Ordinary Heroes

by Joseph Pfeifer

  I feared that terrorists could cause another 9/11 without the planes. We could not afford any more failures of imagination. I had to warn about extremists using fire as a weapon in future attacks on high-rise buildings. I published articles that appeared in fire journals cautioning chiefs not to risk firefighters if a high-rise building might collapse. Later I met with government agencies and the Secretary of Homeland Security, testified before Congress, and spoke at the United Nations warning that extremists would again use fire as a weapon in the form of “vertical terrorism” against towering skyscrapers.

  * * *

  • • •

  For almost a decade, I had wondered if Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda responsible for the 9/11 attacks and so many other terrorist acts, would be caught. Late on the evening of May 2, 2011, I no longer needed to wonder as the world was told of the previous day’s raid.

  President Barack Obama, standing in the East Room of the White House, announced: “The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

  “It was nearly ten years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history. The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory—hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.

  “And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.”

  A sense of relief came over me as another 9/11 chapter ended. On TV, firefighters could be seen cheering atop their fire trucks in Times Square. On the side of one truck, you could see the names of fifteen members lost from one firehouse. Finally, this open wound could be closed.

  A month after the U.S. military brought bin Laden to justice, I and Sal Cassano, now fire commissioner, heard the details directly from the CIA. Brian Gimlett, a retired Secret Service agent in charge, invited Cassano and me to come to the New York Stock Exchange, where Brian was senior vice president of global security.

  As we sat in a secure room, Brian introduced two women from the CIA, Gina Haspel, who would later become the director of the Agency, and an analyst in her twenties who had played a significant role in finding bin Laden.

  The CIA analyst spoke to us for thirty minutes. It was the best, most intense briefing I ever received in my career. From her passion and conviction, I knew that she had pushed hard in her quest to find bin Laden.

  She and fellow agents pieced small bits of information together to track one particular courier to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Though many in the CIA believed bin Laden had to be in Afghanistan, she thought this courier would lead the Agency and Special Forces to bin Laden. She had met with President Obama, Director of the CIA Leon Panetta, and other government officials to outline what she had discovered, trying to persuade the president to approve a dangerous mission.

  Senior officials thought that the chances of bin Laden being at the Abbottabad compound were at best 60 percent. When it came time for this young analyst to speak, she insisted that the odds were 90 percent. In reality, the analyst told me, she believed the odds were closer to 100 percent, but it would “freak everyone out” if she said that. The meeting led to Operation Neptune Spear, overseen by Admiral William McRaven and successfully conducted by Navy SEAL Team Six in Abbottabad.

  At the end of the meeting, the analyst came up to me and said, “Chief, I have something for you.”

  Since the attacks, each time the United States captured or killed a 9/11 terrorist, President Bush had put an X through the name on a list of key al-Qaeda operatives even after he was out of office. The CIA had continued that practice. After this most recent operation, President Bush had X-ed out the name of Osama bin Laden.

  It gave me a brief flashback to September 14, 2001, at Ground Zero, when President Bush had quietly told us, “We will get them.” The seamless dedication of the CIA and Special Forces across two administrations made this possible.

  She stretched out her right hand with a coin bearing an X nestled in her palm. As we shook hands, she passed me the coin. In return, I presented her with my coin, symbolizing the FDNY Center for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness.

  A couple of weeks later, we had lunch together. She showed me a picture on her phone of a red and blue standing cardboard poster that was part of the 9/11 exhibition at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. One side read: “He survived.” The other side read: “She remembers.” She told me the poster represented the two of us. I was the person she’d remembered from the 9/11 film. About a year after our lunch, I would remember her when she was portrayed as Maya in the film Zero Dark Thirty.

  Osama bin Laden had been brought to justice, but the casualties from the attacks would continue.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the years since 9/11, we had become aware of the devastating health impact of the toxic dust and smoke that permeated lower Manhattan after the collapses. Finding more and more of our members were coming down with respiratory illness and cancers, the FDNY had instituted a yearly medical evaluation for its 9/11 responders.

  In 2008, Ray Pfeifer was diagnosed with cancer related to his work on the Pile. Ray could have retired after recovering from major surgery, but instead, he returned to light duty. He drove me for a while. But cancer took its toll, slowing Ray down.

  A couple of years after Ray’s diagnosis, 9/11-induced disease hit the Duane Street firehouse. Firefighter John O’Neill, the chauffeur, and Lieutenant Randy Wiebicke of Ladder 1, who’d toiled tirelessly on the Pile, both died of cancer. So did retired Chief Larry Byrnes, who’d come back to help that day and for weeks following. Though most of their Engine 7, Ladder 1, and Battalion 1 colleagues had moved on to other firehouses or other jobs, we returned for their line-of-duty funerals. Over the last twenty years, more than 240 FDNY members have died from 9/11-related diseases. By the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary, we fear that more firefighters will have died from inhaling 9/11 dust than the 343 who died that day.

