North tower basement janitor has notable account, was with Rodriguez

[Gravy]

While checking a PDF I have on file for the number of ABM employees who died on 9/11 (17: see page 12), I came across an account that I'd somehow missed before. It's the story of James Barrett, like Rodriguez an ABM janitor, who was in the north tower basement when both planes hit. I don't know what level he was on. His account is notable for several reasons:

1) He didn't hear either plane impact, wasn't aware of any explosions, and didn't know anything was wrong until he went up to the plaza level on routine business.

2) He is the one who helped Rodriguez rescue the men in the north tower freight elevator who had sprinkler water pouring on them. Before today, I'd never known his identity. Rodriguez says he met this man in the north tower.

3) His account makes an interesting addition to the accounts of people who didn't hear the impacts. On this page I quote several people in each tower who were closer to the impact zones than was Rodriguez and who felt, but didn't hear, the impacts. Below, I've reprinted part of the accounts of Edward McCabe, on the B-4 level, who felt a slight shift of the building and about 30 seconds later saw a door blow off its hinges, followed by white smoke; and Mike Pecoraro, on the B-6 level, who felt and saw nothing, but whose co-worker noticed the lights flicker, then they saw white smoke that smelled like kerosene.

4) I think Barrett's account illustrates the localized nature of the jet fuel explosion in the basement core, and lends credence to the idea that Rodriguez didn't hear flight 11's impact.

ABM Industries janitor James Barrett, who was on the 6 a.m. shift and cleaning a basement room a quarter-mile below where the first plane hit the North Tower, was in the dark [figuratively]. “I was in the building when both planes hit but I didn’t hear a thing,” said Barrett, who has spent 22 of his 39 years keeping the World Trade Center clean and operating smoothly.

...At the time of the disaster, more than 250 ABM employees were at work. One of these was Barrett, not far from where he remembers a terrorist bomb went off in 1993. This time, the blast was more than 200 yards overhead and he discovered the danger only by chance.

Because he didn’t have his cell phone with him, Barrett missed a frantic warning from his wife. He learned of the unfolding catastrophe only after he walked upstairs to the plaza level to get a broom and dustpan. He immediately ran into a fellow janitor who told him the towers were ablaze and it was time to flee. But before running for their lives, the two heard shouts behind a freight elevator, pried open the doors and lowered a ladder to three men [sic: there were apparetly two men in the elevator] who were up to their knees in rising water. Barrett then joined the rush for the exits as firefighters continued to pour in. Later, as Tower Two imploded with a roar and blinding cloud of smoke, dust and debris, Barrett began running to eventual safety.

http://www.abm.com/ilwwcm/resources/file/eb0189054765374/Alliance-911.pdf (pdf, page 8)

See also Salvatore Giambanco's corroboration of the elevator rescue on this page, and the Port Authority radio transcripts on this page.

Other interesting basement stories (more here):

Edward McCabe, on sublevel B-4: "I was in the refrigeration plant in tower 1 sub basement 4. I was passing through when I felt a slight shifting of the building. I froze right where I stood and listened....nothing.. about 30 seconds past and to my left about 30 feet from me was a stairway leading up to a door. this door explodes off its hinges and white smoke came into the plant.

I later on found out the reason there was an explosion was the jet fuel filled the elevator shaft and seconds later a spark triggered an explosion."

***

Mike Pecoraro, on sublevel B-6: Deep below the tower, Mike Pecoraro was suddenly interrupted in his grinding task by a shake on his shoulder from his co-worker. "Did you see that?" he was asked. Mike told him that he had seen nothing. "You didn't see the lights flicker?", his co-worker asked again. "No," Mike responded, but he knew immediately that if the lights had flickered, it could spell trouble. A power surge or interruption could play havoc with the building's equipment. If all the pumps trip out or pulse meters trip, it could make for a very long day bringing the entire center's equipment back on-line.

