Firefighters aren’t the quietest people in the world. At most fires, there’s loud chitchat, orders being given, and colorful language. But this morning, the lobby was a grim place. They entered with grave concern on their faces. They saw the burning towers and knew they were going to the most dangerous fire of their careers.
People were trapped and needed our help. It was our job, but each of us made a personal decision to go in and risk our lives for others.
At 8:55 a.m., Deputy Chief Hayden entered the lobby. Hayden had been at his quarters in SoHo, the firehouse at Lafayette and Spring, when he heard a plane passing overhead, extremely low and loud. He ran to a window in time to hear the impact, though the buildings obscured his line of sight. Hayden suspected a plane had accidentally crashed somewhere in lower Manhattan. When the chief heard me call for multiple alarms to the WTC on the radio, he grabbed his aide and said, “Let’s go.”
During his drive down Lafayette Street, Hayden saw only a huge column of smoke, no flame, giving him little information about where the fire was blazing. But he immediately ordered FDNY Hazmat and Rescue specialty units to respond.
On his arrival, Hayden became the incident commander. I was glad to see him. Hayden was the quintessential FDNY firefighter. Born of Irish parents, he grew up in Rockaway, Queens, joined the FDNY in 1968, and had a brother, two sons, and a son-in-law in the department. We’d worked fires together for many years and knew how each other thought. Pete was a person of action and always wanted things done quickly. I was more analytical and could anticipate the outcomes of our decisions. Together, we had a half century of experience in the FDNY and were both very familiar with the WTC complex.
I brought Hayden up to speed with what I knew, which was still precious little. Whatever floors were involved, the body of fire was large and growing fast, fueled by office combustibles—material like desks, chairs, paper files, and other furnishings.
In front of the fire panel, we set up a magnetic command board brought by Hayden, like a big aluminum suitcase with fold-down legs. With its battered top propped up, you could see the words “Command Post” and an FDNY logo. His aide, Firefighter Christian Waugh, started tracking units using numbered chips in different colors, which designated whether a unit was Engine, Ladder, Rescue, Squad, Hazmat, or Battalion. The board design dated back to World War II; it was effective, if primitive. We could see at a glance which units had been deployed where.
Hayden and I agreed that evacuation and rescue would be our priority. We had to get the people out of the building. I saw Jim Corrigan, retired captain of Ten House, now one of the Port Authority fire safety directors, and asked him to put his engineers to work on gaining control of the building’s systems, especially the elevators. Without working elevators, our rescue operations would be slowed considerably as rescuers would have to climb the narrow stairs in this gigantic skyscraper.
Three to six firefighters, with their heavy gear, would go up as a unit, led by a fire officer. Fire officers carry only a big flashlight and an eighteen-inch officer’s tool that resembles a small crowbar. They direct units and evaluate risk, keeping their firefighters safe. If something doesn’t feel right, they pull them out. The officers would be the first to go into danger as they led their teams for search and rescue. But they couldn’t race ahead of their unit. The officer and firefighters were a team.
At first, aggressive firefighters might climb one floor per minute. But after ten flights, exertion and equipment would slow that down to perhaps two minutes a floor. That might slow further as they found injured people in the stairwell, were blocked by debris, or encountered smoke or flame. Just to get up to the floor below the fire could take over an hour.
That gave me pause. But people needed us.
The simplicity of the structure would seem to be an advantage. Each of the tower’s 110 floors was square, with each side of the building measuring 208 feet in length, about one acre of open space per floor. Stairwells A, B, and C were situated in the center core of the building, where all the electrical conduits, water pipes, and elevators were located. The three stairwells, elevator banks, and utilities fit like a smaller square inside the bigger square.
But they weren’t exactly the same. Stairwells A and C ran from the mezzanine level of the lobby up to the 110th floor. Stairwell B ran from B6 in the basement up to the 107th floor, accessible from the West Street lobby area, where we had entered that morning. But stairs A and C had deviations to transfer hallways, which could be confusing to people unfamiliar with them. Those had caused confusion during the 1993 evacuation.
