A Decade of Hope (2 page)

But then a guy came out of the crowd. If this had happened in a movie you would think it was an integral part of the film, because he literally stopped me. I wanted to say “I'm really in a hurry,” but this guy was shouting, “My wife is in the North Tower!” I knew the guy, and knew that his wife had had a baby three months before. These things triggered in me the sense that I couldn't run away from him, and so I told him, “Nobody's cell phone works. She's fine, I'm sure.... Don't worry, don't worry.” I didn't really believe it, not with what I saw all around me. But no sooner did we turn around and begin to walk fifty feet toward the South Tower than the building came down.

When the South Tower fell, we ran to a big, substantial place, a Starbucks, figuring it would be easy to get into. I grabbed the door handle; it was locked. That was the second time that I felt I was destined to get hit with the building. Once again we were outside, and I thought we were too close to the falling tower to find safety. But we were on Dey Street, midway between the North and South towers, and because of the way that the buildings were laid out, I guess we were far enough inside the doorway to feel that we would be safe. My aide that day was Adam, who is my nephew. He had on only a short-sleeved FDNY shirt and no helmet, typical of the way our aides work. He did not expect to be put into a firefighting position. So we got into a corner, and I got on top of him, and we waited to see what would happen. The sound was a huge, screeching roar. The only thing that landed on us was that thick dust and light debris. There was enough of it, though, to make me feel very worried:
When is it ever going to stop?
I asked myself, and
When will we be able to breathe again?

The black cloud just enveloped us, and the dust got everywhere—in the nose, the ears, the eyes, every crevice. And then it suddenly stopped. After that extremely loud noise came those unbelievable minutes of quiet—a forbidding silence. We picked ourselves up, and I couldn't see more than twenty feet. I could see a car parked at the curb, ten or fifteen feet from us, that was half crushed by something. In a moment of dark irony, I was happy that it had hit the car and not us. I didn't see anyone in our area who needed help. I don't know what our mental state was at the time, but I would say that we were extremely confused.

You could say that this guy who stopped me in concern about his wife was a random thing. He came out of the crowd and prevented me from being either in the building or directly under the building, which is where we would have been. People who believe that things are for a purpose would say that there was some other reason for it. Some would say this is how random our life is.

I do remember clearly that I wanted to get back to the command post. The most direct route there would have been to turn right and try to go through the plaza there that separated the towers, but all that was there now was a mountain of collapse. It dawned on me to go down Broadway and then turn and head over to West Street. A couple of building maintenance guys pulled us into a building—I guess we looked like ghosts—and we were able to wash some of the stuff out of our eyes and ears in their washroom.

So we continued downtown to try to head west. But suddenly there was that terrible sound again. We weren't really in a position to see the building coming down, but this huge cloud came and covered us again. Later I saw in some of the pictures how the cloud mostly blew to the south and east, and followed us to where we were.

When the North Tower fell, it was, at least for us, not as bad as the first time. But it was still frightening to everyone, as it added to the sense of calamity. We waited a short time for the cloud to disperse again, and could see the Fire Department communications van to the south of us. We ran down to it, thinking they had to know what was going on. We saw Dr. [David] Prezant [FDNY chief medical officer; see page 28] standing there with a few firefighters. I said, “What's going on? You can't tell from the radio who's in charge. Where is the command post? Who's running this operation?” I was really surprised when the guy said that Chief [Thomas] Haring, a deputy chief in the Bronx, was in charge of the command post, which was now on Broadway just south of City Hall.

I was stunned. Had everyone been killed? Where was Chief Ganci? Commissioner [William] Feehan? Chief [Donald] Burns? The command post, originally west of the buildings was now east, not even on the same side of the buildings. So all of us walked back: Dr. [Kerry] Kelly [FDNY chief of health services], Dr. Prezant, myself, my aide, and a few firefighters who I think were assigned to Engine 10 and Ladder 10.

We got up to the post where Chief Haring was and learned that it was just an operations post, for there were so many fires burning and people hurt, and that the real command post was still at West Street. So we left the doctors there, because they were dealing with some injured people. They had set up a triage center in a drugstore, I think.

Someone I knew from Ladder 111, Vince Conway, was there, and said to me, “Pete is missing.” I think that's the first news I got about Chief Ganci. I saw that this then placed me in charge, and I continued to make my way to the command post. On West Street, a few blocks north of the Trade Center, we formed somewhat of a command post setup. Chief [Frank] Cruthers and some of the other staff chiefs were there. They confirmed that Chief Ganci and Commissioner Feehan had been together and were now missing. As we learned later, almost everyone, with the exception of Jay Jonas and those miracle guys in the stairway of the North Tower, was missing, gone, never to be seen alive again. Which was the case with Pete Ganci and Bill Feehan and Donald Burns and all of them. I was the highest-ranking person now operating.

Thinking about it now, part of what was in my head was disbelief:
How could this have happened?
The first thought that entered my mind when the building was coming down was disbelief that I was going to be killed by the collapse of the World Trade Center. It just didn't make any sense to me. Afterward, knowing that both of the towers were gone, I came to accept that it had happened, though it wasn't really registering in the reality part of my head. It was hard, maybe impossible, to put everything together. Days later I read a lot of the official department interviews, and many people had the events out of sync. They might have remembered they were in a certain location, but we know that they couldn't have been at that place at that time. The day happened in such a once-in-a-lifetime fashion.

