For the first time, I realized that both towers had completely collapsed. The buildings were not hiding behind the smoke. They no longer existed. Though it was the second skyscraper to be hit, the South Tower had disintegrated first in fifty-six minutes, followed twenty-nine minutes later by the North Tower’s collapse. As each Twin Tower pancaked from the top down, they destroyed everything beneath them, including the Marriott Hotel and surrounding buildings. Most of the sixteen-acre complex had been utterly demolished.
My mind reeled in disbelief. I tried to take it all in but could not. I had landed in a war zone. With fires burning everywhere, it looked like the whole world was on fire. The nightmare had unfolded in just 102 minutes, from the airplane hitting the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. to its collapse at 10:28 a.m.
Questions flooded my thoughts. How many people had we lost? I had sent a couple of hundred firefighters up those staircases. Had any of them survived? Where were my brother and Engine 33? Where were Engine 7 and Ladder 1? What about all the other units I’d ordered to evacuate?
Jules and I walked toward the burning piles of debris. Dozens of rigs had been destroyed. Dazed, injured people coated in powder staggered around like apparitions. First responders were on their knees, sifting through rubble. It looked, as Jules put it, like the “gateway to hell.”
Jules was desperate to know what had happened to his brother. He believed Gédéon had gone up in the North Tower with Tony. They usually rode in Engine 7 together. It made sense that they’d come with us to the odor of gas call, though I didn’t recall seeing either of them in the lobby. But I had been extraordinarily busy.
“I’ve got to find my brother,” Jules said. “If you don’t mind, I’m going home.” Weary, coughing, crying, he began to walk back to the firehouse, asking every firefighter he saw, “Have you seen anyone from Engine 7 or Ladder 1?”
I knew Gédéon also would be worried about Jules. I thought of Kevin and the other firefighters I had told to go up stairwells—especially those from my firehouse—and then ordered to evacuate. Had they heard me? Where were Captain Tardio, Lieutenant Walsh, and their firefighters? They’d been among the first to go up inside the tower.
Heartsick, I pictured my brother’s calm face as he headed toward his assignment. I fought to gain control of my fear and anxiety, to figure out what to do. Nothing I had ever experienced gave me any guidance. I had never felt so helpless.
I tried to call Kevin by radio, “Battalion 1 to Engine 33,” and heard no answer. Radio traffic was cluttered, so it would not be unusual for him not to answer me. I assumed he would show up, and there was a lot to do.
* * *
• • •
After hearing my order to evacuate, the Duane Street firefighters had hit the lobby of the North Tower with minutes to spare.
Lieutenant Walsh and Ladder 1 briefly regrouped in the deserted lobby, amazed at the devastation. But they still had no idea the South Tower had collapsed. They started to exit the building through the broken windows. As Walsh walked under the overhang, he could hear and see bodies hitting the glass, others hitting the ground. On the corner of the building was a pile of bodies where people had been landing in the same spot.
Someone in the middle of the street yelled, “Wait, wait,” throwing up his hands. Two people had jumped together. Olsen, who had rejoined the group, was too close and his bunker gear got spattered with blood. Walsh took a deep breath and ran about fifty yards to a pedestrian underpass, hoping nothing would hit him from above.
O’Neill was stunned to realize that Ladder 1’s truck had been demolished by concrete and steel, but still didn’t realize the South Tower had completely collapsed. He and Van Cleaf walked up West Street, followed by other members of their house. Someone came up to them to tell them they better move faster, that the North Tower was going to fall. The firefighters doubled their pace, difficult in bunker gear after their exhausting climb.
The group had made it about two blocks north on West Street when the terrible rumble began. The top of the North Tower came down, popping floor by floor as everyone below fled in panic, chased by the mushroom cloud of debris. O’Neill dropped his mask and took off, for the first time really and truly running flat-out for his life.
