Ordinary Heroes

by Joseph Pfeifer

  As Zoda climbed, he wondered what they were going to do when they got to the upper-floor staging area. “Will we be able to knock down the fire?”

  * * *

  • • •

  I looked at the clock and estimated that we were nearly an hour into the incident and the first firefighters I had sent up had made it to around the 35th floor, some even farther. The crowded stream of people exiting the stairwells onto the mezzanine had slowed to a trickle. The able-bodied were assisting disabled people or those with injuries, slowing their own evacuation to save friends, even people they didn’t know.

  Suddenly, an elevator door opened into the lobby. Five men and three women stumbled out, gripping their belongings, staring at the apocalyptic sight that surrounded them. I had no idea how or why the door suddenly opened. They’d been stuck in the car since the first plane hit and had no idea how bad things were. They wasted no time leaving the building.

  Chief of Rescue Ray Downey arrived. “We got three fifth alarms and it is chaos out there,” Downey told me and Hayden. He said nobody should leave by the side of the tower closest to our command post to avoid being hit by the jumpers. As he left for the ICP on West Street, we received a radio message.

  “Tower number 2, 19th floor, firefighter down,” we heard. “Tower number 2, 19th floor, firefighter down.” A firefighter going up the stairs in one of the towers was having chest pains. There was some confusion as to what tower he was in.

  Firefighter Chris Waugh turned to me. “This is Tower 1?”

  “This is Tower 1,” I told him. Firefighters were coming into the North Tower, even if they’d been ordered to report to the South. They didn’t know the difference between Tower 1 and Tower 2, and dispatchers hadn’t made it clear. The South Tower chiefs were frustrated because they didn’t have the manpower they needed. I handed Waugh a black marker. “Put a big one here.”

  Waugh scribbled “Tower 1” on the marble top of the fire command station.

  Thirty seconds later, at 9:59 a.m., I heard a strange rumbling sound. I had one or two seconds to decide what to do.

  Intuitively I knew we had to move, and pushed people, including Ed Fahey and Jules, about fifteen feet toward a small alcove on our left. The rumble grew to a roar, as if we were standing underneath a trestle as a train passed overhead—a sound I will never forget. I suspected pieces of the plane or debris were falling from above and crashing through the glass windows or the elevator shaft. I thought those of us in the lobby were the ones in trouble.

  The monster locomotive sound chased us until we reached a nonworking escalator. A rush of debris and dust hit us from behind. I automatically crouched down, trying to make myself smaller before the inevitable impact.

  But the terrifying sound passed. Then silence. Blackness. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The event—whatever it was—had taken all of nine seconds.

  “Is everyone okay?” Chief Callan asked.

  People coughed. Then Jules spoke: “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  Other people spoke up, saying they were all right.

  “We have to get out of here,” Callan said.

  I knew the way out, so I remained calm. The air was so saturated with dust my lungs couldn’t draw a clean breath. Jules turned on the light on top of his camera, which illuminated the floor, but the area was still pitch black.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but one thing was clear: we couldn’t command under these circumstances. I deliberately forced myself to think. If we in the lobby had to leave the North Tower, I had to pull our firefighters out of the building and regroup outside. With so many civilians still in the building, this was not an easy decision, but I knew it was the right thing to do. I turned to Hayden.

  “I am going to evacuate the firefighters,” I said. He nodded in agreement.

  Never in the history of the FDNY had chiefs made the decision to abandon a burning building with over a thousand people in it. I grabbed the microphone of my portable radio:

  “Command Post to Tower 1, all units evacuate the building.” I repeated the order several times.

  On the radio, I heard my message being relayed up to chiefs and fire units.

  Even though I knew some firefighters heard my order to evacuate and were relaying my message to others, they were already dozens of floors above ground level—some possibly as high as the 50th floor, based on radio communications—and it would take time to get out.

  * * *

  • • •

  Engine 7 was taking a breather in the hallway when the building had started to shake, swaying from side to side. Captain Tardio yelled at his men to get into the stairwell for safety. For nine seconds, they felt the building rock. Then it stopped.

  They had no idea what had happened.

  “All right, we can deal with that,” someone said.

  On the 19th floor, Walsh’s Ladder 1 had gotten antsy. Searching the floors for victims had slowed them down. The men started to rejoin the climb when the building began to shake and shudder, flinging people against the walls and furniture. Lieutenant Walsh felt as if he were standing in a speeding subway car making abrupt turns. Like Engine 7, they dove into the staircase for protection and stood there for nine terrifying seconds as the walls danced and swayed. Dust and debris filtered into the stairwell.

  The quake sent a shock wave of fear through O’Neill. “This is not a good situation,” O’Neill told the guys. The radio traffic faded. “We’re in trouble here. We’re on our own now.”

  Seeing everyone shaken up unnerved Van Cleaf. Usually, in tough situations, more experienced firefighters would reassure him. “Because you depend on each other,” Van Cleaf said. “But when you have eight or nine men in a hallway and you all have the same look, that just tells you that something’s not right. Because never is everyone scared.”

  Lieutenant Walsh refocused the group. “Let’s move on,” he said. But no sooner did they start climbing the stairs again than they heard me give the order to get out of the building.

