Continued from Part I
I hadn't really expected much of a response to Part I and was rather shocked to see it see it listed on the Community Spotlight. That got me motivated to push through getting Part II finished tonight; Part III, hopefully, the final part, will be a little longer coming along though.
Part II
So they had kicked a couple of Majors out of their office in Base Ops and turned their office over to me. I had a Master Sgt. assigned to me to help me with whatever I needed. Unfortunately, what I really needed was a couple of more ears to handle the phone calls but he couldn’t really help me with that, all he could do was answer the ringing line and put them on hold until I could get to the call.
There is much confusion about how the rest of our management team would get to us given that they were on the west coast. After many hours of back and forth they were finally put on a military transport and aimed at McGuire. Sometime after that was decided WTC 7 collapsed. I am thinking that my odds of survival really aren’t too good if buildings like that are still collapsing.
Later in the evening my boss makes it into NYC and down to the WTC site. He calls me and tells me some really, really bad news; Ray Downey was killed. Ray was a legend. When bad things happened in NYC he was always in the middle of trying to get things sorted out, and now a really bad thing has happened and he is gone; this is going to be really hard.
So as the night wears on I am answering phones, answering questions, and trying to figure out what needs to be done to get the Task Forces (TFs) from McGuire to NYC. Late in the evening, a flight comes in with the rest of the IST. After a brief conversation, they decide to go get some sleep and work on getting into the city in the morning. I keep working.
We have TFs on the ground in the city that drove in from up and down the east coast. My boss is occasionally calling with updates and to learn what I know about incoming resources. We have all been to pretty incomprehensible incidents in the past, it is the nature of the work, but what he is describing to me doesn’t really register with me. It was too far beyond my experience to really understand. It wouldn’t be until I got on the site that I could really start to process what we were working to overcome.
Sometime in the middle of the night the Base Commander comes in and asks me if I could do a briefing for the Chief of Staff of the USAF and the Secretary of the USAF on FEMA’s activities in the morning. I am a bit taken aback, and I make sure that he knows that all I know about is the US&R system’s deployment and not FEMA’s overall response, but I say yes.
He tells me that the briefing will occur at 0900 and that I need to put together some PowerPoint slides, no more than two or three. I look at him like he is crazy while dealing with multiple phone calls and tell him no way, I can’t do the slides. He says he will make them up for me and that all I need to do is tell him what needs to be on the slides. I tell him what needs to be on the slides.
He comes back an hour or so later and hands me some slides. I look at them and mark them up and hand the corrected slides back to him and he goes off to make the corrections. Now I can’t tell you how disorienting this was to me. I had been discharged from the USAF as an E-4 (Senior Airman) in 1985 and now I have an O-6 (full Colonel) doing my editing for me. And things would just get more bizarro from there.
He came back a while later with the cleaned-up slides and I looked at them. They looked good so I told him that I thought I was set.
He said I needed to practice the briefing for him. What? He wanted me to run through what I was going to say to ensure that it would fit within the 3-4 minutes he said I had. I told him that I wouldn’t have any problem with it but he insisted. The phones had actually died down so I decided to roll with it and practice for him. So at something like 0530 I am running through what I am going to say. He is happy and says he will be back to get me later.
A while later a Major pops his head into my confiscated office digs. He asks if I am the FEMA guy and I say I am. He says good, he has been told to report to me and let me know that he has four CH-53s (really big heavy-lift helicopters) that he has been told to make available to me. He asks me what I want to do with them. I haven’t a clue because I hadn’t asked for helicopters of any size, much less CH-53s. CH-53s are really big helicopters and they can’t land just anywhere.
I express my concern and he says that they have thought of that and that they think that they can land on the aircraft carrier Intrepid in the Hudson. I say I am not sure what I would do with my folks and all their stuff once they landed on the Intrepid but I would keep them in mind. Way surreal…
At some point during the evening the IST physician had made his way to the base driving in from somewhere. He had popped in and out a couple of times but no one was sure where he was supposed to go. After a while someone decides that he needs to be in DC to help at the Pentagon. I remember I have helicopters. Problem solved.
As morning rolls around the west coast guys roll back into Base Ops. There is a brief discussion about various things and then they decide that they are going into the city. I throw a flag on the play.
At this point, I had been up for more than 24 hours and I was pretty fried. Additionally, I needed someone to hold down the fort while I did the briefing for the brass. There was a bit of contention but I stood my ground and it was decided that two of them would replace me and most of the rest would head into the city. That worked for me.
It turns out that a few of the west coast guys need to go to DC too. So I sent them off to find my fleet of helicopters and either ride down with the doctor if he hadn’t left yet, or to grab another helicopter and head down to the Pentagon with it. I am finding that having a fleet of helicopters can be useful.
A short time later the Base Commander comes to get me for the briefing. He tells me I will be the first item on the agenda because I don’t have a security clearance and they need to get me out of the room for a secure briefing to follow my talk; fine with me. He says that the Wing Commander will introduce me and then I will run through my slides. He reiterates that I only have 3-4 minutes to cover my material and I reassure him that I won’t have any problems staying in my allotted time.