Lieutenant Walsh heard a tremendous roar and turned to look at the tower as it began to melt, starting high at the crash zone, “like a sandcastle in a rainstorm.” Walsh dropped all his tools, shed his mask and helmet, and ran north, trying to outrace the roaring locomotive bearing down on him. He could hear steel beams hitting steel beams, “like an erector set breaking down.” As the hot gale of dust and debris knocked him to the ground, he knew he was dead.
Eleven seconds later, he opened his eyes to blackness. He was covered in ash and could see little pockets of fire around him. “I thought I was in hell or purgatory at that point.” Then Walsh realized he had survived.
After leaving the building, Olsen had sought refuge under a pedestrian walkway and run into Joey Angelini, a firefighter he knew from Rescue 1. They were facing each other when Olsen told him the building was “shivering and shaking” and he feared it was going to come down. No sooner did he get out the words than the building began to pancake. Both men took off running—Olsen ran north up toward Vesey Street, Joey went south toward Liberty Street. Olsen survived but his friend did not.
When Engine 7 firefighters exited the North Tower, Zoda thought the landscape around them looked “like the end of the world.” The Marriott Hotel next door had been cut in half, crushed by the South Tower, which they still didn’t realize had fallen.
Tardio told his firefighters to keep close and stay in front of him as they headed north on West Street. Then they heard the loud rumbling, looked up, and desperately tried to outrun the collapsing tower.
“It was like a landslide,” Zoda said. “I was running and watching this cloud of smoke chasing me up West Street. And I said, I can’t outrun this smoke.”
Tardio was frozen in amazement for a moment or two before he started running, still carrying his mask and gear. Exhausted from climbing and descending thirty floors, he was caught by the tsunami of hot air and grit. He threw himself to the ground and covered up. He expected to be incinerated by a fireball.
Then it stopped. In the pitch black, Tardio got up on his knees. “Felt my hands. I had them.” He took his first breath of air, like his face was “buried in sand.” He swallowed dust but was finally able to get his mask on and breathe.
* * *
• • •
Like me, firefighters who had managed to evacuate without serious injury started to move toward the vestiges of the World Trade Center they had barely escaped. Covered with dense gray dust, they looked like stone statues standing at the edge of the pile of twisted steel and crumbled concrete.
Their firefighter brothers were trapped beneath the twisted mayhem, maybe injured, dying. They started to pick their way across collapsed beams to search for survivors, only to retreat as material shifted beneath their feet, all too aware that voids might swallow them up.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” my handie-talkie radio suddenly squawked loud and clear. It was the tactical channel. “Ladder 6 to Command, we are trapped on the 4th floor in the B stairs. Mayday, mayday, mayday.”
With a rush of relief, I recognized the voice of Captain Jay Jonas, from Ladder 6, a firehouse in Chinatown. I had sent him and his unit up the B stairs early on. Jonas and at least a few others were alive. If they had lived, maybe Kevin had survived in a structural pocket and was awaiting rescue.
I had no idea how to find the B stairs of the North Tower in this vast mound of misshapen steel beams and concrete. One wrong step and I could be terribly injured.
I decided to try going in below street level, through WTC-6, an eight-story building, the shortest structure in the complex. Known as Custom House, it stood on Vesey Street. I knew a lower passageway from there i
nto the North Tower, where I could access the B stairs in the basement.
I didn’t know what I’d encounter, but I needed air. I’d left my SCBA in my vehicle, now crushed by tons of debris. I found another chief’s car on the street, damaged but accessible. I borrowed a Halligan tool from a firefighter, popped the trunk of the vehicle, and found an SCBA. The masks, carried by all firefighters, not only provide air, but also emit a high-pitched alarm when the user stops breathing or remains immobile for more than thirty-five seconds. Firefighters can trigger the alarm if they are trapped.
WTC-6 had been damaged, but not completely destroyed. I asked a firefighter to go into the building with me, but it quickly became clear the destruction was so extensive, it was impossible to get through the passageway to the B stairwell. The twisted steel beams and pockets of fire made it too dangerous. I yelled for Jonas, listened for SCBA alarms, but heard nothing. The rescue would have to come from the top.
