The firefighters didn’t know they were being photographed.
911 IN MEMORY PICTURES SERIES
The three firefighters begin to raise the flag in the first of the series of Grinker's photographs. Evening light illuminated the scene: red, white and blue framed against twisted steel and thick, gray smoke. (The flagpole is thought to have been from the grounds of a Marriot hotel situated just next to the World Trade Center.) The wind picked up and the flag began to fly. one, raising it high enough that rescue crews still searching for survivors might see it from the valley of destruction below. Spotting a flagpole jutting out of a tall hill of debris, the trio took down a faded green flag and replaced it with the U.S. Inspiration struck, and he took it, enlisting fellow firefighters George Johnson (also Ladder 157) and Bill Eisengrein (Rescue 2) to carry the flag to the southeast corner of the wreckage-what would later be dubbed “Ground Zero.”
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McWilliams, a firefighter with Brooklyn’s Ladder 157, was walking past the North Cove marina, just a block from where the towers once stood, when he spotted an American flag on a yacht. Nobody yet knew how many people had died-save that the number would be “more than any of us can bear,” as Mayor Rudy Giuliani told reporters that afternoon. Fires burned and toxic ash choked the air in New York’s Financial District. By half past ten, both skyscrapers had collapsed.
![911 in memory pictures 911 in memory pictures](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/26/59/46/2659468c2ee479515a1141485309f6a1.jpg)
That morning, hijackers crashed two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
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Dan McWilliams made a spur-of-the-moment decision.