A pretty incredible 9/11 photo story. Photographer William Lopez took this image at sunset on September 11, showing two FDNY firefighters embracing after each had feared the other was dead. Years later, the photo was included in a fundraiser for first responders, and Lopez was given a commemorative plaque containing the image alongside steel recovered from the World Trade Center. He lost the plaque during a move about a decade ago and assumed it was gone forever. Then a Brooklyn woman found it among discarded items, kept it for years, and eventually posted it to Reddit after noticing a Bolivar Arellano Gallery label on the back. That post ultimately led back to Lopez, and the plaque was returned to him. One of those strange little pieces of 9/11 history that somehow found its way home.

Incredibly high def and vivid photos taken from a helicopter in the days and weeks following 9/11. These have been sitting on a personal hard drive of someone who has recently decided to share the images. Really gives you the scale of the WTC complex and destruction. Also reinforces how much footage and information that is still out there that has been unseen 25 years later.

27 photographs of 9/11 sat inside a safe for nearly two decades. The photographer is still unknown. It’s another reminder that there is still so much unseen 9/11 footage and information out there. The conversation needs to continue. Old film needs to be digitized, private footage preserved, and institutions holding unreleased material pushed to make it public.

Earlier in the footage, we are at Maiden Lane Plaza as the South Tower is struck. Then, at around 10am, the video cuts to surveillance footage from somewhere along Liberty Street looking west, just seconds after the South Tower collapsed. The debris cloud moves rapidly through the narrow street and completely consumes the view. What makes this footage especially frustrating is that the original tape apparently still exists. After several attempts, the mysterious owner has ignored requests to have it properly digitized and preserved. There may still be important 9/11 footage sitting in private hands that the public has never seen in full.

For the first time in 112 years, the Atlantic has made it this deep into hurricane season without producing a single hurricane. Meanwhile, the Pacific is doing the exact opposite. Hurricane Polo is a Category 5 just off southwest Mexico, not far from La Saladita, one of my favorite surf spots. Another hurricane, Odalys, is farther out in the Pacific, while Tropical Storm Nolo is sitting south of Hawaii and expected to strengthen. September is normally the heart of Atlantic hurricane season, but this year it's almost complete silence.

Rare view from the top of the North Tower, followed by footage riding down in one of the window-washing baskets. The system was built into the Twin Towers from the beginning. Track grooves were incorporated directly into the exterior facade so the maintenance platforms could glide down the building instead of swinging freely. A full trip down took about 20 minutes. Coming back up took around 10. Pretty incredible engineering for something most people probably never even thought about.

As Mount St. Helens erupted toward him in 1980, photographer Robert Landsburg kept shooting. Realizing he couldn’t escape, he rewound the film, packed away his camera, and laid his body over it to protect the photos. He died. The film survived. Months later, his final images were published in National Geographic, fulfilling a lifelong dream.

For decades, nearly every film of the Hindenburg disaster showed the same familiar angle. Then this footage surfaced more than 80 years later. Shot on an 8mm home movie camera from a completely different position, it captures the disaster from an angle almost no one had ever seen.

Lisa Lefler left this briefcase behind on the 103rd floor of the South Tower when she evacuated on 9/11. Two days later, rescue worker Boyd Harden found it in the wreckage near Church and Liberty Streets. Her résumé was still inside, allowing him to track her down and return it. Lisa survived. The battered briefcase is now preserved by the Smithsonian.

The mall beneath the World Trade Center was enormous. More than 70 stores and restaurants sat below the plaza, connected directly to the PATH station and subway system. Thousands of people passed through it every day on their way to work, grabbing coffee, shopping, eating lunch, or cutting across the complex. It is easy to think of the Twin Towers as just two giant office buildings, but underneath them was basically an entire underground neighborhood. On 9/11, much of it was destroyed or buried. That is part of what makes old photos of the mall so interesting. It shows how much ordinary life existed beneath the towers. Did you get a chance to visit?

In the spirit of diesel prices reaching new highs, a throwback to when “Luxury Diesel” was actually a selling point.

Window washers on the upper floors of the north tower. They would ride on powered-carriages that were built into the buildings themselves. Most of the buildings were cleaned by a custom automated window-washing system, but there was still a lot of manual work involved, such as the upper floors which had wider windows, corners, and more difficult sections.

Newly re-surfaced picture from an old archive appears to be Donald Trump on 9/13 near ground zero

Audio on. “An airplane crashed, right now, in Queens, today.” “Get out of here?” “Yep, let’s go.” Two months and one day after 9/11, workers at Ground Zero can be heard reacting to breaking news that another passenger jet had crashed in New York just 15 miles away. American Airlines Flight 587 went down in Queens on November 12, 2001, killing all 260 people aboard and five people on the ground. After everything New York had already been through, you can hear the disbelief in their voices. A brutal few months for the city.