In each stairwell, there was a standpipe, or water main, which ran the height of the building. Each floor had a spout with a wheel. The wheel controlled the water pressure. Once firefighters reached the floors involved with the fire, they could use water to cut a path through flames to reach those trapped.
At 8:57 a.m., seven minutes after our arrival, I gave orders to Captain Tardio to take Engine 7 and climb up toward the impact zone, checking each floor for civilians and fire before continuing up. I didn’t want them to get trapped on a higher floor with a growing fire beneath them. But they were to go no higher than the 70th floor. Eight floors below the fires was a reasonable margin of safety.
They were to report conditions they encountered by radio. We didn’t know whether stairwells were filling with smoke, didn’t know the impact floors, and didn’t know if water for firefighting would be available on upper levels. We were making critical choices with little to no information. We had no video feed allowing us to see the exterior of the building.
Without hesitation, Tardio, carrying an extra length of hose, turned and led the men of Engine 7 toward the staircase. They were followed by Lieutenant Walsh leading Ladder 1, with orders to go up any staircase that was available, help any civilians who needed it, and give us a report by radio.
Battalion 7 Chief Orio Palmer and his units arrived from their quarters in Chelsea on the west side of Manhattan. About the same age, Palmer and I had been captains in neighboring firehouses in a heavily populated area of Corona and Jackson Heights in Queens. Both highly competitive, we ran in fire department races against each other.
Promoted to battalion chief about the same time, we had spent hours discussing the challenges of radio communications in high-rise firefighting. We used analog, point-to-point radios that had six normal operating channels. Companies would operate on the same tactical channel, which chiefs like me would monitor and use to communicate with firefighters in an emergency. The chiefs had a separate command channel to communicate with each other.
But these radios had weak signal strength and often didn’t penetrate the steel and concrete floors separating companies attempting to talk to each other. When many companies were trying to use the same channel at the same time, communications became unintelligible.
After the 1993 bombing, the Port Authority had installed a repeater system on the roof of WTC-5 to boost FDNY radio communications in the complex. The radio signal would be received by the repeater at a low wattage on one frequency and transmitted on another frequency at a higher wattage. An activation console was installed in the fire safety desk of each tower.
Chief Palmer and I had trained many times on the WTC’s system, used only for the chiefs’ command channel. Because it interfered with our operations in lower Manhattan, we asked them to keep the repeater off unless it was needed. When I first arrived, I had asked Lloyd Thomas, the civilian safety director for the building, to turn the repeater on.
Chief Hayden and I began ordering more units up. Some we sent to respond to particular distress calls. We had reports of civilians with chest pains or in wheelchairs. One blind woman needed help to get down the stairs. I told one battalion chief and three companies to clear floors 21 to 25, then continue up, but no higher than the 70th-floor staging area.
One fire lieutenant from Engine 33 came up to me. I was surprised
to see him. It was my brother Kevin, and he was supposed to be off studying for the captain’s exam. Without saying a word, he and I looked at each other, wondering if the other was going to be okay. Then I ordered him to take his company and “go up the B stairs to the 70th floor and evacuate occupants along the way.”
My brother slowly turned and quietly led his Engine 33 firefighters—David Arce, Michael Boyle, Robert Evans, Robert King, and Keithroy Maynard—to a stairwell.
We still had no information from the outside, nothing even as simple as what floors were involved. Within minutes of Chief Hayden’s arrival, police helicopters began circling the towers. We wanted to know if we could do a helicopter roof rescue. One of the other chiefs had grabbed my citywide radio, so I tried a landline to get through to the FDNY dispatcher. I kept trying but could get no response. However, at 8:58 a.m., an NYPD helicopter pilot radioed to their dispatcher that they could not do any roof rescue because of smoke and heat. This meant that the only way to get to people was from the interior.