I am taken down into a bunker under the building somewhere and shown where to sit on the edge of the room. I take my seat and wait for my cue. After a few minutes, more people start filing in and filling the seats around the edge of the room. Finally, I see stars start to roll into the room and the seats around the table fill up. As it turns out the Chief of Staff and Secretary are sitting at the end of the table right in front of me. As soon as everyone is seated a one-star on the other side of the table stands up and starts explaining the material that the briefing will cover. Then he introduces me.
My first slide pops up on the screen and I stand up and start talking. Even though I am a bit sleep-deprived I roll through my slides in a pretty coherent manner and finish within the allotted time. Then the questions start.
Both the Chief of Staff and the Secretary are peppering me with questions. I actually have good answers for the stuff that involves the US&R response and explain that I am not ‘FEMA’ at large so I can’t speak to the larger picture. Then Chief of Staff asks me how well the US&R assets are integrating into the city response. I don’t know what I looked like on the outside (in my mind I maintained a dispassionate expression) but on the inside, I went on alert.
You see, in those phone calls from my boss in the city I had been hearing about the frustration trying to get our folks on the ground working. There is almost always an issue integrating when we show up to help someone. As I said, when we show up people are almost always having the absolute worst day of their life. It always takes us some time to get to any incident so by the time we get there the shock has kind of metastasized and often the folks dealing with the problem think that they have it under control and aren’t inclined to deal with the hassle of outsiders; they rarely have things under control.
Now I mentioned in Part I that the FDNY is the largest municipal fire department in the world; it was and still is as far as I know with over 11,000 firefighters and many thousand more EMS providers. It is also one of the oldest paid fire departments in the country. They have been doing what they do for 150 years. They don’t ask for help, they give the help. Hell, terrorists had blown up one of the buildings before and the FDNY just handled it; no other FD in the country could do that. And they aren’t having just a really, really, really bad day on 9/11, they are having a catastrophic day. Much of the command staff were killed when the towers came down and those that survived are understandably shell-shocked.
Now even when the receiving organization hasn’t been decimated by the event there is often a little lumpiness in getting everyone on the same page, but this situation is off the scale. All of this flashes through my mind when the question was asked. So I know that we are struggling to get integrated into the organization and start helping them with the stuff that we can really do well. I also know that these problems often occur early in an incident and that normally in 24 to 36 hours everything is smoothed out and running well.
So in my slightly sleep-deprived state, I say that while we are struggling a little to get our crews working that this isn’t unusual and that normally within 24 to 36 hours, if not before, we are fully integrated and working side-by-side with the receiving jurisdiction. I actually sounded pretty good I thought and I thought I was giving a good answer that accurately described how thing were and how they would go. That is when the Secretary upped the ante.
He looks at me and says something like: If you all are having problems getting organized with the city resources he could call the White House and ask to have the President call the Mayor and ask the Mayor to help smooth things out. I am now fully alert!
My mind is racing (while hopefully maintaining my placid exterior demeanor). I am thinking what the f*ck! I am a f*cking firefighter who rides fire trucks. The Secretary of the USAF is going to call the White House to have the President call the Mayor on my say so!!! This isn’t good, and no good could come from the Mayor going to the FDNY and asking them why they aren’t playing nicely with FEMA; that would not help our integration struggle.
So I wing it. I say something like ‘I am not sure that disturbing the President or the Mayor over this issue is necessary given all they are dealing with and the reality that we normally go through this type of integration curve when we arrive on an incident’. I continue by saying something like ‘I am confident that in a few hours we will get sync’d up with the FDNY command staff and be working side by side.’ I sounded good again and the Secretary accepted the response. In hindsight I was wrong.
The integration problem was massive and we would struggle with it for days and days. I didn’t know it at the time but I massively underestimated the institutional trauma that the FDNY had suffered and the inertia of an organization of that size. I also didn’t comprehend what it meant to the scope of the issue that Ray Downey was dead. If Ray had still been alive there wouldn’t have been a problem. Ray essentially created the FEMA US&R program and everyone listened to Ray, from the Mayor on down. But Ray was dead.
In hindsight, I should have asked the Secretary why he wasn’t already on the phone when he posed the question. I suspect that doing that would have ended my involvement with FEMA but if it helped overcome what we actually faced in the coming days and weeks it would have been well worth it. It was at about this time that the one-star Wing Commander stood up and said that my portion of the briefing had run well over its allotted time.
General Jumper, the Chief of Staff, looked at him and said that the reason that they were there was to hear what FEMA was doing and that they would continue the discussion until their questions were answered. My head was spinning more than a little by now. I had just cut off the Secretary at the pass keeping him from calling the President and now a four-star had just smacked down a one-star so that he could continue talking to me; absolutely surreal…
As it turned out they only had a few more questions about the configuration of the US&R TFs and our anticipated resource arrival and staging needs, stuff that I could easily answer. After that my part of the briefing was complete and I started heading for the exit.
As I got to the exit a thought popped into my rather shell-shocked mind and I turned to them and said something like: ‘There are people I know and respect, firefighters, who are dead in the piles. They were good people and friends of ours and we are going to do what we can to get them out. It is going to fall to you all to hold the people that did this accountable; please remember our friends when you start on that mission.’
I am sure that I was not quite as coherent as that but they understood what I was saying. I am glad I said it.
I stumbled up the stairs back to my office. My replacements already had things well in hand and were straightening out the stuff that I hadn’t gotten handled to that point. I went and found a bed. To be continued…
Part III here.