Slide #62 - Indira Singh

"We're Gonna Have To Bring It Down"

In this slide, Gage introduces the account of Indira Singh, a risk management architect and volunteer EMT who worked on a triage site on 9/11. She also advocates for the air quality issue surrounding the Ground Zero cleanup, and she is considered a whistleblower about several the international groups that are posited to have been behind Al Qaeda and 9/11.

All of that is a subject for a different website than this one. What concerns Gage (and therefore us) is a statement she made on a series of radio interviews for the show Guns and Butter. It was April 2005, Singh was explaining her particular theories, and in doing so she was describing her experiences on 9/11:

BF: How long then, did you work as an Emergency Medical Technician and exactly what is it that you were doing?

IS: Well, there was so much chaos, Bonnie. There was -- when I got there we were setting up triage sites close, very close to the area. The triage site that I was setting up was behind -- well, to the east of Building 7, where Building 7 came down. And what we were expecting -- as an EMT you're trained for live survivors. And there were people on the pile, digging and looking for survivors, and what happened is, they would bring someone out to the nearest triage center, we would stabilize them, put them in an ambulance, and send them further uptown.

So we were setting up triage as close to the pile as possible, you know. On it, in many cases. So what we were doing was setting up different kinds of stations, I.V. stations, cardiac stations, just -- wound stations, burn stations, just trying to have an organized space.

What happened with that particular triage site is that pretty soon after noon, after midday on 9/11, we had to evacuate that because they told us that Building 7 was coming down.

If you had been there, not being able to see very much, just flames everywhere and dark smoke, it is entirely possible -- I do believe that they brought Building 7 down because I heard that they were going to bring it down, because it was unstable, because of the collateral damage.

That I don't know, I can't attest to the validity of that, all I can attest to is that by noon or one o'clock, they told us we had to move from that triage site, up to Pace University a little further away, because Building 7 was gonna come down, or being brought down.

BF: Did they actually use the word "brought down," and who was it that was telling you this?

IS: The Fire Department, the Fire Department, and they did use the word, we're gonna have to bring it down. And, for us there observing the nature of the devastation it was -- it made total sense to us that this was indeed a possibility.

Given the subsequent controversy over it, I don't know. I'm not an engineer, I don't know. All I know is, you know, that was my experience. We backed off a little bit to Pace University, there was another panic around 4 o'clock because, they were bringing the building down, and people seemed to know this ahead of time, so people were panicking again and running. I went back to One Liberty, which was further south of where I was before and there were triage sites set up in there. We were treating basically people who were on the pile digging for survivors, if there were any.

And it was basically chaos. I asked who was in charge, for instance, because I supposed to check in with whoever was in charge, and no one seemed to know. It was complete and utter chaos there, if there was someone in charge. The normal response units around for a multi-casualty incident, they didn't know.

One of the big problems is that so many people in the Fire Dept. and the Police Dept. at a high level had been already killed. There was complete and utter shock and disbelief and they were still trying to sort out the details.

BF: I know you certainly weren't concentrating on this, but did you happen to notice any fires in WTC 7?

IS: Yes. I think there was. I couldn't get close enough. Because of the smoke I couldn't really tell where the fires were coming from. I didn't have a bird's eye view. I was down on the ground and there was all this rubble and devastation around me. If someone had told me there was a fire in Building 7, I would have likely believed it simply because there were fires everywhere. There were fires -- because there was so much paper and litter on the streets, for hundreds of yards around, there were fires everywhere. It was confetti, sort of like a ticker-tape parade. As if someone had set fire on the street to a ticker-tape parade. It would all burn, in a line, so there were just flames everywhere.

A Striking Account

Well, that wraps it all up, doesn't it? Indira Singh has the Fire Department telling her triage unit to move because they were going to have to bring down Building 7.

There are some problems with this account, however.

• The overall picture she paints of the scene is chaos
• She has no names of anyone who told her this information
• She describes the collapse of 7 as both "coming down" and "brought down"
• This account was given 3.5 years after the event
• No one in the Fire Department corroborates this story
• Singh found it reasonable that the building was going to be brought down and that it was being planned and carried out that day

Has Singh remembered this detail to her overall story incorrectly? My guess is yes. It's possible that the idea of knocking down the building, or "bringing it down," had occurred to people that day. It's certainly what Singh seems to think was going to happen.

But assuming that the statement was indeed, "We're gonna have to bring it down," has Singh identified the actual subject here? As she tells it, it seems possible to me that this is actually an interrupted explanation of where to take the triage unit. Both the building and the unit were part of the conversation.

We do not know exactly what representatives of FDNY said to Singh and the crew at the triage unit. We don't know when she entered the discussion or who exactly was a part of it. None of them were taping the scene, none of them were transcribing every conversation that happened. And who would have expected them to?

On an admittedly chaotic day, isn't it possible that a confusing conversation may have led to an erroneous assumption on Singh's part? It's a detail that she only related 3.5 years later, and in the telling still described 7 World Trade as simply coming down. And out of hundreds of oral accounts given by FDNY employees, no one speaks a single word about planning a controlled demolition of WTC 7.

Who exactly in that chaotic scene could have planned a controlled demolition on the day of the attacks? That's what seems reasonable to Singh, but as you look at the various accounts of that day, such a task would have been well beyond the capacity of any organization on the ground -- especially a group who had lost over 300 of their fellow firefighters, including a sizable part of the command structure.

Understand me. I don't fault Singh for thinking that. She had other things to do that day than sit around wondering how likely it was that Building 7 was about to demolished by the Fire Department.

Has Gage Finally Made A Point?

Without any corroborating evidence for her story, I'm afraid not. Indira Singh is not backed up in this detail by any Fire Department member. Her account is an outlier contradicted by a wealth of information against it. This one is best chalked up to the confusion of the day.

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