Troubling Question About Firefighters

[Stephe96]

As you may or may not know, a controversial new book is alleging that some New York City firefighters were actually caught looting merchandise from various stores on the morning of 9/11.

I have no idea whether or not this is true, but even before 9/11 I recall hearing from fairly reliable people that the looting of burning homes and businesses is, in fact, a fairly common practice among firefighters.

Anyone have The Straight Dope on this topic?

[Whack-a-Mole]

Well, while looting firemen do exist (hey, every group will have its bad apples) the issue cited above seems to be overblown. At the very least, the author admits to not having researched many ‘facts’ and only reported what he was told (so he says).

**Langewiesche back-peddles and double-speaks to defend his factual errors in American Ground: **

Langewiesche claims he “did not personally check out many stories he heard… ‘I’m not a truth squad as far as 9/11 goes… I’m a reporter. I was interested about what people really believed. My readers understand that and have understood that for years.’” (Newsday, 11/19/2002, p. A8)

SOURCE: WTC Living History Project Response

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Apparently this is the specific allegation.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?reportID=61063&storyID=3007420

Author’s debunking of NY fallen heroes causes outcry

03.12.2002
By ERIC BURROUGHS

…The book includes allegations that firefighters, who lost 343 of their own, looted jeans from a Gap store before the buildings fell.

< snip >

The biggest controversy surrounds Langewiesche’s description of workers finding new jeans in one fire-engine being dug out of the rubble, suggesting looting began even before the towers fell.

< snip >

The writer says editing included a tortuous five months of fact-checking.

Googling and Googling, Googling and Googling…

Ah ha! Finally.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/21/national/main312056.shtml

Looting Reported At WTC

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2001

(CBS) Some stores in a retail concourse beneath one of the World Trade Center buildings were looted, the New York Times reported Friday.

The newspaper said the thefts were almost certainly carried out by rescue workers searching for survivors in the rubble of the 110-story twin towers.

In a related development, there were also some reports of looting at Battery Park City, an apartment complex near the World Trade Center. The apartments were evacuated after the terrorist attack on the twin towers.

The Times’ account of looting at World Trade Center 5, a building near the twin towers, was based on interviews with New York National Guardsmen on duty at the structure.

The newspaper said the looters had taken items from a watch store, raided cases of designer sunglasses in another shop, tried to pry open at least one cash register and penetrated the service room behind a row of bank automated teller machines, where steel safes appear to have prevented them from making off with cash.

Same basic facts reported here, with some details added.

http://www.photius.com/feminocracy/wtc_looting.html

September 21, 2001

UNDERGROUND
Looting Is Reported in Center’s Tomblike Mall
By C. J. CHIVERS

…Guard officials have exercised painstaking care not to blame any particular group of rescuers, saying the thieves could have come from any number of agencies working under the rubble.

“They could have been police officers, they could have been firefighters, they could have been contractors or National Guardsmen,” said Captain Heintz, who is also a rackets prosecutor in Mr. Morgenthau’s office.

Guard officials noted that it was virtually impossible for civilians to reach the underground area, which is at the center of rings of security, immersed in darkness and cluttered at many points with hanging or leaning rubble.

They said they had little doubt that the thefts were conducted by people familiar with the ground and equipped to carry out the crimes with speed and confidence. “It was calculated,” said Second Lt. Peter Fluker, Company C’s second platoon leader. “It was done with crowbars and heavy equipment and some sharp, blunt objects that were used to smash open big doors and jewelry cases. They were rescue workers of some sort.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1558574.stm

Saturday, 22 September, 2001, 21:49 GMT 22:49 UK
World Trade Center looters arrested

Two people have been arrested for looting $3,700 worth of watches from a jewellery shop in the shopping arcade beneath the World Trade Center, police in New York said.

The pair, a former New York corrections office, posing as a police officer, and his friend, were arrested last week on charges of burglary, grand larceny and criminal impersonation, a police official said.

They had been working as volunteers in the disaster area when they allegedly took the watches.

New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said that no other shops have reported looting, but he did say that some of the rescue workers at ground zero had themselves fallen victim to theft.

And then there’s this.
http://www.warsawvoice.pl/v457/News00.html

Pick Up a Sandbag and Help!’