  Ray continued to work at our Center for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness between periods of medical leave and light duty. He would tell me his ideas for the center and give me good-natured kidding. When I got promoted to assistant chief, Ray hung a sign from the auditorium balcony reading, “Congratulations, Joey Three-Star.”

  After his retirement, Ray concentrated on a new passion: lobbying Congress to extend and expand the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act (2011), named after an NYPD police officer whose death was linked to exposure to toxic dust and fumes. The bill provided medical monitoring and care to sick first responders, workers, survivors, and others contaminated by the dust.

  On trips to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Ray, accompanied by comedian Jon Stewart, waited in the hallways of Congress for lawmakers to pass by so they could ask for their vote on the bill. No matter how long it took, Ray sat patiently in his wheelchair as Stewart paced back and forth. Securing votes one by one was exhausting for Ray, but he never let on that he was in pain. He only said, “It’s all good.”

  Stewart described how legislators and their staffers would hand Ray their business cards to brush him off. Ray would point to his pocket and say, “I have all the cards I need.” He had the memorial cards of the members of his firehouse and other units who had died on 9/11. These were two-by-four-inch cards with the person’s picture, along with personal details on the back.

  It would
infuriate Stewart to see such disrespect for Ray in uniform. But eventually, Ray won lawmakers over and secured enough votes to pass the reauthorization of the bill in 2015. For Ray’s selfless work on the Pile and his concern for first responders, he received the Key to the City of New York from Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016. Of course, Ray was grateful, but he didn’t need keys to open doors; he used his heart.

  Less than a year and a half later, I got a call from Ray’s brother. He said, “You need to come to see Ray right away.” I rushed to the hospice. During Ray’s battle with 9/11 cancer, I would ask him how he was doing, and Ray would always say, “All good.” But this time was different. Ray was so critically sick that he could not speak, yet he was awake. In the quiet hospice room, I told him what a great friend he was and kissed him on his forehead. As I stepped back, I could feel emotions welling up inside of me. And in the silence, Ray said with his eyes, “All good.” When I left the room, that was the last time I saw my friend Ray.

  22

  THE WHOLE WORLD ON FIRE

  In the fall of 2012, a North Atlantic hurricane merged with a nor’easter to create “Superstorm Sandy.” As it slammed into New York City on October 29, at the peak of high tide during a full moon, Sandy brought a storm surge of 13.8 feet and 65-mile-per-hour sustained winds, with gusts up to 92 miles per hour. The storm, almost a thousand miles in diameter, became the most significant and damaging Atlantic Basin hurricane to hit the East Coast of the United States in centuries.

  I was monitoring weather conditions when I learned that a spark had ignited an inferno in Breezy Point, our childhood summer place where I had joined the Rockaway Point Volunteer Fire Department and learned to love firefighting.

  Breezy Point held more recent precious memories for me, too. Kevin and I had sailed the waters of Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean surrounding Breezy Point. When our kids were small, Ginny and I would stay with the kids, my parents, and my brother in the bungalow. Kevin and I took Christine and Greg on their first sailboat ride and taught them how to sail. Kevin’s old Hobie Cat was stored under the cottage.

  When my parents had gotten too elderly to maintain the bungalow, Greg bought it and turned it into a beautiful year-round home. Each summer, he had my parents stay with him, which brought back healing memories of good times with Kevin.

  On the Breezy Point bayside, a piece of WTC steel stands at a 9/11 memorial for this community, where so many members of the FDNY and NYPD live. The steel overlooks the place where we kept my brother’s catamaran during the summer, and across the bay in the background is the New York City skyline with the new World Trade Center.

  Despite everything that had happened on 9/11 and all the losses, I had come to love the job again.

  Now, high winds, coupled with the storm surge, had created a short in a transformer, which ignited the electrical box in a single-story home just off the ocean. The house was owned by the parents of my childhood friend Brian Jordan, who’d grown up to become a Franciscan priest. During 9/11 recovery operations, Father Jordan had said mass every week under a tall piece of steel in the shape of a cross at Ground Zero. Luckily, neither he nor his family were in the house when the fire erupted.

  Hurricane-force winds whipped the flames from house to house. Directly in the path of this wind-driven fire was my son Gregory’s house. Before I arrived, the fire was only eight houses away.

  At 10 p.m., after hearing reports of flooding and multiple fires along the narrow Rockaway peninsula, I responded to Breezy Point while other staff chiefs were deployed throughout the city.

  Driving myself, I had to zigzag through Brooklyn and Queens to avoid flooded roads. Crossing the Marine Parkway Bridge over the crashing waves of Jamaica Bay, I saw Breezy Point shrouded in complete darkness, except for an enormous fiery glow reflecting off clouds. The two-mile road leading to Breezy Point appeared to be a fierce river, completely covered by three feet of roiling water. Unable to proceed any farther in my SUV, I pulled over on dry land and got into my bunker gear. Standing at the mouth of this raging river, I flagged down the next responding fire rig.

