Continued from Part II. Part I here.
Part III
So I ended up spending a few hours fitfully sleeping in the Visiting Officer’s Quarters or somewhere; I am not really sure where I was other than at McGuire AFB. I woke up in the middle of the afternoon and found some food to eat and made my way back to Base Ops.
When I got back to Base Ops my replacements had things humming along smoothly, far better than I had managed to achieve. Of course, they had a slight advantage of actually being logistics guys while I was merely playing one in the midst of a crisis. It was apparent that I was no longer needed at McGuire so I tried contacting my boss, the Operations Chief, in the city.
Communicating was still quite difficult and after an hour or so of trying I decided that I would just have to go find him to figure out what he needed me to do next. I had spent the prior 24 hours or so directing people to the Jacob Javits Center (JCC) as it had been designate as US&R’s base of operations (BoO) in the city so I knew were to go. Early in the evening of 9/12 I head out of McGuire AFB.
I find my way over to I95 and head north looking for signs aiming me towards the Lincoln Tunnel. Again, there was very little traffic on I95. I start seeing signs for the Lincoln Tunnel but there are also signboards saying it is closed; I figure I can work my way past that problem.
I find the exit off of I95 and it is blocked by trucks and New State Police patrol cars. I slow down and creep along until I find a place I can pull over close to where two officers are guarding the ramp. I walk over and talk to them and explain who I am and where I am going, and ask if I can go through the tunnel. They check my ID and say that they guess it would be ok and let me through.
So I head into NYC through the Lincoln Tunnel and mine is the only vehicle in the tunnel; a very strange sensation. When I pop out the other side I surprise a group of NYPD officers guarding the other side of the tunnel; they were not expecting anyone approaching from that direction apparently. I slowly pull up to where they are and again explain who I am, where I am going, and show ID. They let me through and helpfully provide directions to the JJC.
When I get to the JJC it is a bit of controlled pandemonium. I guess that they had directed anyone who was looking to help to the JJC so the place looked like the terminal end of some bizarro parade. There were vehicles of all types parked all over the place and hundreds and hundreds of people all over the place. Some of the people seemed to be moving with purpose and others were just milling about aimlessly. Some people were in uniforms and many were not. The uniformed contingent consisted of just about every type of uniform you might ever imagine.
It took me a while to figure out where the US&R contingent was located but I finally found my way to them. Once I am there it takes a while before my boss makes his way back there from wherever he had been but we finally connect. There is a lot of discussion about site conditions (chaotic) and what we are going to do the next day. By now it is getting late so it is decided that we will go get hotel rooms and reconvene in the morning.
So I follow someone over to the hotel that we are staying in; the Marriott Marquis Times Square. It is about midnight by the time I get to my room. I make a quick call to my girlfriend and catch a few more hours of sleep.
The next morning we meet up and drive back down to the JJC. By 0600 we have gotten there, had something to eat, gone over the day’s plan, and were ready to brief the TFs. We hold the TF briefing and for reasons that are lost to me now, it was decided that my boss would go down and check things out and then come back up and get us.
He comes back after a while and says that he has a place we can get all the vehicles into identified, he also says that things look much better on the pile and it is not so out of control. We head off down to the site. We go down the highway on the west side of Manhattan. For about the last mile or so as we approach the site, there are ambulances lined up on the right side of the road. We stop several blocks short of the site and walk in.
When we get to West & Vesey there is a tent sitting in the middle of the road and just beyond that the road is blocked by a pedestrian bridge that has collapsed across the road. Everything is coated in dust and there is paper blowing around in the breeze. The tent is the on-site command post for the FDNY for the incident.
One of our guys has a small space staked out in the back of the tent where we can operate and try to coordinate with the FDNY. After some brief conversation my boss and I go on a tour of the site and he shows me where our TFs are located. At this point in the incident, the streets immediately adjacent to the WTC site are all covered in debris; huge piles of steel and stuff, lots and lots of stuff. The only way to navigate around the site was to go at least one block over and parallel the site.
So we start heading around the site and I am stunned. As we travel around the site I see thousands of people all over and around the pile; all sorts of people, civilian and uniformed. At one point I literally pass a woman in a skirt and high heels picking her way over the debris walking past me. This is the morning of 9/13, two days after the attack, and scene control appears to be non-existent. On the pile there are bucket brigades that wind their way up into the pile, sometime just a few people going a few feet into the pile, sometimes hundreds of people going way up onto the pile. All of them are handing 5 gallon buckets and handfuls of debris from one person to the next where it is being piled at the end of the line.
The size of the debris pile itself was hard to comprehend. I had been to some big incidents in the past, like OKC in 1995, and thought I had some idea of what to expect; I didn’t.
