24 years after 9/11, previously unseen images are still emerging. This group finds and publishes them

By Melissa Gray, CNN

(CNN) — The camera zooms in on the flames and black smoke pouring out of the building more than 90 stories up. Papers fly down as people on the street stare up. The cameraman says it was an explosion.

But then the second tower is hit, and he realizes it’s even worse. “Oh my God,” the man says over and over. He tells people around him to go home and not look up.

The video was recorded a block from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, by a man named Edward Sferrazza, who then rushed to his work van to drive away. Blocked in by standstill traffic, he got out to film again with his camcorder and became engulfed in the racing dust cloud that covered Lower Manhattan when the first tower fell. He kept recording even as he coughed, stumbled and sought refuge back in his van.

That footage was on an hourlong Hi8 videocassette that captures not only the events themselves, but the raw shock people felt as they were happening. And it was largely unknown to the public before it was digitized and posted online – in full for the first time – this year, having been discovered by a volunteer group of digital sleuths, tech experts and information-seekers who collectively form what they call the 9/11 Media Preservation Group.

The group certainly isn’t the only one looking to archive images, video and information from September 11, and at two years of existence, it isn’t one of the most longstanding crews. But it is determined to help preserve this media, including finding and bringing to light materials that for various reasons were long buried in their owners’ collections and had yet to be published, like Sferrazza’s full video.

The September 11 attacks were the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, killing nearly 3,000 people, most of them in New York. Hijackers took control of four West Coast-bound passenger planes shortly after takeoff from the East Coast, crashing three of them into the iconic Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The fourth plane, believed to have been headed for Washington, plummeted into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers fought back.

The 9/11 Media Preservation Group – which publishes its work, in part, on the “Between Two Towers” YouTube page and solicits and discusses material on Reddit – is run by Andrew, who asked CNN to use only his first name, citing concerns that using his last name could negatively impact his other, full-time work. He also spoke about security and privacy concerns regarding his 9/11 work.

“I’ve always kind of viewed 9/11 as just kind of like a puzzle, in the sense that there’s just so many individual stories, but they all come together in some way,” Andrew said.

Though he was only a child when the attacks happened, the events made a lasting impression on him and directly led to his professional work with safety systems for high-occupancy, large commercial and government facilities. He runs the archive group in his spare time, but it’s almost like a second full-time job.

“Lately, after talking to more and more survivors and witnesses, it’s become just preserving that memory,” he said. “I’m learning that a lot of these people, they never talked about it or they never thought that their perspective was important. Now it’s just kind of become the objective to preserve that, I guess, or at least to be able to share that.”

Andrew shares a lot of the group’s work with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which has its own archive. Stephanie Schmeling, its head of cataloging and archives, said Andrew is one of the most actively engaged researchers she works with, and she values the legwork his group does in finding sources of undiscovered media, then helping them get it digitized and preserved.

“Some of the things that he has shared with me are astounding,” she said, pointing specifically to a photo of yellow debris that landed on a roof just after the first tower was hit, with letters just legible enough to indicate it came from an aircraft. Based on information he’s received and the timing of when the photo was taken, Andrew said he believes the piece was from American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the North Tower – the first to be hit.

The photo was taken by an architect named Laszlo Kiss, who worked in the building where the debris landed and used his digital camera to capture what he was seeing that day. He’d posted a few images on Facebook in 2021, Andrew said, but the rest weren’t shared until Andrew contacted him. Kiss said he gave the images to Andrew, who uploaded them from the raw image files and posted higher-resolution versions.

The stated mission of Andrew’s group is to archive images and video related to the September 11 attacks, and it offers help to anyone who wants to get their material from that day digitized. The group’s work has focused mostly on the World Trade Center attacks because, Andrew said, more media is available from New York than from the attack on the Pentagon or the crash in Pennsylvania.

Out of about a dozen members of the 9/11 Media Preservation Group, Andrew said, he and a few others handle most of the outreach and digitization. They find leads wherever they can, like digging up obscure online references about someone having had a camera, and tracking down the lone copy of a documentary that may have aired once on local TV.

One of the first projects the group worked on was finding a person who’d filmed a video from their apartment balcony down the street from the World Trade Center. A clip had been uploaded to a website in 2002, downloaded by someone and shared more widely, but all information about the person who filmed it was missing.

Andrew said he traced it to a man named Dennis Lovelady, who recalled filming it with a MiniDV camera as soon as the first plane struck. The tape has since been lost, leaving only the clip found online, Andrew said, but while searching for a copy, Lovelady found several Kodak floppy disks of photos he took after the towers came down. Lovelady said he shared them with Andrew’s group, which published them.

Long before Andrew’s group published Sferrazza’s video, a clip of it briefly emerged publicly. The clip was included in an Italian documentary a couple of years after the attacks, after a family friend shared it without his knowledge. A member of Andrew’s group found the documentary and managed to track Sferrazza down, Andrew said.

Sferrazza had kept the tape in storage and nearly forgotten about it, Sferrazza said, and he hadn’t ever viewed it, feeling the events of that day were too intense. After Andrew met with him in person, Sferrazza agreed to hand it over to his group for preservation because, he said, he wants the world to know what happened that day and hopes it can do some good.

The people who share their images with Andrew’s group often do it for similar reasons, Andrew said. “It’s kind of why we’re trying to preserve this, because you get so much out of that day, just the normal footage – for lack of a better word, the highlight reels, the stuff everyone immediately goes to – but you lose a lot of the human aspect when you don’t get the moments in between.”

Twenty-four years after the World Trade Center attacks, Schmeling said, she finds it surprising how much undiscovered media is still out there.

“It’s unquantifiable,” she said. “We don’t know how many people had cameras, how many people documented it, and a lot of people don’t feel comfortable sharing it because it was an emotional moment for them, and so they haven’t shared it.

“But as we move through time, people get more comfortable – or people feel like they don’t want to move on from this life having not shared it with anyone. So work that Andrew and his team are doing is helping with that.”

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