Because of that experience eight years earlier, many workers in the South Tower immediately headed for the elevators. When the first people leaving got to the lobby, the security guard asked, “Where are you guys going?… All is well here. You can go back to your office. This building is secure.” Some left, while most went back up.
Just before 9:00 A.M., an announcement over the public-address system repeated the guard’s assurances: An incident had occurred in the North Tower, but the South Tower was safe. Everyone should stay in their offices.
Then the fire chiefs decided the North Tower fire endangered the whole complex, so the South Tower should be evacuated. Before that decision could be announced over the public-address system, a United Airlines plane going 540 miles an hour crashed into the South Tower between floors 77 and 85.
At his station uptown on 100th Street, Commander Richard Picciotto, the 50-year-old chief of Battalion 11, was watching television news and saw the second plane hit. Picciotto had been among the hundreds of firefighters who had helped evacuate the Trade Center after the 1993 bombing. Thinking his experience would be helpful, he rushed downtown.
Amid wailing sirens and flashing lights, “dodging bodies and glass and falling office equipment,” Chief Picciotto ran to the North Tower’s lobby. Reminiscent of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire nearly one hundred years earlier, people from the upper floors were jumping to avoid burning to death. He later learned that Danny Suhr, the first firefighter killed that day, had been hit by a falling body. Then FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge was killed by falling debris as he gave Suhr the Catholic Church’s last rites.
In the North Tower’s lobby Deputy Chief Pete Hayden told Picciotto to look for civilians on the 21st and 25th floors. The chief picked half a dozen men from Brooklyn’s Company No. 110 to follow him. Those men carried about one hundred pounds of gear, including cylinders of compressed air, axes, hooks, rabbit tools (hydraulic tools for forcing open doors), 150 feet of nylon rope, Halligans (a type of crowbar), and a length of hose called a roll-up. And their clothing—turnout coat, pants, boots, and helmet—weighed another thirty pounds.
Firefighters searching for survivors. [LOC-DIG-ppmsca-02121-0136]
With only a communications radio, flashlight, bullhorn, mask, and an air cylinder on his back, Picciotto sprinted ahead. After making sure no civilians were on either floor, he kept going up and checking floors. On the 35th, he saw three dozen firefighters waiting for orders. As the highest-ranking officer there, Picciotto had to decide what they should do. He knew that after three hours, a fire can bend a skyscraper’s steel frame and cause the building to collapse.
A few minutes before 10:00 A.M. policemen in the two helicopters saw the South Tower leaning. They radioed NYPD commanders who immediately ordered all policemen out of that tower. Just 56 minutes after being struck, the burning tower crumbled.
As dust and rubble from the collapsed building filled the North Tower’s lobby, the FDNY commanders ducked behind an escalator and got on their radios. “All units, tower 1, evacuate the building.” But the men up in the tower carried old radios that didn’t work well, if at all, in skyscrapers. Few heard the order. And police and FDNY radios didn’t share a frequency, nor did the two departments coordinate communications.
On the North Tower’s 35th floor, Chief Picciotto heard “a bone-chilling roar and rumble.” What was it? An explosion? Another airliner crashing? The chief got on his radio. “We just had a huge noise in the building. Does anybody know what happened?” There was no response for several seconds. Then a voice over the radio said just four words: “The Tower came down.” Picciotto had to decide what to do. If one tower had collapsed, the other could, too.
For Picciotto, as for most firefighters, retreat wasn’t normally in his vocabulary. But it had been over an hour since the first plane struck, the chief reasoned, so the floors below where it had hit should be clear of civilians. That settled it.
“Get out!” he yelled. “Let’s start moving! Drop your masks! Drop your tools! Drop everything!” The firefighters trotted down stairwell C, but the pace soon slowed as other evacuating rescue workers filled the narrow stairwell.
