Posted on 09/06/2003 12:39:20 PM PDT by sarcasm
hey did not even see the pale fleck of the airplane streak across the corner of the video camera's field of view at 8:46 a.m. But the camera, pointed at the twin towers from the passenger seat of an S.U.V. in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, kept rolling when the plane disappeared for an instant and then a silent, billowing cloud of smoke and dust slowly emerged from the north tower, as if it had sprung a mysterious kind of leak.
The S.U.V., carrying an immigrant worker from the Czech Republic who was making a video postcard to send home, then entered the mouth of the tunnel and emerged, to the shock of the three men inside the vehicle, nearly at the foot of the now burning tower.
The camera, pointed upward, zoomed in and out, and then, with a roar in the background that built to a piercing screech, it locked on the terrifying image of the second plane as it soared, like some awful bird of prey, almost straight overhead, banking steeply, and blasted into the south tower.
It was not until almost two weeks later that the worker, Pavel Hlava, even realized that he had captured the first plane on video. Even then, Mr. Hlava, who speaks almost no English, did not realize that he had some of the rarest footage collected of the World Trade Center disaster. His is the only videotape known to have recorded both planes on impact, and only the second image of any kind showing the first strike.
The tape — a kind of accidentally haunting artifact — has surfaced publicly only now, on the eve of the second anniversary of the attacks, after following the most tortuous and improbable of paths, from an insular circle of Czech-American working-class friends and drinking buddies.
At one point, a friend of Mr. Hlava's wife traded a copy of the tape to another Czech immigrant for a bar tab at a pub in Ridgewood, Queens. Mr. Hlava and his brother, Josef, who was also in the S.U.V. on Sept. 11, tried at various times to sell the tape, both in New York and in the Czech Republic. But with little sophistication about the news media and no understanding of the tape's significance, the brothers had no success.
Eventually, a woman happened to learn of the tape from the pub deal at a school where one of the Czech immigrants was studying English. She brought it to the attention of a freelance news photographer who doubled as her ballroom dancing partner, and that man, Walter Karling, brought the tape to The New York Times.
For all the tape's imperfections — the first plane is seen distantly, and Mr. Hlava's hand is understandably far from steady at many points during the hourlong record — federal investigators who are studying the collapse of the towers say that they are now attempting to obtain a copy for the data it may contain. A lack of information on the first strike, for example, has posed a major challenge to engineers trying to understand exactly why the north tower crumbled. The tape could, for example, help investigators pin down the precise speed at which the first plane was moving when it struck the tower.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Hlava said through a translator — David Melichar, who with Mr. Karling now describes himself as Mr. Hlava's agent — that the language barrier had much to do with why no one beyond his family and friends had seen the tape. Finally, Mr. Hlava said, so much time had passed that he doubted anyone would still be interested.
"All his friends, they told him, `Hey, you made a mistake. You waited too long.' '` Mr. Melichar said.
Mr. Melichar also made it clear that the driver of the S.U.V., a Ford Explorer, had strong objections to releasing the tape. And because the driver, a Russian native named Mike Cohen, is Mr. Hlava's boss on his construction job, that wish carried a certain weight.
"Three thousand people died in that place," Mr. Cohen said when reached on his cell phone on Friday. "I told him the day he's gonna sell that film, he's not gonna work for me anymore." The New York Times had not paid for the tape, and it had not been sold to any television station, Mr. Karling said on Saturday morning. ABC is scheduled to show the tape for the first time on the program "This Week" at 9 a.m. today. ABC did not pay for the tape, said Tom Bettag, executive producer of the program.
In the weeks and months after the attack, the tape bounced around in Mr. Hlava's apartment in Ridgewood. Once, he found it in his daughter's closet, Mr. Hlava said; another time, in a drawer in his living room table.
On one occasion he noticed that his son was playing with the video camera and erasing the tape. Mr. Hlava snatched the camera away before either of the plane impacts had been wiped away.
account: billclinton
password: isaliar
Dangit. Well, it was old anyways. I passed it around as much as possible; maybe they wised up?
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