Nobody got excited. It was a routine emergency, one of the most common calls to the firehouse. Each person goes to their designated spot on the apparatus.
Captain Dennis Tardio hopped on Engine 7, which carries hose, nozzles, and connections to standpipes. He was joined by Engine Company Chauffeur Tom Spinard, who had the important responsibility of correctly positioning the engine at hydrants when we arrived at a fire scene, making sure that the water pressure was maintained. Firefighters Jamal Braithwaite, Joe Casaliggi, and Pat Zoda took their usual spots on the rig.
Lieutenant Bill Walsh did the same with Ladder 1, which carries the various tools we use to force entry or to check for fire spread. Ladder Company Chauffeur John O’Neill got behind the wheel, as Firefighters Nick Borrillo, Damian Van Cleaf, Steve Olsen, and Hank Ryan climbed into their seats.
Jules, who had started riding along with me on most shifts in the battalion chief’s vehicle, jumped into the backseat of my red Suburban with its rack of flashing lights. Gédéon was usually the one who rode in the Engine and did the filming, while Jules assisted him with logistics. But Gédéon had urged Jules to learn how to shoot as well, and in August, they had bought a second camera. That morning, Jules rode with me to practice filming for one more run before heading home after the long night.
The FDNY dispatcher sent us to the northeast corner of Church and Lispenard Streets in Tribeca. We’d meet Ladder 8 at the scene and Engine 6 was en route. We were responding with two Engines, two Ladders, and a battalion chief, a typical response for an odor of gas because of the fear of an explosion.
Arriving in three minutes, we dismounted the rigs into a glorious September morning: pristine blue sky, bright sun, mild temperature, summer just heading into fall—one of those “top ten” days of the year that makes you feel alive, ready to tackle anything.
Standing in the street, I pulled out a gas detector about the size of a firefighter’s portable radio with a very sensitive probe on the top, which I carried in my vehicle. After a few minutes walking up and down the street, I got a buzzing sound, a hit, over a sewer grate, and a whiff of sewer gas, a normal false positive. I sent some firefighters into basements and nearby restaurants, looking for the source, and they found none. As was standard practice, I asked my aide to contact Con Ed to check it out with their equipment.
Suddenly, I heard the thunderous roar of jet engines at full throttle. In Manhattan, you rarely hear planes because of the tall buildings. Looking west, I saw a low-flying commercial airliner so close that I could read the word “American” on the fuselage. Racing south above the Hudson River, visible just above the buildings on Church Street, the plane zoomed past us and disappeared from my sight for a couple of seconds behind some taller buildings.
When it reappeared, I saw the aircraft was aiming for the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
It was 8:46 a.m.
I stood on the street and watched as the airplane intentionally crashed into the upper floors of the World Trade Center. The aircraft slammed dead center into the building, the wings carving a huge gash through the upper floors of the 110-story skyscraper. A massive fireball erupted, followed a second later by an earsplitting explosion. Black smoke billowed from the wound the aircraft had ripped in the steel and glass building.
The impact took my breath away. Time seemed to stand still as we watched the flames. Then the firefighters around me erupted in a chorus of, “Holy shit! Oh my God! Holy shit! A plane hit the building!”
In horror and disbelief, I tried to comprehend what I had just seen. One of the tallest buildings in the world was struck by a commercial jet and on fire. Thousands of people were in that building or arriving to begin their workday. We were only a few blocks from the World Trade Center, almost certainly some of the closest firefighters to the disaster. As the closest chief in lower Manhattan, I knew instantly I was going to be the first chief on the scene and would have to take command.
“Get back on the rigs!” shouted Captain Tardio to Engine 7’s firefighters, who grabbed their equipment and scrambled into their places on the vehicles. Lieutenant Walsh did the same thing with the firefighters of Ladder 1.
I jumped back into my red SUV, followed by Jules. “Go, go to the Trade Center,” I told firefighter Ed Fahey, who that day was driving me for the first time as a battalion aide. His job was to drive with lights and sirens, so I could talk on the department radio.