Destruction everywhere. [LOC-DIG-ppmsca-02121-0122]
On his way down, Picciotto checked each floor for civilians. On the 12th floor, he saw sixty people waiting for something—it wasn’t clear what. He ordered them to evacuate immediately. “And as they moved toward me, I thought I was seeing things,” he recalled. “There were people in wheelchairs, people on crutches, people moving with the aid of walkers and canes, people hardly moving at all.” About half of them weren’t impaired. They were helping friends and coworkers who were. The chief, over their protests, told the able-bodied to evacuate while firefighters helped the others.
One person needing help was a 59-year-old bookkeeper named Josephine Harris, who had already walked down 61 flights of stairs. Harris’s legs were swollen and her breathing was labored. Picciotto followed as she took one step and then rested a couple of seconds before taking another.
After five floors, Chief Picciotto heard a noise he described as “earsplitting, bone-chilling, knee-trembling … every-damn-body-part-shaking, all multiplied out by about a million” and the wind was “just shy of gale force.” As chunks of concrete crashed around him, in a fight-or-flight reaction he bounded down the stairs two at a time. At about the sixth floor, something hit the chief. “Whatever it was had whacked me pretty good, and I was down and thinking that would be it.” Then everything went black.
The North Tower, after burning 102 minutes, had collapsed at 10:28 A.M.
Even though his mind seemed aware, Picciotto at first couldn’t hear or feel. The chief soon realized he wasn’t dead, just buried alive under a mountain of concrete. He shouted for the others. Out of the dark came responses from 14 men and Harris.
Exhausted firefighters. [LOC-DIG-ppmsca-02121-0230]
Several hours later, Picciotto and his men had managed to climb up to a door leading to a section of floor missing its outer wall. They used their ropes to rappel down the ten-story mountain of debris. It took several hours to rescue Harris, who was bruised but okay. Only four other people in the rubble were found alive.
Searchers later uncovered Kevin Pfeifer’s body. Somewhere under the pile of smoldering concrete and steel was Pete Alderman, one of the 160 people that morning in the Windows on the World restaurant. Also beneath the debris were De Martini and his three colleagues. Some sixty to seventy survivors remembered the men guiding them to the one passable stairwell to safety.
A firefighter overcome by emotion. [LOC-DIG-ppmsca-02159]
Rescue workers and survivors soon learned what had caused the tragedy. Terrorists had hijacked four airliners, two from Boston, one from Newark, and one from Dulles Airport, near Washington, D.C. All four planes were bound for California and had full fuel tanks. A half hour after the second plane hit the World Trade Center, terrorists crashed the airliner from Dulles into the Pentagon, located across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital, and killed 125 people.
The fourth airliner, with 44 passengers and a crew of 7, didn’t hit its target, believed to be the White House or the Capitol. The passengers attacked the hijackers, and the plane crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
At the World Trade Center, according to the office of the chief medical examiner of New York, 2,749 people died. They included 147 passengers and crew on the two airplanes, an estimated 600 people on the floors the airliners hit, and an estimated 1,500 people above those floors. A total of 412 rescue workers died, including 8 medics, 23 city police, 37 transit police, and 343 firefighters. More firefighters died that day than in the entire history of the FDNY.
The massive pile of rubble from the Twin Towers, which burned for three more months before it was finally extinguished, was cleared away the following year. Construction of the new World Trade Center began in 2006. The complex includes the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. The memorial, two large
reflecting pools where the Twin Towers once stood, is called Reflecting Absence.
The new World Trade Center and the water memorial. [National September 11 Memorial and Museum]
10
WILDFIRE
SAN DIEGO COUNTY, 2007
“The whole county is on fire,” said Battalion Chief Ray Chaney, a U.S. Forest Service firefighter in San Diego County, where one of California’s worst wildfires began Sunday morning, October 21, 2007.
For weeks, Southern California had been on red-flag alert because of dangerous fire conditions. Daily temperatures were in the nineties and the region was having a record-breaking drought. Plus, the annual Santa Ana winds, which usually start in November and last through January, were early. They swept in from the Mojave Desert on the Arizona and California border at thirty to forty miles per hour.