There is some incredible detective work happening right now around one lost 9/11 photograph, and the story keeps getting better. Just five days ago, @jonwalczak , director of 32 Frames, posted Frame #20 and asked for help identifying the seven people seen evacuating the World Trade Center shortly before the North Tower collapsed. At the time, none of them had been identified. Walczak also pointed out that the same group appears in a photograph taken by FDNY firefighter Bertram Springstead. Then, buried in the replies, @StanleySkoglund suggested that two of the people might be Paul Carris and Judith Toppin, whose escape was later featured in the BBC podcast 'The Woman Who Saved My Life'. That opened everything up. Within days, Frank Varriano was confirmed by his family. Others began falling into place. Walczak eventually spoke directly with Paul Carris, who was stunned to see a photograph of himself escaping that he never knew existed. We now know this single image captured two separate rescue stories. Frank Varriano and Mak Hanna helped Moe Lipson escape. Lipson, who was on the 88th floor of the North Tower, is often described as the oldest person to escape the towers that day. Paul Carris helped Judith Toppin escape from the 71st floor. Judith went on to write a poem that spread quickly called “Angels Walk Among Us”, which detailed her harrowing escape from the north tower. Dennis Switaj has also been identified, leaving only one person in the photograph still unknown. Most of these people had no idea this photo even existed. More than 25 years later, they are seeing themselves escaping the North Tower only minutes before it collapsed. Pretty remarkable. And there is still one face left. Maybe someone out there can help finish the investigation.

Faces of 9/11: The Man in the Red Bandana Welles Crowther was just 24 years old, working as an equities trader on the 104th floor of the South Tower. He had also been a volunteer firefighter since he was 16. After Flight 175 struck, survivors on the 78th-floor sky lobby remembered a young man appearing through the smoke with a red bandana covering his face. He calmly directed people toward the one usable stairwell, carried injured people, and repeatedly went back for more. For months, nobody knew who he was. Then survivors began describing the same detail: the red bandana. His mother immediately knew it was Welles. His father had given him his first red bandana as a boy, and he had carried one ever since. Welles never made it out. But the people he helped did, and that red bandana became one of the most recognizable symbols of courage from 9/11.

John Labriola may have captured one of the most complete photographic records of the evacuation from inside the Twin Towers. Labriola was on the 71st floor of the North Tower when Flight 11 struck. He began photographing his way down through the building, documenting the stairwells, the evacuees, and firefighters climbing upward into the tower. His full set has never circulated as widely as it probably should, but you have almost certainly seen at least one of his photographs: FDNY firefighter Mike Kehoe of Ladder 6 climbing the stairs as civilians moved down past him. What stands out in Labriola’s photos is how orderly the evacuation still appears. Survivors have often described people moving calmly, staying to one side of the stairs, and making room for firefighters carrying heavy gear upward. His final images are especially interesting. By then, Labriola had reached the plaza level of the North Tower lobby and photographed downward toward the concourse-level command post, where Chief Joseph Pfeifer, Jules Naudet, and other FDNY personnel were operating. It is almost a complete visual journey from high inside the North Tower all the way down to the command post below.

A few photos of the passageway between 1 World Trade Center and 6 World Trade Center, the U.S. Customs House. The escalators and stairs here dropped directly into the North Tower lobby, while the revolving doors ahead led toward the elevated North Bridge across West Street and into the World Financial Center. This area became a crucial escape route on 9/11. When the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., Chief Joseph Pfeifer, Jules Naudet, and others inside the North Tower lobby ran toward these escalators. Naudet kept the camera rolling as the lights went out, dust and debris poured into the passageway, and the group scrambled through the darkness trying to get out. Those stairs and escalators helped lead them away from the lobby and toward the bridge route that ultimately got Pfeifer and others across West Street. It is strange seeing the space before 9/11 knowing how important it would become that morning. And in a completely different chapter of WTC history, Lil’ Kim’s “No Time” music video was also filmed on these escalators.

“There’s more planes coming.” Bertram Springstead was a firefighter with FDNY Ladder 9. In addition to giving a detailed deposition on December 4, 2001, he also took some incredibly raw photographs that morning using a personal camera he carried in his pocket. I was reading through Springstead’s deposition yesterday, and what stood out most was just how little information first responders had in real time. At one point, an FBI agent told him, “There’s more planes coming.” Springstead replied, “What the hell are you talking about, more planes?” The agent told him, “There’s two more planes on the way for these buildings.” Twenty-five years later, we have the luxury of knowing how the story played out, what happened, how it ended, and most of the details in between. They didn’t. That morning was chaos. Many first responders did not know a second plane had hit, that the South Tower had collapsed, or whether several more planes were still on the way. They were operating with limited, unclear, and rapidly changing information. And despite all of that, they kept moving forward. They climbed the towers, helped people down the stairs, and searched through the rubble for fallen men.

I have a feeling we’re going to see a wave of unseen 9/11 footage over the next five years. CCTV that has sat in archives for decades. Private tapes people are finally digitizing. FOIA requests that keep chipping away at government collections. And growing public pressure to release material that has never been seen. The recent fight over unreleased World Trade Center PATH CCTV is a good example. Twenty-five years later, it increasingly feels like we still haven’t seen everything.