Sounds of sirens filled the streets outside the lobby as emergency units continued to stream into the area. The entire FDNY hierarchy had mobilized. Responding from headquarters in Brooklyn were Chief of Department Pete Ganci, Jr., Chief of Operations Daniel Nigro, Assistant Chief Sal Cassano, and other high-ranking chiefs. Ganci set up the Incident Command Post (ICP) across from the North Tower on the far side of West Street, a six-lane street in front of the World Financial Center. From that safe vantage point, he could look at the big picture strategically and coordinate the massive resources, communications, and operations needed to respond to this unprecedented event.
A Port Authority police officer passed me news that people were trapped in elevators, but he did not have exact locations. The building staff continued fielding desperate calls from people begging for help on the intercom phones.
I thought about my brother. Kevin and other fire officers had started the long slog up the stairs, leading their teams. What would they encounter?
* * *
• • •
The Duane Street firefighters with Engine 7 and Ladder 1 approached their assignments to go up the stairs with the conviction that their mission would succeed.
“I felt the mood that we were gonna put the fire out,” said Firefighter Damian Van Cleaf, of Ladder 1. “Everyone seemed to be confident. I know I was.”
“You basically looked at it and said, Okay, we got ten to twenty stories of fire,” said Captain Tardio, of Engine 7. “We’ll deal with it. We’ll get up there; we’ll get to it.”
Tardio had spent his first eleven years at a house in Chinatown. As a lieutenant, he worked in Staten Island, bounced around Brooklyn for a few years as a captain, before coming back to Manhattan and getting assigned to Engine 7. A leader who took his role of training and drilling the younger firefighters very seriously, he’d get to the firehouse early to relieve the offgoing officer and get ready for his tour, well before he was due.
Standing on the street at the odor of gas call, Tardio looked up and saw the first airplane heading toward the North Tower. In mounting horror, he said to himself, “Turn, turn,” trying to will the pilot to change course. “And he hit it, as if there was a bull’s-eye on it.”
Within seconds, he was shouting to the men to get on the rigs.
As he watched the impact, thirty-year-old Van Cleaf felt as if someone had taken “the air and sucked it out of my lungs and my head. I became so light-headed, my knees buckled and it felt like a dream as I saw the plane crumble into the building and just disintegrate.”
Arriving at the WTC, Tardio instructed his chauffeur, Tommy Spinard, to make sure he could get a hydrant near the building’s sprinkler standpipe. Spinard hooked up to the hydrant by the curb, which wasn’t protected by the overhang, stretched three lengths of hose, and started pumping at 200 pounds of pressure.
Spinard saw injured civilians lying in the street. Two naked women sat on a grass divider in the middle of West Street, gray from head to toe. Their clothes had been burned off. They were still alive, but just staring, not moving. Firefighter Casaliggi made eye contact with one of the women and he went numb. As an EMT, he wondered if they were going to do medical treatment. He ran to the other side of the rig and told Tardio, “Captain, we got bodies in the street.”
Tardio calmly said, “Get the roll-ups.” An EMS ambulance arrived and took the injured people away.
After ascertaining the elevators weren’t working, Tardio and Firefighters Braithwaite and Pat Zoda started up stairwell C. Tardio grabbed an extra roll of hose himself. Though not a big guy, he was carrying, with his bunker gear, close to sixty pounds of weight. They started up the stairs, which were so narrow there was room only for two people to pass, one going up while another was going down. He knew they were walking into hell, but the only thing going through his mind was, “We have to get up there.”
As they climbed the stairway, they encountered civilians coming down in a steady stream, some injured or burned, with their clothes and skin hanging off. They tried to comfort them, to tell them it would be all right, to stay calm but get out as quickly as possible. Don’t stop! They found a scorched woman just sitting in the C staircase, clearly in shock, unable to move on her own. They put her with a group of firefighters to take her down.