As floodwaters move down the Oder River and government agencies dither, the battle to save threatened cities is being fought by individuals.

The great flood of 1997 revealed the bitter truth about the government’s competence (or rather, lack of it) on both national and local levels. The opposition is lambasting the government, which in turn is arguing that natural disasters of this scale are unpredictable.

< snip >

Profiteers, fake volunteers and ordinary thieves took advantage of the chaos. “At night you could hear shop windows being smashed,” one Wroc³aw resident told a local radio reporter. “Bands of thieves swam from store to store and took whatever they could find.” Police did not confirm these reports, nor others of people claiming to be rescue workers who instead looted evacuated homes.

Annnnd…that’s about all I can find on rescue workers looting, whether at the WTC or just generally. Looks like either it doesn’t happen, or it happens but they don’t get caught, or it happens and they get caught but it just doesn’t get posted on the Web.

[Colibri]

Here is a link to a column by NY Daily News columnist Michael Daly, published on Nov. 24 of this year:

Facts and logic thwart ugly rumor of looting

. . .

[Ladder 4’s] crumpled rig had been found in December, having plunged five levels below the street. A Federal Emergency Management Agency video of the rig’s recovery shows that a wide area of the surrounding debris was laced with jeans, almost certainly from the destruction of the Structure store that had been at that end of the concourse level.

Afterward, an ugly rumor persisted, even though it defied the simplest logic. Writer William Langewiesche reported it as fact first in the Atlantic Monthly and then in his book “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center,” stating that the rig’s crew cab was “filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from the Gap.”

. . .

Langewiesche does not name the “particular crew” but he can be referring only to Ladder 4. He would have us believe these firefighters parked their rig as close as possible to the command post, walked to a Gap store 300 yards away, trudged back with armloads of jeans past hundreds of injured civilians, and risked death from falling debris to stash their loot within clear view of their supervisors.

I would agree with Daly that it defies credibility that firefighters could possibly have been engaged in looting before the towers fell. There was simply too much going on in too short a time for that to have been possible.

However, I think it is pretty certain that at least some looting went on by some rescue workers on subsequent days. Whether or not that included any firefighters, I dunno. My brother, who works for the City, worked on the clean-up at Ground Zero for a couple days after September 11 and says that he saw some looting by construction workers.

[SmackFu]

Whack-a-Mole’s and Colibri’s cites are from the web site of the main critic of the book (Rhonda Roland Shearer). Just saying.

Slate article on the subject: Lay Off Langewiesche

[Colibri]

*Originally posted by SmackFu *
**Whack-a-Mole’s and Colibri’s cites are from the web site of the main critic of the book (Rhonda Roland Shearer). Just saying.

Slate article on the subject: Lay Off Langewiesche **

Actually, it’s from the website of the WTC Living History Project. Although Shearer is the Executive Director of the Project, I wouldn’t exactly characterize it as “her” site, since it includes representatives from many organizations that participated in the rescue/cleanup.

I first read Daly’s article in the Daily News when I was in NY last week. He cites “[t]he FDNY and a committee of senior rescue workers of every stripe called the WTC Living History Project [which] have cited numerous witnesses to the rig’s recovery who dispute Langewiesche’s account. These include the FDNY recovery team leader, an FDNY battalion chief, a construction company supervisor, two grappler operators and various hardhats” and “[a] Federal Emergency Management Agency video of the rig’s recovery” as the sources of his information. So it’s not based purely on info generated by Shearer.

Not having read Langewiesche’s book, I reserve judgement on its general reliability. However, regarding the one specific allegation of firefighters looting jeans while the WTC burned, as I said IMO this defies credibility.

[Stan_Doubt]

In a recent “Newsquirks” column, Roland Sweet describes how hundreds of NY municipal employees overdrew from their accounts after a computer error made it impossible for the financial institution to check whether sufficient funds were available. Rather than bar employees from making withdrawls, which may have put a strain on the people hardest hit by the attacks, the bank (credit union?) allowed all transactions to be completed. Once the policy became public, many employees began withdrawing the maximum amount ($500) per day. One woman was reported to have withdrawn ~$18,000.00.