Fire on Mount San Miguel, about 17 miles east of San Diego. [San Diego Times Union]
Firefighters name wildfires after the place where they begin. This one started at Witch Creek in northeast San Diego County, so they called it the Witch Creek Fire or simply the Witch Fire. Firefighters believed the blaze started when sparks from electrical arcs along power lines ignited dry brush. These volts of electricity flash through the air from one conductor—power lines, in this case—to another.
Feeding on willow trees, cottonwoods, and low tangled brush called chaparral, the Witch Fire grew quickly. Strong winds sent it racing toward Ramona, a city of palm trees, horses, million-dollar homes, and 35,000 residents.
The Forest Service workers at Ramona Airport included Air Attack Base Manager Deborah Lutz. This soft-spoken 50-year-old with a long blond ponytail was in charge of four airplane tankers and three spotter planes. The tankers, when not grounded by high winds or thick smoke, flew over fires, dropping water and strawberry-colored fire-retardant chemicals. The strawberry color helped pilots see where they had previously dropped retardant. The small spotter planes searched for new fires and radioed their location to the airport.
Lutz and her crew focused their efforts on Mount Woodson, where a blaze threatened a communications tower used by the FBI, San Diego County sheriff, California Highway Patrol, and county emergency services. She also had more immediate problems.
A fire in the brush beside the runway, probably started by a firebrand, threatened to close the airport. No firefighters were immediately available, but they soon arrived and quickly extinguished the burning brush. Several miles away, the Witch Fire had burned the power line to Ramona’s main water pump. Fortunately, the airport had an emergency pump powered by a gasoline generator.
Fire threatened thousands of homes near Irvine, California. [AP Photo/Chris Carlson]
In Ramona, the Witch Fire destroyed hundreds of homes and buildings. Then the winds drove it through 14 miles of canyons and hills to Poway, a city of fifty thousand people, located just 23 miles northeast of San Diego. The fire, Poway Fire Division Chief Kevin Kitch said, “was fast, hard, furious. It was push, push, push, push.”
The Witch Fire could easily be seen from space. [NASA]
To make things worse, a second fire started forty miles away on the Harris Ranch, near the Mexican border in southern San Diego County. And the following day, over a dozen other fires broke out around the county. An arsonist started one, a 10-year-old boy playing with matches a second, and downed power lines caused others.
“The perimeter of the fire is huge,” said Battalion Chief Chaney. “You’re looking at an entire pillar of fire from the Mexican border to the Palomars,” a mountain range in northern San Diego County.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a state of emergency and President George W. Bush declared Southern California a national disaster area. To help fight the fire, the governor called out fifteen hundred National Guardsmen. Officials also brought in three thousand inmates who were serving prison sentences for nonviolent crimes. The Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego sent MH-60 Seahawk helicopters equipped with huge buckets for carrying water from Lake Ramona to drop on the fire.
Modern firefighters use helicopters and airplanes to battle wildfires. This helicopter and crew is from the Navy Reserves Sea Combat Squadron in San Diego. [U.S. Northern Command Public Affairs]
Firefighters from neighboring Arizona and Nevada rushed to San Diego County. And forty firefighters, called bomberos in Spanish, came from Tijuana, Mexico. Firefighters feel a strong bond for one another. “There isn’t a difference between the firefighters here or on that side of the border,” said 30-year-old bombero Jorge Villegas. “We’re all hermanos,” which means brothers and sisters.
“Worldwide, we’re all firefighters no matter what,” added 40-year-old Dan Regis of the Miramar Fire Department.
Some of the American firefighters were specifically trained to fight wildfires. They’re called Hotshots and work in teams, known as handcrews, of about twenty men and women. Equipped with shovels, axes, chain saws, and sometimes a bulldozer, the Hotshots’ job is to get in front of a wildfire and clear away trees and underbrush to create firebreaks.
Preparing to fight the fire. [© Nelvin C. Cepeda/U-T San Diego/ZUMAPress.com]
Even with additional help, the San Diego County firefighters had to be selective about the fires they fought. In Poway, flames destroyed one hillside of homes while firefighters fought all night to save homes across the road. By morning, they were so exhausted they could barely talk, but they had won.