  “When I heard the chief’s voice, I knew it was time to leave,” Walsh said. He radioed to Olsen, of Ladder 1, to get out, but the firefighter, who had reached the 22nd floor, didn’t acknowledge hearing the command.

  Ladder 1 had a long walk down. They abandoned their tools, but kept their flashlights and SCBAs. They thought they’d get out of the building, meet up with the chiefs, who would come up with a plan, and they’d go back in.

  At first some firefighters were yelling to get out. Walsh tried to calm people down. They’d make it out just as fast in an orderly fashion. But other firefighters were far too unconcerned.

  “I can remember a firefighter resting on the landing and I told them, ‘We’ve heard to get out of the building,’ ” Walsh said. “A lot of them didn’t have a sense of urgency, but the firefighters of Ladder 1 did.”

  “You start to feel your anxiety build up,” Van Cleaf said. “You take a deep breath, and you say, It’s going to be all right, let’s just keep going. Brothers ahead of me, brothers behind me, we’re in this together, we’re fighting together, and we’re going to do what we have to do.”

  At some point, Van Cleaf started to run. “I don’t even know if I was touching stairs on my way down. When I got about to three or two is when I started to think of my family—you know, I got to get out of here.”

  Tardio and Engine 7 had made it up to the 30th floor when they encountered a chief, who had heard the command post evacuation order, running down the stairs. “All right, guys, we’re getting out,” he told Tardio and his firefighters. “Everybody, out of the building.”

  With over twenty years on the job, Tardio knew that when a chief said to leave, they were leaving. No questions asked. Tardio told the men to drop their hose, anything that would slow them down.

  * * *

  • • •

  Downstairs,
the lobby alcove was still pitch black. Even so, I was confident I could lead others to the way out. Trying to get my bearings in the darkness, I felt something at my feet. I grabbed a flashlight from Fahey and bent down to see what it was.

  The light from the flashlight and Jules’s camera revealed our chaplain, Father Judge, on his back near the base of the escalators. His helmet had been knocked off and he lay motionless, face up, but he had no obvious injuries. I knelt by his side, removed his white Roman collar, opened his shirt, and checked for breathing and a pulse on his carotid artery. When I found none, I realized our kind and faithful chaplain was gone. I guessed that he’d had a heart attack. But the event had caused more marble and glass and fixtures to fall. He might have suffered injuries I couldn’t see in the blackness.

  Father Judge’s death was a terrible blow. I knew people had died in the airplanes and on upper floors, and I knew the firefighters going up were at risk, but Judge was our chaplain, a compassionate soul who’d put himself in danger, by choice, to provide solace. A rare form of heroism. I wondered how many more people would lose their lives.

  Firefighters, like soldiers, do not leave our people behind. Chief Hayden, his aide Chris Waugh, and two firefighters picked up Father Judge’s body. They started to carry him up the escalator to a narrow pedestrian bridge, over West Street, connecting the World Trade Center to the World Financial Center.

  “Wait at the top of the escalator,” I told them. “I’ll see if the bridge is intact.”

  While Callan stood at the top of the escalator and issued another evacuation order, I took Jules, Ed, and an EMT to see if the bridge, about fifty yards long, was still a safe way out. It was strewn with broken glass and other rubble but intact, for now the best exit, safe from jumpers and falling glass. I radioed Hayden by our call names.

  “Battalion 1 to Division 1 . . . Battalion 1 to Division 1 . . .”

  Hayden didn’t answer. I assumed it was because he was carrying Father Judge. But I had to go back to make sure he got out.

  We walked back over the bridge again, to the North Tower, looking for the men bearing the body of our beloved priest. But Hayden, and those carrying Father Judge, were gone.

  I looked out a window and saw Hayden. Instead of waiting, they’d found another way out, which happened to be more dangerous, through the plaza. They handed Father Judge over to EMTs, who carried him a few blocks to St. Peter’s Church, one of the oldest churches in New York, founded in 1785. They laid our chaplain’s body in his bunker gear on the altar.

  Relieved Hayden and the others were safe, for the third time my small crew and I crossed back over the pedestrian bridge, using up valuable minutes. It was about 10:20 a.m. when we emerged by the World Financial Center at ground level under the bridge, where we were protected from falling debris. We saw the ICP had been abandoned. Nobody was there to give orders. Nothing was on the radio but incomprehensible static. We were on our own.

  * * *

  • • •

  Upstairs, the descent continued. As Tardio and Engine 7 descended stairwell B, they ran into Captain Jay Jonas and members of Ladder 6, who were on a landing.

  Jonas and his company had made it up to the 27th floor when the rumbling of the South Tower collapse prompted them to stop.

  “All right, all right, we’re going home,” Jonas had said. “It’s time for us to get out of here.”

  He’d thought to himself, “We’re not going to make it out.” But he didn’t say that to his men.

  On their way down, they’d found Josephine Harris, a fifty-nine-year-old bookkeeper for the Port Authority who worked on the 73rd floor. A few months earlier, Harris had been hit by an automobile and injured her back and leg. She had been released from the hospital the same day, able to walk with a brace, and returned to work. But she was still impaired. She had limped on her own down to the 20th or so floor before her legs gave out.

