February 27, 2020 – West Bend, WI – Tonight is the final segment in a four-part series in West Bend surrounding the 9/11 attacks in New York. Last week the guest speaker was contractor Charlie Vitchers who spoke about the massive cleanup effort following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
“I was the guy explaining what needed to be done,” he said. “I had a Port Authority cop who said he lost 20 guys in a staircase below building 6. I said there was 30,000 pounds of Freon released in the basement of that same building.
“We found 84 human remain pieces on the roof of that building that had never been searched since 2001. That was in 2005. Out of those remains four people were identified four-and-a-half years later,” said Vitchers.
“I started my day, every day asking the fire department how many recoveries did we make last night. That brought everybody to the reality on why we were here.”
“There was a point where we found two firefighters in their bunker gear under the same collapsed piece of the beam. They sent a woman down from the medical office. The cops got her down to the site. I brought engineers down. It was getting dark told the guys to do what they had to do. Came in in the morning and those guys were gone; they were done. Within 24 hours I got the word the slurry wall on Liberty Street was collapsing and they needed to do something immediately as the walls shifted 6 inches the first day and 2 feet the next. Those walls were coming in and I had to get 600,000 cubic yards of sand to stop the wall from moving. At the same time I had 15 firefighters yelling at me because they said there were more guys buried under there. There probably were more…. but it had to be done. Those were tough decisions.”
Click BELOW to watch the entire interview with Charlie Vitchers.
Tonight the final speaker in the series is Gordon Haberman, father of Andrea Haberman who was killed at 9/11 in New York. Andrea was in New York for the first time. She was there for a job interview on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
Tonight’s live broadcast is brought to you by West Bend Elevator, Property Loss Management, Morrie’s Honda, Collett Systems,