The massive amount of steel was just really hard to comprehend. Another thing that struck me, although I didn’t notice this for a few days, is that there wasn’t any concrete of any size to be seen. Now I knew that each floor of each building had a poured concrete floor 200’ x 200’ and several inches thick but there was almost no concrete to be seen; just dust, steel, and paper.
After I noticed that absence of concrete I actually started seeking it out over the days I was there. There was broken ground level concrete to be found where the collapsing buildings had shattered it on impact, but I never found a piece of concrete larger than the palm of my hand that came out of one of the buildings; it was almost all dust. 220 floors of concrete dust.
As I am doing my circle of the site the same thought keeps going through my head: If this is ‘not so out of control’ what does out of control look like? I keep thinking that it will be amazing if we don’t have people killed the way things are going.
The next day, 9/14, I spend the day manning a phone at the JJC BoO that is being used to maintain communication between the BoO and the FDNY command tent at West & Vesey. Radio and cell phone communications are so poor that the only way to maintain contact was via a phone line that had been brought into the tent. I was on one end and the US&R guy in the tent was on the other. We would stay in contact back and forth to try to keep things organized to the extent we could.
At some point during this day the President swings through the JJC and stops by the BoO on his way down to the site. Everyone in the BoO except me went over to see him as he came through. I kept manning the phone because it was the only connection we had with the site.
On 9/15 someone else had phone duty so I spent the day on the site as I did every day after until I left on 9/25. During that time I would come in each morning and circle the site, at first on foot and later on an ATV, to understand how it had evolved over the night shift. We would then start meeting the FDNY command officers that would be staffing the site that day.
Each day there would be new folks on site so we would go through a learning curve. By the end of each shift, things were almost always running smoothly, but at the beginning of each shift, particularly in the first week or so, things would be challenging. It became a bit like Ground Hog Day, but in a sleep-deprived more surreal way.
Traveling to and from the JJC up the west side of Manhattan was interesting. As we would head down the road we would start seeing people lining the streets the closer we got to the site; thousands and thousands of people. When they would see a vehicle, or convoy of vehicles, approaching they would start cheering and waving signs. It was both inspiring and humbling: Inspiring to have the visible and vocal support of so many people; humbling knowing how limited our ability was to actually substantially change the course of events was.
As the days passed I had many strange experiences. One day I found a display box of padded pink bras sitting on top of the debris looking untouched and ready for sale between two burned-out buildings? Another time I am trying to sort out an issue between two groups of folks working the pile and a group of people walk up beside me and look out over the pile. When they leave someone says that they were the Backstreet Boys? Huh? Where did they come from and how did they get there?
Another day I am working my way around the site and I come across a guy I work with in my department in MD and I am surprised to see him because I was the only one sent to the city. I ask him how he came to be there and he said he was watching it at home and just decided that he needed to come up and help. During my time there the site was never secured.
Another day a large (30,000 gallon) Freon storage tank became an issue. The word I got was that the EPA was going to shut down the worksite unless we could account for the Freon tank. Really? In this chaos, a Freon tank is our biggest concern?
I tried explaining to whoever was pushing the issue that finding a Freon tank of any size wasn’t happening. They insisted. I sent folks in trying to locate the tank somewhere under Tower 1 in the parking garage and they kept coming back with confused results. I finally decided I had to go look for myself so I went back in with a group of US&R folks and we worked ourselves towards the tank’s location following the columns and the building plans.
No matter how we approached the area where the tank was we kept hitting this wall of cars and concrete in this crazy jumbled mess. We also kept running into water that had flooded the lower levels of the site. After we tried from two or three different ways we came back out and I reported to my bosses that we couldn’t get to the tank. I never heard another word about it. That was my only time actually going into the pile. I crawled over the top of it a lot, but I only went into it once.
One evening, my relief was late getting down to the site for some reason so I was standing out in front of the FDNY command tent surveying things and trying to wrap my head around what I was seeing with limited success while waiting for him to show up. As I stood there I heard someone next to me ask if I was from Montgomery County, MD and I said yes. He said he saw my uniform and wanted to introduce himself because he was the Director of Emergency Management from Ocean City, MD (where I had spent the weekend before the attack). I said hello and introduced myself but I was very perplexed as to why the Director of Ocean City Emergency Management would be standing in the FDNY command post, so I asked him why he was there.
He said something along the lines of: ‘We just came help the city manage the incident.’ Now let me say this guy is a really good guy who I have worked with subsequently, but when he said that I almost burst out laughing. The idea that teeny tiny Ocean City, MD was going to help NYC manage this incident is was just about the funniest thing I think I have ever heard.
Just going from the site to my room at the hotel each night was a bit strange. I would spend 14 or 16 hours on a ‘normal’ day at the site and then I would drive up to the Marquis and walk into its 5-star splendor; the dichotomy was striking. I would come in covered in dust and grime and walk past people sipping drinks in their suits at the bar; it was as though the few miles between the site and the hotel transported me back and forth into a different dimension of time and space altogether.