Back on the surface, wherever I walked, I saw no desks, no chairs, no computers, no phones. Everything was pulverized. Shredded paper—millions of pages of reports, financial documents, the detritus from hundreds of offices that had occupied the skyscrapers for decades—was inches deep.
The FDNY had to regroup, reorient, and rebuild a command structure. But how?
The sixteen-acre rubble field was divided roughly into four distinct sectors, essentially squares, with chunks of buildings blocking movement from sector to sector. Fires raged in adjacent buildings, particularly WTC-7.
We were not willing to jeopardize firefighters to go into a building that had been evacuated, but we couldn’t let the fire jump the streets to other structures. However, the water main was broken.
Fresh firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, and doctors were arriving, eager to search for survivors, all asking, “How can I help?” People were digging ad hoc, a dangerous situation. We had fires raging throughout the complex and no water supply. We needed to reestablish command, but our upper ranks had been devastated, chiefs either missing or dead. The magnetic command board in the North Tower lobby—our only record of what units had been sent to which floors—had been destroyed.
Firefighters began organizing themselves from the bottom up instead of the top down, watching each other to make sure their buddies didn’t slip into a void. The dust on the steel beams was as slippery as baby powder.
Little by little, I heard chiefs reporting in on the radio. Deputy Chiefs Charlie Blaich and Tom Haring announced they were taking command of their geographical sectors.
Chief Hayden appeared out of nowhere. After carrying Father Judge, he had been on West Street looking for the ICP when the North Tower began to collapse. Too close to outrun it, he and Sal Cassano had crawled under different rigs parked on the street to escape the onslaught. The vehicles were damaged, but they survived. Cassano had injured his back and had been taken to the hospital for treatment.
Hayden surveyed the chaos. Nobody knew where Ganci was, or even if he was alive. People needed direction. Hayden had to impose order, but how? He climbed up on a burned-out rig in roughly the middle of the rubble. He asked everyone to stop whatever they were doing and look at him.
Dozens of firefighters obeyed, turning to watch Hayden, covered in gray dust, standing atop the crumpled fire truck. Then he asked us to do something unusual.
“Take off your helmets,” Chief Hayden said, “and we are going to have a moment of silence, because we lost a lot of people today.”
Our helmets bear our rank, unit number, and soot from every fire we have ever fought. Our helmets are our identity. Firefighters don’t take off their helmets for anybody. Hayden knew that. Nobody moved to comply.
“No, no, no,” Hayden said. “Take off your helmets because we lost a lot of people and we’ll have a moment of silence.”
So, wherever we were standing in the vast debris field, members of the FDNY took off our helmets and bowed our heads in silence, as did Chief Hayden.
With that simple, ordinary gesture, Hayden brought us together. At that moment, we felt solidarity with each other in our human frailty. Our vision of being superhero firefighters, the often felt but unspoken motivation that prompted many of us to join the FDNY, had ended. We were only ordinary people.
“Okay, put on your helmets,” Chief Hayden said, as he slapped his own helmet back on his head. He told everyone, whether on duty or off, to give officers their name, their unit, so they could keep track of them and their given assignments. “We have much work to do.”
In the quiet moment of silence, he established command.
7
BROTHER SEARCHING FOR BROTHER
Though Jules believed his brother had gone up in the North Tower with the probie, Gédéon and Tony had stayed behind in the firehouse. Tony had gone off duty and was about to leave. Then, suddenly, someone from the neighborhood pounded on the door of the firehouse and told them, “Excuse me. A plane just hit the World Trade Center.”
Gédéon grabbed his camera, and the two went out on Church Street. Filming the North Tower burning and the reactions of those on the sidewalk, Gédéon immediately felt guilty. All summer long, he had wished for a big fire.
Then he felt a rush of fear. He knew that everyone from the Duane Street firehouse who had been on the odor of gas call would be responding—including Jules—and started to worry.