Mike told his co-worker to call upstairs to their Assistant Chief Engineer and find out if everything was all right. His co-worker made the call and reported back to Mike that he was told that the Assistant Chief did not know what happened but that the whole building seemed to shake and there was a loud explosion. They had been told to stay where they were and "sit tight" until the Assistant Chief got back to them. By this time, however, the room they were working in began to fill with a white smoke. "We smelled kerosene," Mike recalled, "I was thinking maybe a car fire was upstairs", referring to the parking garage located below grade in the tower but above the deep space where they were working. [Note: the parking garages were next to, not in, the towers.]

 

[Unsecured Coins]

I got 12 dollars and a case of root beer that Willy doesn't come here to discuss this.

 

[Gravy]

I got 12 dollars and a case of root beer that Willy doesn't come here to discuss this.

Weird: that's the title of my favorite Merle Haggard song.

 

[firecoins]

where are the people who saw bombs? If there was a controlled demolition, someone had to see the bombs. Where are these people?







crickets







I geuss they don't exist.

 

[uk_dave]

where are the people who saw bombs? If there was a controlled demolition, someone had to see the bombs. Where are these people?

crickets

I geuss they don't exist.

Don't be silly. People don't see bombs, they only hear them.

Hence the old proverb:

If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to see it.....

.... it must have been a bomb.

 

[Hyperviolet]

So this gentleman, James Barrett, was in the basement, yet didn't hear or feel this bomb which went:

PAAH very strong BOOM!!!
An explosion so hard that it pushed us UPWARDS, UPWARDS!!…The explosion was so hard that all the walls cracked the false ceiling fell on top of us, the sprinkler system got activated and when I was going to verbalize it was a generator we hear BOOM!

Very interesting.

 

[ref]

Good find, Mark. Very interesting story. More bad news for William, though.

 

[gumboot]

I've always claimed there's no way Mr Rodriguez heard the impact of AA11. Frankly, given that people located a few floors beneath the impact claim they didn't hear anything - instead alerted by the building swaying so much objects fell off their desks - the notion that someone in the basement three hundred feet below impact, beneath 80+ floors, would hear the impact is absurd.

-Gumboot

 

[pomeroo]

Always keep in mind exactly who we're talking about. Willie is Willie:

(From WWeek.com-- November 2, 2007)
"Yet some of the claims Rodriguez has made about 9/11 don’t add up. He says an explosion occurred seven seconds before the first plane hit the towers, and came from below, not above. But when he first began to report this, he described the explosion as a “rumble,” like furniture moving. Today, he remembers it as a “POW!” Rodriguez claims the difference is due to translation errors, but his accounts of the explosion have gotten more and more dramatic over the years."

http://wweek.com/wwire/?p=9889

 

[jaydeehess]

I had always ignored W.R.'s account for one very strong reason. He says that he heard an explosion in the basement and then heard the plane hit the tower.
I found it very unusual that there were windows in the basement that would allow him to discern which of the two sounds he says he heard was the plane impact.
Now it seems he not only was able to discern a plane impact but also heard an explosion in the basement that others lower down did not hear.
Odd, very, very odd!

Then there was his time before the investigators. His time to shine, to tell of this anomolous activity that suggested a bomb had gone off in the basement levels. What does he do? Does he put forth this very important bit of information? Nope, he goes on about the lack of proper maintenance in the stairwells and how he had complained to management about this many times to no avail.

 

[leftysergeant]

One thing seems clear to me from the discrepencies between the stories. Only Willie and the one construction worker from Shafquat's film described powerful explosions in the basement. Both were near elevators.

Can we not, then, conclude that this is proof that the explosions originated in the elevator shafts?

 

[Blender Head]

One thing seems clear to me from the discrepencies between the stories. Only Willie and the one construction worker from Shafquat's film described powerful explosions in the basement. Both were near elevators.

Can we not, then, conclude that this is proof that the explosions originated in the elevator shafts?

Phil Morreli?


Also, I do not really understand what WR is claiming:

-In basement of WTC 1 on 9/11
-felt either rumble or loud boom then
-hears AA11 hit North Tower?

 

[jhunter1163]

It's been pointed out that sound travels much faster through steel than it does through air. The difference is great enough (about one second at the distance F-Rod was from the explosion) that it could have been perceived as two events, assuming he could have heard the explosion directly (not a sure thing, given that others much closer to the blast didn't hear it).