I looked up at the smoking North Tower and grabbed the radio. I needed to give concise orders to command and control our response.
“Battalion 1 to Manhattan.”
“Battalion 1,” the dispatcher responded.
“We just had a plane crash into upper floors of the World Trade Center,” I said. “Transmit a second alarm and start relocating companies into the area.”
“Ten-four, Battalion 1.”
“Battalion 1 is also sending the whole assignment on this box to that area.” I was informing the dispatcher that the units with me at the odor of gas were now assigned to the WTC. “This box” referred to the location of the red fire callbox on the corner. All the rigs on that box were now heading to Box 8087, the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
With lights flashing and sirens blaring, our convoy raced south on West Broadway to the WTC.
In seconds my mind flooded with a hundred pieces of information as I thought about my next moves. Fighting thousands of fires had taught me to recognize danger, to pick up small details and process them at lightning speed. The more experience you have, the faster you can process the information by matching it to past incidents and envision a possible course of action. But this was a novel event. I had to slow my thinking down and anticipate the unexpected.
“That was an American Airlines plane,” I said. “That looked like a direct attack.” I had no idea who was responsible, but I knew it was a terrorist attack. I could feel my heart rate subtly increase.
At the height of the workday, there were as many as 40,000 people in the World Trade Center complex. Hundreds of people had probably died as the plane bulldozed through the building. Many others were likely in danger. Of one thing, I was certain: we were going to the biggest fire of our lifetime, the biggest fire since the FDNY was founded in 1865. I was in charge of the FDNY response for now. I had to gather situational awareness, inform the dispatcher, request additional alarms, develop a plan, and deploy firefighting resources.
As we drove, I watched white and black smoke billowing from the building. After the initial fireball, I saw no more flame. It was difficult to identify exactly which floors were involved, but certainly, multiple floors were now internally ablaze and the fire would quickly spread.
Over the years as a firefighter, I had learned how important it was in a crisis to be flexible in my thought processes. I learned when to rely on intuitive gut feelings—That wall is about to collapse! Get out!—and when to switch to deliberate or analytical thinking. Especially as a chief, being able to step back and see the big picture is crucial.
I forced myself into a deliberate calm. Though I had extensive experience with high-rise fires and taught the subject at the fire academy, none of us had ever been confronted with a massive high-rise fire on numerous upper floors. My focus was: What do I need to do right now?
Sixty seconds after giving the first radio transmission, I got on the radio again.
“Battalion 1 to Manhattan . . . We have a number of floors on fire. It looked like the plane was aiming toward the building. Transmit a third alarm. We’ll have the staging area at Vesey and West Street. Have the third alarm assignment go into that area, the second alarm assignment to report to the building.”
The dispatcher and the incoming units needed to know what I knew in my gut: this was not an accident but a deliberate attack by a plane aiming for the building. With those two orders, I had asked for about 150 firefighters to go to the scene, with two-thirds reporting
to me in the building, others reporting to a staging location where they would await assignment.
* * *
• • •
I had a few minutes to think as Fahey drove. I knew the World Trade Center well, especially being a battalion chief in Battalion 1, whose response area was the tip of Manhattan, including the WTC, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island.
On any tour of duty, I might visit the sixteen-acre WTC complex several times. Thanks to years of experience, I was familiar with the layouts and fire safety systems of each of the seven buildings: the North (WTC-1) and South (WTC-2) Towers, the Marriott Hotel (WTC-3), the Southeast Plaza Building (WTC-4), the Northeast Plaza Building (WTC-5), the Custom House (WTC-6), and a 47-story office building (WTC-7).
This wasn’t the first time the World Trade Center had faced a terrorist attack. On February 26, 1993, an extremist had parked a rental van stuffed with explosives in an underground parking garage of the WTC. It blasted a hundred-foot-wide crater through four subfloors, knocking out the center’s elevators, public-address system, and electricity lines. Six people were killed, including a pregnant woman, and over a thousand people had been injured.