He and Tony returned to the firehouse. The firehouse housewatch computer started spitting out message after message calling for more units. Over the next twenty minutes, firefighters began arriving from home to grab their bunker gear and tools. But they had no rigs and no orders to report to the WTC. They began turning the Duane Street firehouse into an emergency triage center for injured civilians and firefighters who were sure to arrive, bringing out all the EMS equipment, blankets, and other supplies. A couple of doctors who worked across the street knocked on the door, volunteering to provide medical treatment.
Gédéon and Tony monitored the computer. Gédéon felt torn. He was responsible for putting Jules in danger. The film had been his idea; he was supposed to stick to their plan, to keep filming Tony, but he had to find Jules.
He again grabbed his camera and started slowly walking south on Church Street toward the WTC, taping people on the sidewalks, their shocked faces staring up as ambulances and fire trucks raced past. Periodically, he tilted the camera from the people to the burning skyscraper.
“I’m thinking, ‘My God, this is too big,’ ” Gédéon said. “For two months, we’re waiting for a fire, and all of a sudden the most incredible catastrophe is in front of you. And you think you’re not ready.” But the scene was too important not to document. He kept going.
Gédéon had pushed Jules into learning to film. Now, as he walked toward the burning WTC tower, Gédéon felt his passion to get the film made had put his brother’s life in extreme danger.
The sidewalks grew crowded, chaotic, filled with people who had seen the plane hit, telling strangers what little they knew. He filmed their astonishment, their eyes saying, This is not happening.
Because lower Manhattan is a magnet for people from all over the world, they were speaking multiple languages, but the reaction was the same. Disbelief, shock, fear. Some were crying, in anguish for those they knew were trapped in the tower, for those who were jumping. It was as if the globe were under attack, not just a skyscraper in New York.
Three minutes after 9 a.m., Gédéon caught the fireball at the moment when the second aircraft slammed into the South Tower. Debris rained down onto the street, sending panicked people running. Black and white smoke from both towers churned into the blue sky. Shredded paper fluttered through the air toward the East River.
“It’s like something out of The Towering Inferno, like a movie,” one man told him, clinging to a street post and looking up at the buildings.
On Church Street, Gédéon filmed a smoking chunk of jet engine that
had crashed through one of the buildings and landed on the sidewalk, as a police officer shooed the curious away.
“Clear this area, please,” the cop told rubberneckers. “Please stay away. Whoa, what are you doing? This is evidence, you don’t kick it. Just get away from the area. Just go.”
Gédéon couldn’t get closer to the trade center without a firefighter. More afraid for his brother than ever, he retraced his steps to the firehouse, hoping to get someone to bring him back to the site.
Tony ached to go to the WTC, to join in the biggest rescue operation any of the firefighters had ever seen, only to be told to stay put, to answer the phones. He watched TV in frustration, furious when he saw a report that a third terrorist plane had hit the Pentagon. Tony said, “The Pentagon’s on fucking fire? War. This is war.” He started to put on his boots.
Watching Tony get angry, swearing at the unknown perpetrators, Gédéon realized he was expressing what everyone felt. “I saw the firefighter in him taking over.”
But without permission, Tony couldn’t join Engine 7 and Ladder 1.
* * *
• • •
Firefighters and other FDNY personnel were reporting to the scene, including Dr. Kerry Kelly, the chief medical officer whom I would come to know well. She had been at work seeing patients on Staten Island when the first plane hit the North Tower. Her job with the FDNY was to go to the command post at fire scenes and direct immediate treatment for injured firefighters.
Dr. Kelly parked her new department vehicle near the WTC about 9:30 a.m. Then she saw a molten car, which had been destroyed by jet fuel. She went from thinking “great parking spot” to “oh my goodness.”
She put on her turnout coat over her dress. Realizing she had no helmet, she went to Ten House to borrow one. At the firehouse, she saw a TV report that the U.S. had been attacked. But by whom? Nothing made sense.
Ordinary Heroes Page 6