So the timeline could be:

0.0: plane hits WTC.
0.4 (or so): Sound traveling through steel reaches F-Rod.
1.4: Sound traveling through air reaches F-Rod.
9.0 (or so): Fuel free-falling down elevator shafts reaches basement level, explosion seen.

Call me cynical, but in the beginning F-Rod said that the time between the rumble and the explosion was a second or two. When the steel/air sound transmission difference was pointed out, he changed it to 6 or 7 seconds.

And, of course, F-Rod and the rest of the Twoofers have never been able to explain why, if there were bombs in the basement, the Towers collapsed from the impact points.

 

[leftysergeant]

Morreli was approaching an elevator when he was hit, as I recall.

Schroeder was standing where he could see an elevator bank.

The machine shop where a hydraulic press was destroyed was, as I recall, near an elevator shaft.

Does anyone know where Willie would have been in relation to the nearest elevator shaft when it all started?

 

[Gravy]

It's been pointed out that sound travels much faster through steel than it does through air.[snip]

I don't think there's any question that the first thing he noticed was an elevator shaft explosion. The sound from above may have been elevators crashing down or other explosions in the lobbies or shafts.

Morreli was approaching an elevator when he was hit, as I recall.

Correct:

[FONT=arial,sans-serif]Phillip Morelli: "As I'm walking by the main freight car of the building, in the corridor, that's when I got blown. I mean, the impact of the explosion, of whatever happened, it threw me to the floor, and that's when everything started happening. It knocked me right to the floor. Of course you didn't know what it was, you're assuming something just fell over in the loading dock, something very heavy, something very big. You don't know what happened, and all of a sudden you just felt the floor moving, and you get up, and the walls – and then, you know now I'm hearing that the main freight car, you know the elevators, fell down, so I was right near the main freight car, so I assume what that was. [Describing the same event] Then, you know, you heard that coming towards you, I was racing, I was going towards the bathrooms, you know, all of a sudden, and a big impact happened again, and all the ceiling tiles were falling down, the light fixtures falling, swinging out of the ceiling.

And I come running out of the door, and everything – the walls were down, and now I started running towards the parking lot. [He describes going underground from WTC 1 to 2, helping injured people.] And then all of a sudden it happened all over again. Building 2 got hit. Again, I don't know that, I just know something else hit into the floor. Right in the basement you felt it. Walls were caving in, everything that was going on. I mean, I know people that got killed in the basement, I know people that got broken legs in the basement, people that got reconstructive surgery because the walls hit them in the face." Video: http://www.ny1.com/pages/RRR/911special_survivors.html[/FONT]

Schroeder was standing where he could see an elevator bank.

Yes, but that was much later. An elevator did fall then, but there was no major event in the lobby. Schroeder was almost certainly confused by the impact of flight 175, which people who were with him reported at that moment.

The machine shop where a hydraulic press was destroyed was, as I recall, near an elevator shaft.

I don't know where it was, but since no explosions were reported away from the core, I think it's safe to say it was nearby. We can't assume it was destroyed, based on a single account. It may just have been knocked over and covered with debris. The walls there were not load-bearing.

Does anyone know where Willie would have been in relation to the nearest elevator shaft when it all started?

He says he was 400 feet from where Felipe David was burned, which would put him far outside the building and perhaps across the street, depending on the direction.

(I don't know where the ABM maintenance office was.)

 

[Crazy Chainsaw]

While checking a PDF I have on file for the number of ABM employees who died on 9/11 (17: see page 12), I came across an account that I'd somehow missed before. It's the story of James Barrett, like Rodriguez an ABM janitor, who was in the north tower basement when both planes hit. I don't know what level he was on. His account is notable for several reasons:

1) He didn't hear either plane impact, wasn't aware of any explosions, and didn't know anything was wrong until he went up to the plaza level on routine business.

2) He is the one who helped Rodriguez rescue the men in the north tower freight elevator who had sprinkler water pouring on them. Before today, I'd never known his identity. Rodriguez says he met this man in the north tower.

