Excerpts of more than 500 firefighters’ oral histories of their experiences on Sept. 11, 2001, released Friday along with more than 15 hours of radio transmissions:

“People were grabbing onto us. We were picking up people, because they were still – after it was black, there was screaming in the beginning and we were shouting. We were saying ‘Don’t worry, we’re with the Fire Department. Everybody is going to get out.’ I remember saying stuff like that, which is pretty wild, actually. We were just as scared as anybody else. We were just victims too. Basically the only difference between us and the victims is we had flashlights.”

– Firefighter James Murphy, who was trapped in the mall below the World Trade Center with dozens of frightened civilians.

“We were watching it. We could see it from here. We have an unobstructed view. The other guys came up too. All six of us were on the roof. We were sitting around looking at it, and I remember one guy saying, ‘You’re going to earn your pay today, guys.’ I just remember that.”

– Firefighter Murphy, who began the day watching the crisis unfold from the roof of his firehouse.

After the towers collapsed, “at this point, the radio was pretty open because there weren’t a lot of survivors really. Guys ran in different directions. It has a lot to do with the choices you made: which direction you ran, what you decided to do, how close to the buildings you stayed, your sense of urgency, all of those things. … Even at that point, I knew in my mind that firefighters were killed or injured in the last 45 minutes or whatever during what happened, but I still didn’t realize the scope of it.”

– Fire Lt. Warren Smith