A month after the 1993 bombing, I made captain and was assigned to midtown Manhattan. Promoted in a time when the FDNY and NYPD were working hard to fix the vulnerabilities the attack had revealed, I’d spent a lot of time studying skyscraper fires. This was a whole new world of firefighting for me. The fires were more complex, hard to reach, and sometimes hard to find.
In my studies and subsequent years of fighting skyscraper fires, I’d learned that the biggest danger to most people in a high-rise fire is not burns, but smoke inhalation. When a fire is controlled in a one- to three-story building, you break windows to let smoke escape. That is not wise with most high-rise fires; falling glass can injure civilians and firefighters. Without that release, the smoke builds up, often fatally—it obscures the exits and starves the lungs of oxygen, killing you within minutes.
We had to get people out fast, but I wasn’t sure we would be fast enough. I had designed a training exercise on the 93rd floor of the WTC South Tower in 1999. Even with working elevators in an empty building, it had taken twenty minutes to get firefighters up to the 93rd floor. That had not taken into account a commercial airliner laden with jet fuel, used as a terrorists’ missile against a high-rise building, igniting infernos on multiple floors.
Knowing every second counted for the people trapped in the building, we raced south, passing pedestrians who had stopped to look up, stare, and point, mouths agape. At 8:50 a.m., we arrived at the North Tower on the West Street side. The rigs of Ten House, a block away, arrived at the same time. Smoke was pouring out of the upper heights of the building as ash and paper drifted down. Chunks of glass littered the ground outside the building.
“Pull over,” I told Fahey at the driveway to the lobby doors, allowing Engine 7 to take a hydrant and pump water into the building’s sprinkler and standpipe system. Fahey pulled under the Plexiglas porte cochere in front of the building to avoid the falling wreckage. Ladder 1 parked on the street in front.
Guys piled off their rigs, grabbing hose and tools.
I jumped out while Fahey stayed in my car to monitor radio traffic. Division 1 Deputy Chief Peter Hayden was on his way. Fahey would join me when DC Hayden arrived.
My bunker gear was in the back of the vehicle. I climbed into the heavy knee-high leather boots, pulled the bunker pants over my slacks, then shrugged into the bulky black turnout coat made of Nomex, a heat- and flame-resistant fabric. It had reflective yellow stripes and my rank and last name across the back of the coat.
I put on the white helmet that identified me as a battalion chief at fire scenes. But I left my self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) in the vehicle. A face mask attached to an air tank, the SCBA weighed twenty pounds that I didn’t need to carry.
“Can I come with you, Chief?” asked Jules. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, and an FDNY T-shirt. Most other people would have run away, but Jules was now part of the firehouse on Duane Street, and the lobby is usually safe when the fire is many floors above.
“Yeah, you stay with me,” I said. “I want you right next to me. Never leave my side.”
I looked up at the tower and saw smoke churning. But I was seeing only the west side of the building. The plane had struck from the north. I knew there had to be an inferno inside.
My plan was to urgently mobilize resources, evacuate all occupants, and rescue those who could not get out. Save life first, contain the flames, and then we’d think about extinguishing the fire. However, I needed to send up engine companies with rolled-up hose to attach to the standpipe water supply, figuring that we may have to extinguish fire to get to people who were trapped.
Before sending anyone up, I needed to gather information on what was being reported about conditions above.
The soaring six-story lobby, usually festooned with colorful flags of the world, looked like it had been hit by a bomb. The thick floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides of the lobby had been shattered. Shards of glittering glass littered the floors. Large white-and-gray marble panels had crashed from the walls and lay in broken chunks. One entire bank of elevators had been destroyed by the initial fireball racing down the shaft and exploding into the lobby. But the lights were still functioning. The large space had a faint smell of jet fuel but was clear of smoke.