  At this point, the firefighters from Ladder 6 were running for their lives. But it is not in the culture of the FDNY to leave a civilian to struggle alone, even at the risk of death.

  “We’ll bring her with us,” Jonas said. He and the men of Ladder 6, who were still carrying all their tools, began helping her walk. But the going was so slow, they had to stand aside as faster-moving groups overtook them.

  Tardio, who had been a firefighter in Ladder Company 6 and knew Jonas well, told them, “We gotta get out.” Jonas nodded. They were going as fast as they could.

  As Tardio and Engine 7 passed floors on their way down, their realization that they were in danger was steadily rising.

  When they reached the lobby, the place that had been bustling an hour earlier resembled an abandoned combat zone, thick with debris and coated with gray dust. Tardio saw that the command board was still set up but the chiefs had vanished.

  “Whoa, this is not a good sign,” Captain Tardio said.

  “It was unbelievable,” said Pat Zoda. “Nobody was around. There was nobody at the command station. It looked like the end of the world.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Once outside the tower, I tried to get my bearings, to understand what had just happened. Looking across the street, I saw the Marriott Hotel had been heavily damaged. Amid a cloud of brownish-gray dust, single sheets of paper covered the road, as if a million office trash cans had been dumped.

  I looked toward the South Tower, but all I could see was a cloud of dust and smoke, with bits of paper raining down like confetti. I assumed the smoke obscured the South Tower. But I couldn’t make sense of the scene because of the damage and the dust. What had happened? How had all this dust been created? What had the rumbling been?

  Jules, still with me, focused on documenting the destruction: destroyed vehicles, streets coated with gray powder, shell-shocked, dust-covered people staggering away from the WTC complex as if zombies in a movie about Armageddon.

  I tried to figure out what to do next. There’s always a next step. But I couldn’t match what I saw to any previous experience. After a few minutes, I could not think my way out of this situation. Suddenly, for the second time that day, a cold chill ran down my spine. I had to trust my instincts; this was the wrong place to stand.

  “We have to go,” I firmly told those still with me. We walked swiftly north to the corner of West and Vesey Streets, for all practical purposes in front of the North Tower. We ran into Chief Cassano, who had been at the ICP with Ganci.

  Cassano had been a lieutenant in Ladder 113 when I was a firefighter in Brooklyn. I used to get detailed to his firehouse since it was within my battalion. Warm and friendly, Cassano was one of my early mentors and someone I would work for through most of my career as a chief. Covered with dust, Cassano’s face was distraught. Hayden appeared out of nowhere and the three of us briefly talked.

  “Joe, move everyone to Chambers Street,” Cassano said. Then he started to walk south with Hayden.

  It was 10:28 a.m. As Cassano got the words out, the loud rumbling began again. The same terrible roar descended on us. Someone screamed, “The building is collapsing!”

  I didn’t look up. I ran down Vesey Street in the direction of the Hudson River, chased by the rumbling sound. In heavy bunker gear, you can’t run too fast or too far. I saw Jules running ahead of me. We made it only a little way before a gale of debris and dust overtook us. Jules ducked down between a TV news van and a car. Since my friend was in a T-shirt and I was wearing a helmet and bunker gear, I jumped on top of him and covered him with my turnout coat to protect him. But we were too close to the North Tower. We heard the noise of steel, glass, and concrete crashing all around us. We waited to be crushed.

  6

  CLOUD OF DARKNESS

  This beautiful summer morning, so filled with bright sunshine, turned pitch black from the dust. In total darkness I bargained with God to see my family again. Then there was complete silence. It was like
that muffled quiet after a first snowfall. For a couple of seconds, I wondered if I was still alive.

  After a few moments, I stood up, covered head to toe in gray dust. I couldn’t catch a breath of air without coughing. My eyes burned. I spat to clear my throat.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Jules.

  Jules struggled to his feet, realizing for the first time I was the one who had been on top of him. Except for scrapes and bruises, he was uninjured but also coated in gray gunk. His camera was apparently intact. He brushed debris from the lens and realized he was still filming.

  “Okay,” Jules said.

  Suddenly, we heard a staccato pop pop pop from across the street—the unmistakable sound of gunfire.

  “Get down! Get down!” I yelled to Jules. Again, we ducked behind a vehicle. I was afraid not only for myself, but for Jules. We had barely survived and now someone was shooting at us? Were there terrorists on the streets with guns?

  A few moments passed. We again got to our feet. To our relief, we realized a police officer had shot out a plate-glass window in the office building across the street, trying to get inside to escape the suffocating dust.

  “Okay, let’s go now,” I said.

  Jules and I found a small coffee shop on Vesey Street where employees were handing out water bottles to firefighters, police, and anyone who needed it. Everyone was dazed; some were injured. I drank but had trouble clearing my throat.

  The wind picked up and started to clear the air. Back out on the street, I looked toward the World Trade Center and saw a surreal mountain of destruction: twisted steel beams, pulverized concrete, smashed glass, and huge pockets of flame, all covered by a murky haze of smoke and dust.