  Engine 10, from Ten House opposite the WTC, stopped to pick me up.

  The coincidence was surreal. Eleven years earlier, I had been the first chief to arrive at the WTC attacks, along with firefighters from Ten House. And now, here we were, the first units to respond to another major disaster that was growing more dangerous by the moment.

  The engine smoked and the exhaust gurgled like a boat while the chauffeur plowed through two miles of streets flooded as high as the apparatus’s headlights.

  From the crew seats in the back of Engine 10, I directed the captain to make sure the Engine company chauffeur did not take his foot off the gas. If he did, the engine would stall out, and we would have to swim. During this short but treacherous ride, I thought about how I started as a volunteer firefighter in Rockaway Point, how that led me to the FDNY, and all that followed. I also thought about seeing the faces of Engine 10 in the lobby of the North Tower before I ordered them to go up to help those in need. Some, like Lieutenant Gregg Atlas, never made it back to Ten House.

  As we pulled into Breezy Point, all I could see was that eerie orange cloud growing larger across the night sky. I instructed the chauffeur to take a hydrant at the northern edge of the fire, which was on a new water main. I was battered by wind, rain, and smoke as I waded through water a foot deep.

  By midnight, we had more than a hundred houses ablaze, forcing firefighters to battle this growing inferno on multiple fronts. The firestorm showered the area with burning embers the size of golf balls. I tried to duck, but one of those blazing embers caught me on the left side of my face. Adrenaline pumping, I didn’t even feel it, but I knew I was burned. That was the least of my worries. I was concerned about my firefighters’ safety. There were hidden dangers everywhere. In some spots, water was five feet deep. The saturated ground was like quicksand; you could sink down to your hips. And the fire was as hot as hell.

  The rapidly moving fire drove flames to the west and north, consuming building after building, block after block. The conflagration became its own perfect storm, combining ample combustible material—the wooden bungalows—hurricane-force winds, little water pressure in the hydrants, difficult access, and few firefighting resources.

  Without a reliable water source, battling intense, wind-driven flames and smoke became a daunting task, made worse for my own peace of mind as I realized the fire was racing toward the homes of people I had known for decades, not to mention my own son’s house.

  When firefighters reported to me, they had uneasy looks on their faces. For many firefighters who had not been at 9/11, this was the biggest fire of their lives. All they could see were flames everywhere against the backdrop of darkness.

  “Chief, it looks like the whole world is on fire!” one fire lieutenant told me. “What do you want us to do?”

  I knew how they felt. It looked as if my own world was on fire. As I had done on 9/11, I had to narrow their focus to a specific mission. I gave one order: “Get me water!”

  With Engine companies sitting in three feet of water, firefighters began drafting directly from flooded streets, stretching heavy hose through these storm-made lakes to relay pumpers and tower ladders—ordinary things but made extraordinarily difficult by driving rain and fierce fires.

  However, the radiant heat and wind-driven convection currents were too hot and kept firefighters at bay; they could not make an initial, direct frontal attack. The fire roared with each gust of wind and breathed intense heat on buildings until the structures exploded into fifty-foot-high flames. Anything in its path was reduced to ashes.

  Commanding at extreme events had taught me to visualize the incident as if I was standing on a hill or perched on a balcony overlooking the fire-ground. Having spent decades of summers in Breezy Point, I created a mental map of the blocks on fire. I generated command opportunities to ba
ttle this superstorm fire by anticipating fire movement and taking advantage of a wide break between one set of homes blocks away. This allowed me to position units for dynamic changes in fire behavior and wind direction.

  My plan B was to get well ahead of the flames to cut off the fire’s advance. I transmitted additional alarms with specific instructions for units to approach from the west and position apparatus three blocks ahead of the western fire front. Due to the scale of the fire and the unpredictable nature of hurricane winds, I had to think of the worst-case scenario. With a hundred homes burning, I made the difficult decision to give up dozens of homes to save hundreds.

  FDNY firefighters, including a few off-duty members and Vollies, battled this unprecedented conflagration despite being cold and soaked to the bone. Suddenly, after six hours, the wind shifted from the southeast to out of the south. This allowed me to send the units I had prepositioned to stop the western advance of the fire.

  By 7 a.m., the fire was contained. Exhausted, I passed command to my relief, who directed final extinguishment of smoldering rubble. As the sun began to rise, it became evident that a six-block stretch of homes had been destroyed by fire and others were severely damaged. It looked as if bombs had leveled a section of Breezy Point.

  A paramedic on the scene observed the side of my face and said, “Chief, you should have that burn looked at by a doctor.”

  “Thanks, don’t worry about me,” I said. “It can’t be that bad.” I didn’t even feel it. He then took a picture of the burn with his phone and showed it to me, reiterating, “Chief, this is a second-degree burn of your face that should be examined at the burn center.”

  One look at the picture and I knew he was right. I left with the paramedics.