At 8:50 a.m., as we entered the doors to the lobby, we saw a man and woman who had collapsed on the floor of the entryway, skin charred, some of their clothing still on fire. The woman was screaming. They’d been badly burned by a fireball.
“I’ll put them out,” Firefighter Jamal Braithwaite told Captain Tardio.
“Yeah,” Tardio told him. EMS ambulances that were close behind would treat and transport the patients to the hospital. Braithwaite grabbed a fire extinguisher and smothered the flames.
Tardio and Jules followed me inside, along with the firefighters of Engines 7 and 10 and Ladders 1, 8, and 10.
Inside were other civilians who had been burned. As awful as it was to see them suffer, I knew I could not stop to help them. Firefighters and EMTs right behind me would provide medical care. My job was to take command of this event, to rescue the hundreds of people who were trapped.
Lloyd Thomas, one of the Port Authority fire safety directors, ran up to me. “The plane hit the top of the building. Looks like the fires are somewhere above the 78th floor.” This was the best information he had. The building’s fire detection system had been knocked out.
Thomas told me that a full building evacuation order had been given on the intercom within one minute of the building being hit. People had started coming down and were being directed to exit at the mezzanine level.
I was glad to hear that many were evacuating safely, but we had to assume we had a thousand people trapped above the fire. In addition to the 10,000 people who worked in the North Tower, hundreds of others came for meetings or to visit the renowned Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors. The restaurant had probably already opened for business. The only good news was that perhaps many people had not yet arrived for work or meetings.
I turned left and proceeded to the fire command station in the lobby, which had a long, chest-high marble partition separating the public from the fire safety panel, phones, and desk, so I could gather information about the building’s systems and possible location of the fire.
I ordered Captain Tardio, who had twenty-two years of experience and knew the WTC well: “Find me working elevators.” Without elevators, rescuers would have to climb the narrow four-foot-wide stairs. With bunker gear, SCBAs, search rope, roll-ups of fifty feet of hose, and other equipment such as axes and Halligan tools, firefighters would have to haul at least sixty pounds up each flight. They would have to get around people evacuating down the stairs—not a good situ
ation when we needed to move fast.
Tardio and members of Engine 7 fanned out with their firefighters’ service keys to recall the elevators to the lobbies.
Each tower had ninety-nine elevators. Large-capacity express elevators went up to sky lobbies on the 44th and 78th floors, where people took smaller elevators to higher floors. A few minutes later, a grim-looking Tardio returned. The unit hadn’t found even one functional elevator in the North Tower.
I asked an official with the Port Authority to call each elevator, to see if people were trapped inside, and to ask if they knew what floors they were stuck on or between. We’d send someone up to get them out with tools. In the far corner of the fire command station, he started to call each elevator, asking anyone inside to yell or kick the doors so firefighters could locate them.
FDNY dispatchers had been flooded with distress calls from people who were injured, burned, or trapped on upper floors. People in wheelchairs couldn’t get out because the elevators weren’t working. One report said thirty people were on the 40th floor, some severely injured and in need of assistance.
Within six minutes of my arrival, Mike Hurley, the fire safety director of the WTC complex, asked if I wanted to evacuate the South Tower.
The South Tower hadn’t been hit, but the entire complex would be affected by such a large fire in the North Tower. “Yes, evacuate the South Tower,” I said, handing him the desk phone at the fire command. “Do it now. Let’s get everyone down.” People could exit through the underground part of the complex to avoid falling debris. Hurley immediately relayed my evacuation order to the safety directors in the South Tower.
I had ordered the evacuation of both towers. Things were happening rapidly. With the elevators unusable, it was a race against time to get up to those who were trapped.
3
GO UP
The huge lobby of the North Tower was filling up as firefighters arrived and awaited assignment. Each officer approached to let me know they and their units were available. Most people just walked in through the broken windows. But it was not chaotic, just solemn faces entering an unfolding crisis, waiting to be told what to do.
Ordinary Heroes Page 2