Battalion Chief John Norman
Special Operations Command - 22 years
From there, we looked out at 7 World Trade Center again. You could see smoke, but no visible fire, and some damage to the south face. You couldn’t really see from where we were on the west face of the building, but at the edge of the south face
you could see that it was very heavily damaged.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/gz/norman.html
Captain Chris Boyle
Engine 94 - 18 years
Boyle: ...on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 t
here had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good.
Firehouse: When you looked at the south side, how close were you to the base of that side?
Boyle: I was standing right next to the building, probably right next to it.
Firehouse: When you had fire on the 20 floors, was it in one window or many?
Boyle:
There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a huge hole. I would say it was probably about a third of it, right in the middle of it. And so after Visconti came down and said nobody goes in 7, we said all right, we’ll head back to the command post. We lost touch with him. I never saw him again that day.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/gz/boyle.html
Deputy Chief Peter Hayden
Division 1 - 33 years
...
also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.
Firehouse: Was there heavy fire in there right away?
Hayden: No, not right away, and that’s probably why it stood for so long because it took a while for that fire to develop
. It was a heavy body of fire in there and then we didn’t make any attempt to fight it. That was just one of those wars we were just going to lose. We were concerned about the collapse of a 47-story building there. We were worried about additional collapse there of what was remaining standing of the towers and the Marriott, so
we started pulling the people back after a couple of hours of surface removal and searches along the surface of the debris.
We started to pull guys back because we were concerned for their safety.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/gz/hayden.html