Some nights I would walk across from the hotel to eat at the TGI Friday’s in Times Square; for whatever reason, it was always open throughout all of this. I would walk across Times Square and if I saw 50 other people it was notable. When I would sit down there would normally only be half a dozen other customers in sight.
One night early in the incident another group of guys came in and they needed to get to their hotel; for whatever reason, they were sent to a Holiday near Times Square instead of the Marquis. They needed a lift and I had space and half (emphasis on half) a clue where their hotel was. So off we go.
I know the street address but for some reason, I am having trouble finding it. I circle around a couple of times and can’t find it. I am coming up a block and I see a couple of NYPD officers standing near the curb so I pull over to ask for directions. I roll down my window and ask directions to the Holiday Inn Times Square.
The officer I am talking to in a completely unflustered manner says: “First you need to turn around; you are going the wrong way on a one way street.” He then proceeded to give me directions to the hotel. There was no traffic on the streets and I had obviously not been paying much attention to the signs. I vividly remember how nonchalant he was about letting me know I was going up the street the wrong way…
As it was nearing time for me to head home I got word that my father, who has been a volunteer firefighter for decades, was going to come up to NYC to ride back with me. I think that they were concerned that I was going to fall asleep driving home because I had maybe been getting 4 hours of sleep a night if I was lucky.
So he came up the night before I left and we went to dinner at the restaurant on top of the Marquis. Again, we were one of a handful of customers. The restaurant rotates so for part of the meal we were looking downtown toward the site and for part of it we were looking uptown towards Central Park.
The next morning we stopped by the site briefly and then headed out of the city. On the way out I decided to go out the Holland Tunnel. As we are heading that way we start seeing signs saying that the Holland Tunnel is closed and my father expressed concern about our ability to use it; I tell him that I have it under control, I know the drill.
We get to the tunnel entrance and there are NYPD officers blocking it. I explain who I am and where I am going, show some ID, and they let me pass. So I come out of NYC as the only vehicle in the Holland Tunnel. Million upon millions of people have gone in and out of NYC in those tunnels, but I am guessing that I am one of a very few that had done it alone, both ways.
To those that have made it this far let me express my gratitude. I really never expected much interest in what I experienced on 9/11; I have been very surprised by the positive response. If you made it this far you probably deserve some sort of medal for perseverance. Thanks.
In some ways, I share the thoughts of others about 9/11 remembrance fatigue. I have no interest in attending any official ceremonies myself. On the other hand, I feel like there is a need to remember what happened that day. Some of the people who died were victims of their circumstances and had no idea what was going to happen when they went to work that day. Others who died had a very good idea of what faced them as they headed into to those towers.
If you are a firefighter you cannot look at what they were facing without knowing that the odds were stacked against them in every way. As I mentioned, on my way to NYC I figured that there was a good chance (maybe 1 in 4) that I wouldn’t survive the event, but they had to understand that their odds were much, much lower than that, but they went in anyway: I could see their odds of success were low from hundreds of miles away watching events unfold on TV, they had to know.
I stand in awe of their commitment and that of people like Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney. While I share in the sense of fatigue I think it is also important that people know and remember what some people did that day.
As time goes on there will be fewer and fewer who experienced the trauma firsthand (whether in lower Manhattan or from the other side of the country) and know how selfless a bunch of people were that day; firefighters, police officers, EMS workers, & civilians. In some ways, it helps to reassure me about the character of Americans at large, particularly given the political and cultural turmoil we are in now. When the going really gets tough there are still people who literally give their all to help unknown strangers around them.
Thanks again for hanging with me.
9/11/2022 — In 10 weeks my 42-year career in the fire service will be complete, I am retiring. Obviously, the events I recounted here are some of the most mind-searing of my career. As a read back through this series of posts that I originally published in September of 2010 I was thinking about how much has changed in the 11 years since.
I am not as sanguine about the country’s ability to keep it together as I was when I initially wrote these posts. The fascist tide that has washed over the country is something that I count not conceive of 11 years ago.
While there are many reasons for the changes and challenges we are facing, in my opinion, one of those reasons is this event. Osama Bin Laden’s goal wasn’t to destroy the country in one fell swoop, it was to destabilize it, and now looking back over the last 21 years I think that he (along with others that have the same goal) was successful beyond his wildest dreams. Our reaction (and over-reaction) to the 9/11 attack provided the opening that the fascist forces that exist to start wedging their way to the forefront of our politics.
November 8, 2022, maybe be a defining event that determines whether the fascist tide is turned back, or whether it continues to swallow the country and much of the globe taking the world to a dark place that could last for generations.
VOTE!