversy going on right now exactly how the World Trade Center site is going to be redeveloped.
Obviously, the centerpiece will be a memorial of some kind.
But at some point in the future, New Yorkers will overcome their fear of super high-rise buildings.
And at that point, a decision is going to have to be made.
Now, obviously, the Twin Towers will never be rebuilt, but do you, as a native New Yorker, and I assume you're a native New Yorker, believe that something, something perhaps like the CN Tower in Toronto or maybe one of the super high-rise designs currently being kicked around now, should be built at the World Trade Center at some point in the future, maybe around the end of this decade, to prove to the world that New Yorkers will not be defeated?
Yeah, I think that definitely should be a memorial.
You know, I think we all agree on that.
It should be a memorial for all the lives that were lost, and there should be a special memorial for the firefighters.
That's my personal opinion.
And then I also believe the site should be rebuilt.
But I don't want to see a target.
And I think if you built a super, you know, a super high-rise, another tower, twin towers, someone's even saying triplet towers, three towers, to show them that way, you know, we're not afraid.
We've had two acts of foreign terrorism on this soil, and they've both been against the World Trade Center.
And I hate to say it, but if we build another target, it'll be attacked.
I don't know when, I don't know where it will be attacked.
I just don't want to see that.
I have no problem building five 50 or 60 story buildings there.