Civilians who passed were glad to see them. “They were pretty much saying, ‘God bless you’ and ‘I can’t believe y’all are going up and we’re coming down,’ ” Braithwaite, of Engine 7, said. “People pretty much said, ‘Why y’all going up there—get out!’ ”
But none of the firefighters turned around. As they climbed, they sweated from the exertion of carrying their gear. People were overheating, getting thirsty.
They asked everyone about what they had seen on higher floors. Was there fire? Tardio didn’t want to pass a small blaze, then discover as they got higher that it had grown and was blocking their descent. On each floor, they quickly searched to make sure everyone had left.
Walsh and Ladder 1 were not far behind Tardio and Engine 7, going up stairwell B.
Walsh had arrived that morning at about 7:30 a.m. and did paperwork for about an hour before the odor of gas call. When Walsh saw the American Airlines jet, he assumed the pilot was in trouble, that he was going to veer off and ditch into the harbor.
When the aircraft instead crashed into the building, creating a gaping hole six stories high, Walsh instantly knew “we had a tough twenty-four-hour tour ahead of us. And the unexpected was gonna happen . . . We’ve never experienced something like this before.” He anticipated having to walk up ninety flights of stairs before they could get to the fire.
Ladder 1 Chauffeur John O’Neill raced toward the WTC, swerving to avoid debris in the road. A veteran of the response to the 1993 bombing, O’Neill had been chatting with the chauffeur of Ladder 8 and hadn’t taken much notice of the plane at first, just saw a silver blur against the blue sky. Then he heard the sound, turned around, and saw the building had been hit and flames had erupted in the hole.
“Right then and there, I knew this was going to be the worst day of my life as a firefighter,” O’Neill said. “And it gave me a chill right down into my bones. It wasn’t that queasy feeling that you get in your stomach. This one went right to my marrow immediately. In that second, I already knew that there were a lot of dead people up there. And possibly going to be even more. And it really shook me full of tremendous fear. Fear for myself and fear for the people who were up there.” It was a feeling he’d never before had as a firefighter.
But O’Neill didn’t tell the others that. Privately, he knew they were in for a marathon, not a sprint. He and Lieutenant Walsh jumped back on their rig, along with Firefighters Van Cleaf, Borrillo, Olsen, and Ryan.
“Well, we have our hands full here,” O’Neill told Walsh as he drove. “We’re just gonna do it.”
Driving down West Street, lo
oking at the smoke pouring from the building, O’Neill hoped he would wake up from the nightmare. But he controlled his fear, telling his crew, “Nice and easy, guys. Take it easy,” as if sensing a need to calm their jitters. After parking the rig, he joined his team inside.
When Walsh first took his men to stairwell B at my direction, so many people were coming down that they had to wait a few minutes for the traffic to slow. Though the B stairwell was congested, people were walking down in an orderly, controlled fashion. The firefighters asked each group where they had been when the plane hit. The highest anyone mentioned was the 80th floor.
Walsh noticed Steve Olsen going ahead of the group, which he didn’t like. He didn’t want anyone freelancing. Anticipating they might have to climb ninety floors, Walsh knew they needed to pace themselves.
“We knew it was going to be a long haul getting up there,” said Nick Borrillo, of Ladder 1. “Had to try to conserve as much energy as I could getting up there. But that was impossible.”
As they passed the steady stream of occupants, O’Neill wondered how they could accomplish anything. He believed there would be a problem with the water supply due to the damage the jet had caused. Multiple floors had initially looked to be involved in the fire, but he knew that was spreading quickly. “In a building like that, it was almost impossible to put out with the kinds of means that we would have at that point.” But O’Neill didn’t air his opinion.
By the time Ladder 1 hit the 19th floor, Walsh had to wait on Van Cleaf to catch up. But he acquired a new guy, a straggler with Ladder 10, who had gotten separated from his group. It wasn’t a good environment to be operating alone. Walsh was worried about Firefighter Olsen, who had told him by handie-talkie that he had made it up to the 22nd floor.
Ordinary Heroes Page 3