but when he explains the Silverstein quote on this page, he's
obviously not expecting us to believe him, is he?
Silverstein said:
"I remember getting a call from the Fire Department
commander, telling me they were not sure they were gonna be
able to contain the fire, and I said, you know, 'We've had
such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is
just pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and then we
watched the building collapse."
The author argues that Silverstein is not a demolition expert,
and then attempts to explain what he meant by "pull
it" by first suggesting he may have meant pull the
building to one side (it is not clear if this is a secondary
explanation of Silverstein's quote or just left for the reader
to understand what the author thinks "pull" means in
demolition terms), and then by suggesting he meant "Pull
the people out of nearby buildings." As evidence for this
second version, he gives this quote:
"They told us to get out of there because they were
worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it,
coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon
building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom
corner of the building was gone. We could look right out over
to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up.
Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was
tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they pulled us
out. They said all right, get out of that building because
that 7, they were really worried about. They pulled us out of
there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street,
between the water and West Street. They put everybody back in
there. Finally it did come down. From there - this is much
later on in the day, because every day we were so worried
about that building we didn't really want to get people close.
They were trying to limit the amount of people that were in
there. Finally it did come down." - Richard Banaciski
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/
Banaciski_Richard.txt
But "pull it" can't possibly be translated to
"pull them out." Those are different phrases. And I
can't imagine anyone would think the first implies the second
or could be interpreted by others in terms of the second.