Some firefighters were especially heroic. Four of them, three men and a woman, attempted to rescue a father and his 15-year-old son who were trying to protect their home. The wind abruptly changed directions, and the fire trapped all six of them. A helicopter dropping water nearby managed to rescue everyone except the father. Three of the four firefighters and the teenager were hospitalized, their condition critical. The boy had third-degree burns over half of his body. His father died in the fire.
The fast-paced fire worried San Diego Fire Rescue Battalion Chief John Tomson. “We’re not going to stop it,” he said. “I don’t have any idea even where it is anymore. I’m not sure anybody knows where it is anymore.” San Diego’s 1.25 million residents weren’t told to evacuate, but most businesses, government offices, and schools closed just in case.
One woman who decided to leave, Pat Helsing, compared the Witch Fire to the Cedar Fire four years earlier. The Cedar Fire had raced across the same region, burning 750,000 acres and 3,600 buildings and killing 24 people. “It seems scarier this time,” she said. “The fire is everywhere.… You don’t know where you can go to escape it.”
Many people who were in the fire’s path were trying to escape. MASSIVE EVACUATIONS ORDERED AS ONSLAUGHT OF FIRES SPREADS, proclaimed a front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times. It was the biggest evacuation in California’s history. Nearly one-third of San Diego County’s population, about 900,000 people, left their homes. Modern technology helped keep them informed.
Reverse 911, a computerized phone system, made 600,000 thirty-second calls, telling residents to evacuate. A newer system called Alert San Diego sent 400,000 phone, e-mail, and text messages over the Internet.
A firefighter silhouetted against the flames. [© Ernie Grafton/U-T San Diego/ZUMAPress.com]
Residents Nate Ritter and Dan Tentler used Twitter and Flickr to make helpful posts. As often happens during natural disasters, people had rushed to buy food and supplies, causing shortages. Tentler scouted supermarkets and convenience stores and then posted messages and photos of what was left on the shelves. Ritter’s tweets combined bits of television and radio news with instant messages, e-mails, and text messages from evacuating people with helpful advice about traffic or lines at gas stations.
Heavy smoke hangs over north San Diego County. [U.S. Northern Command Public Affairs]
On Interstate 5, beneath a sky blackened by smoke, bumper-to-bumper cars and trucks inched northward toward Los Angeles. One reporter wrote that it looked like a scene from the movie War of the Worlds. Thousands of people
slept in their cars beside highways, checked into motels, or moved to evacuation centers. The biggest evacuation center was Qualcomm Stadium, home of the San Diego Chargers, where officials prepared for 100,000 evacuees.
Many people left home with pets, both small and large. Some 1,500 evacuees along with 2,200 animals, including horses, chickens, and a zebra, found safety by the ocean at the Del Mar fairground and racetrack.
On Tuesday, two days after the Witch Fire began, the wind died down and firefighters extinguished the blaze just five miles from La Jolla and other oceanside communities. Officials then added up the losses. The fire destroyed 3,069 homes and other buildings and burned half a million acres, about one-fifth of the whole county. It killed 17 people. No firefighters died, but over one hundred were injured.
County residents heaped praised on the men and women who had fought the fires around the clock for three days. GOD BLESS OUR FIREFIGHTERS! said a sign in front of the Church at Rancho Bernardo. And a sign near the Bonita-Sunnyside fire station proclaimed FIRE FIGHTERS YOU ROCK.
Fire Chief Scott Walker said Bonita-Sunnyside residents had left thank-you notes and cupcakes at his station. “People have been very appreciative,” Walker said, “but this is our job. We’re proud to do it. It’s called the fire service for that reason. We don’t take that lightly.”
* * *
From colonial bucket brigades to modern engines that can pump ten thousand gallons of water a minute, firefighting techniques and technology have evolved dramatically. But one thing hasn’t changed over the centuries: the dedication and bravery of our firefighters.
People showed their appreciation for the firefighters in many ways. [© Sean DuFrene/U-T San Diego/ZUMAPress.com]
FIRE ENGINES IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Fighting Fire! Page 6