3) His account makes an interesting addition to the accounts of people who didn't hear the impacts. On this page I quote several people in each tower who were closer to the impact zones than was Rodriguez and who felt, but didn't hear, the impacts. Below, I've reprinted part of the accounts of Edward McCabe, on the B-4 level, who felt a slight shift of the building and about 30 seconds later saw a door blow off its hinges, followed by white smoke; and Mike Pecoraro, on the B-6 level, who felt and saw nothing, but whose co-worker noticed the lights flicker, then they saw white smoke that smelled like kerosene.

4) I think Barrett's account illustrates the localized nature of the jet fuel explosion in the basement core, and lends credence to the idea that Rodriguez didn't hear flight 11's impact.

See also Salvatore Giambanco's corroboration of the elevator rescue on this page, and the Port Authority radio transcripts on this page.

Other interesting basement stories (more here):

OK are we merely debunker's or are we skeptics with our skepticism based on science?
It is quite possible for one person to hear something, and another not, it all depends on physic and where the person is in relation to the transmitted energy.

Willie might have indeed heard the sounds he believes he heard, however I believe if he did hear them, that they were sounds transmitted by the buildings structure to him, that would be evident, since the other witness did not hear them at all.
They would appear to be sounds transmitted though the buildings, similar to the sounds of a train transmitted down a rail in a train track, the ability to hear them might depend on Proximity to the transmission source.
Has anyone else here heard none auditory sounds from a shock blast wave, you do not hear them though your ears unless they travel though the body from physical contact with the material conducting the sounds.

IT is a really weird phenomena, I was standing on an oil line, and did not heard and explosion that no one else heard, turned out to be some one shooting off a well miles away, because I was standing the only one standing on the line I was the only one of three that heard the blast go off.

It is similar to the difference in your voice between what you hear and what you hear from a recording, you body is actually a better sound transmitter than is air, and it is possible for non auditory sound to be transmitted though it and become auditory when they vibrate the ear drums.

So this does not prove that Willie is lying about hearing sounds-Blasts, it does lead credence that the sounds were shock-waves transiting the structure.

Debunking and skepticism are too completely separate things I am a skeptic with that Skepticism based on my understanding of known Science, Debunking is not my objective fairness, and correction of known error and down right lies is!
You get to caught up in Debunking you tend to loose the science if favor of just the best argument!

Well I hope now your completely confused after watching 3 truther videos this morning I know I am, confused at how truthers can be considered in any way intellegent life forms!

 

[Gravy]

OK are we merely debunker's or are we skeptics with our skepticism based on science? [...]
So this does not prove that Willie is lying about hearing sounds-Blasts

Have you been dipping into the chainsaw oil again? I've never questioned that Rodriguez heard and felt the basement explosion. I wrote a whole paper about it. The point here is the limited nature of the explosion.

 

[Crazy Chainsaw]

Have you been dipping into the chainsaw oil again? I've never questioned that Rodriguez heard and felt the basement explosion. I wrote a whole paper about it. The point here is the limited nature of the explosion.

I agree with that Gravy, however I have already seen people use this information that you posted as fact that Willie lied about hearing sounds most probably the impact-shock waves.

I had to point out to them that in fact he might have heard impact sounds, but that he was most probably Mistaken about the source and timing.

Information passes quickly over the INTERNET Gravy sometimes people just do not take the time to understand the information before using it in an argument.

Sometimes people take Information posted on JERF, more literally than they should, especially if posted by a respected skeptic such as yourself.

I was just making a clarification, for the masses of people who wish to debunk, and not apply scientific Skepticism, to the argument.

 

[Norseman]

Does anyone know where Willie would have been in relation to the nearest elevator shaft when it all started?

In the original blueprint for WTC 1 there is an area marked "Janitorial office area" in the upper right hand part of the Service Level Floor (B1):
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/plans/doc/pac1TowerA/A-A-16_0.png

Multi resolution viewer here:
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/plans/frames.html

That would likely be the office where WR was when Flight 11 hit WTC 1, unless later modifications or changes in the use of floor space on that level.

 

[Gravy]

No idea, Norseman. We can't judge from the labeling whether that area was ever used for that purpose.