We have always fought fires in a certain way: You've seen this happen before; you've seen that happen before. We usually know what to expect. Small things sometimes do occur at a fire or an emergency that are unexpected, but for everyone in the Fire Department, this was completely off the page. So taking charge at that point, I tried to fall back on things that I knew, like sectoring the disaster area, for instance. There was so much going on that I realized that I had to assign my ranking people in charge of each area so we would have some semblance of being organized. The area that came to be called Ground Zero was sectioned into quarters, each led by a single chief. It was organized in our typical fashion: Captains, battalion chiefs, deputy chiefs, and other people worked together as trained companies, as teams, even if they had never met one another [before]. They hooked up with one another, and in some way, maybe common cause, followed the directions of the higher-ranking people, and it worked. Even the chief who was in that North Tower stairwell tried to continue to be a chief. Under the worst possible circumstances, we did form an organization that worked.

We learned that morning about the Pentagon and about another plane that went down. There were many rumors that this was certainly bigger than just two planes. The first few times that warplanes flew overhead, hearing that sound of jet planes again certainly shook everybody up on the ground. For days I think people believed that we were going to be attacked again. Everyone was on edge.

I sensed that our loss was almost incomprehensible. When we got back to the command post the information was incomplete. People weren't really transmitting on the radio. I wasn't hearing enough to know the full extent. Of course I knew we lost hundreds but had no idea how many. Did we lose everybody who was earlier seen? Almost everybody? Did we lose a thousand people? The numbers were just numbing, beyond what you could say, think, or anticipate.

High-rise buildings on fire have never fallen down. How did this happen ? History shows there had been localized collapses in high-rises, and I think some of us expected that. But even the worst fires, at the end of the day there was still a building standing. This was the first time. In fact, as we found subsequently, even in controlled demolitions, no building had ever collapsed into itself as the Twin Towers did.

Back at the command post I could actually see that some people, like Chief [Peter] Hayden and Chief [Joseph] Pfeifer, whom I knew had been in the building, were now safe, and that was a pocket of good news among the bad. People from the West Street command post had gone into the basement of the Financial Center and had come back out. Some of them had realized what was going on. But we were having a hard time and were only learning what had happened as we interacted at the command post and walked around the scene. But throughout that day I still had no idea how many people were missing, except that it was an incredibly high number. None of us knew.

We were all familiar with the fact that people can survive in pockets after collapses for days and days and, in a few rare cases, as long as thirteen days. We did think there would be more people alive, injured, especially since there were many underground levels. As it turned out, there were very, very few.

I thought that the people whose transmissions on the radio came through from that North Tower stairwell were confused, and that they were actually in a different building. I didn't believe anyone could be alive in that pile of rubble—not there, in that position. If they had said we were on Promenade B or one of those levels downstairs, it would have sounded more rational but for thirteen of them to survive in that stairwell, it's still a miracle.

As we made our way around the building again and started to do our searches, however, it was becoming quickly apparent that there weren't going to be survivors here. We called it a rescue operation for a few weeks, but after the first few days it was getting harder to believe that. We never lost consideration for the hope within families, however. Some of them wanted to believe that, like in earthquakes, we'd pull someone out ten days later, so we certainly acted as though we were going to pull people out, and we worked as hard and as fast as we could to find people to pull out. But it was becoming more and more apparent that it just wasn't going to happen. And it didn't.

We were assured through our mutual aid agreements that various fire departments would assist us in covering many other parts of the city. They came in from all over Long Island and Westchester County and staffed some of our firehouses that day and that night. At the scene we had adequate people. At major fires, Pete Ganci used to say, “We have 210 engines, so keep sending me engines until I tell you to stop.” We had an enormous resource of fire companies here in New York that was unavailable to anyone else in the country. So despite our terrible losses, we still had a huge number of people to do this task downtown. While I never felt that we didn't have adequate staffing there, it was difficult to stabilize the situation, because the whole perimeter was on fire, and so much damage had been done to the water mains: 90 West Street, a huge building, was on fire on the south side; on the north we had 7 World Trade Center completely in flames. Either of these would have been the fire of the year for us, but we were also trying to stabilize many, many smaller fires.

We had no chance of committing enough people to put out the fires burning uncontrollably at 7 World Trade Center, so we decided that we would stop operating there because of the danger of the collapse of that building. We pulled everyone to a safe distance, which proved to be a good move, because all forty-seven stories of the building came down around five o'clock. The fact that everyone was out of the way, and no one else was hurt, was a small consolation at the end of the day.

We knew that 7 World Trade Center had a large diesel-fuel tank. It had been a controversy to allow diesel fuel in that building, which was meant to be used for the city's Office of Emergency Management and to power emergency generators for the stock-trading operations that went on in that building. So we knew that there was fuel in there to add to the problem, and once that building came down we could recommit everyone to what we were doing.

At some point late that afternoon the fire commissioner, Tom Von Essen, came back to the scene, and he said, “You're now the chief of department.” Officially I was promoted on Sunday morning, and following that we had a big promotion ceremony to replace all the officers we had lost. So there were promotions in every rank that day. It was held outside of headquarters on Sunday morning.

 

The fires continued to burn for months in that pile, intensely. I'm not sure when and at what point they were declared under control. We would get daily aerial infrared photos from the [federal] government showing where fires were still burning under the pile, so we could see what was getting better and what was changing.

At times I thought it was beyond our capabilities as a fire department to rebuild ourselves and accomplish our work at the Trade Center. Who does something like this? How could we? Maybe we needed the army to come in. But we have a lot of talent in the Fire Department, and a lot of people put together a system that worked. And we did it rather rapidly and on the run. Technically, it was a Fire Department–managed operation, but a lot of agencies were involved. We did use the federal resources, and logistical-support people who were used to running massive forest fires helped. FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] teams came in from all over the country. The design and construction bureau, the city department that supervises construction, had a big role also, as did the Police Department, and the Port Authority, which owned and ran the property. But the Fire Department maintained control of the situation throughout. Some people didn't want to believe that we were in charge—some, I think, were quite offended by that—but it was a Fire Department operation until June of 2002, when it was handed over to the Port Authority.