Back out on the street, the landscape around the WTC was littered with human remains.
“It was as though you were walking by an anatomy class of body parts,” Dr. Kelly said. Above, she saw people leaping to their deaths. “It was awful and almost surreal at that time.”
She rushed to the aid of firefighter Danny Suhr, whose skull had been crushed by a jumper when he reported to the South Tower. An ambulance took him to the hospital, but Suhr later died.
Dr. Kelly worked with Dr. David Prezant, another FDNY medical officer, to set up a triage area for people leaving the South Tower, which had been hit thirty minutes earlier by the second aircraft. Civilians with serious burns and other injuries poured into the street. The medics got them into ambulances, and when those were not available, started sending them to the waterfront to waiting boats.
* * *
• • •
More off-duty firefighters started arriving at the Duane Street firehouse, including former Battalion Chief Larry Byrnes, who had joined the Fire Department in 1957. Somewhat of a mentor to me, Byrnes was the one who insisted I take the most recent promotion test to deputy chief. Though he’d been retired three years, he joined the massive response being mounted by the FDNY.
“I couldn’t wait,” he said. “Because, you know what, they’re my firefighters, it’s my building, it’s my city.” He turned to Tony. “Get your gear all together. Get a flashlight, bottled water.” Gédéon intended to go with them.
As Byrnes got into his bunker gear, he asked Gédéon to grab a box of medical gloves. Gédéon found the box and rushed back, but the retired chief and Tony had already departed, walking south on foot. Able to hear Tony talking on a wireless mic, he followed with his camera. But they got lost in the stream of humanity going north. Gédéon was furious at himself for losing his chance to get to Jules. He turned back to Duane Street.
At the firehouse, Gédéon watched the South Tower collapse on television and began to grapple with the horrifying idea that everyone in the firehouse was dead, including Jules.
He hitched a ride in the bed of a pickup truck back to the WTC with Firefighters Steve Rogers, John McConnachie, and Kirk Pritchard, who had responded on their own initiative to the firehouse. Pritchard had been my aide the night before and got off duty early. Rogers had driven his red pickup from Staten Island after hearing of the attacks on his car radio. McConnachie had come to lower Manhattan for a dentist appointment, but after seeing the WTC burning, he’d rushed to the firehouse.
The guys in the pickup saw the mayor and the police commissioner walking north, away from the WTC, with a stream of sobbing and shell-shocked civilians. Everyone was covered with fine pulverized dust.
Rogers told the mayor to direct injured people to the triage center at the Duane Street firehouse, then slowly continued through the smoke and ash toward the WTC.
He parked the truck at the corner of Church and Vesey. The firefighters got out, grabbed their tools, and started walking toward what remained of the South Tower, directing injured civilians to EMS trucks parked on Church Street. As they continued walking, they checked rigs for tools and masks. Most had already been stripped by other firefighters who needed gear.
Gédéon followed, filming firefighters and ordinary people escorting or carrying the wounded to the ambulances. That was when Gédéon came face-to-face with imminent danger to himself for the first time. “Every single cell of your body is telling you, ‘You should not be here.’ The scenery was radically different. I mean, it was white powder everywhere. Just a few people here and there and this kind of silence.”
Gédéon was walking past Engine 21, parked on the side of the street, when he froze. “In my heart, there is this image of Jules,” he said. “I’m sure he needs me. But there is a kind of force field pulling me back, telling me not to leave this fire truck.” He stood immobilized as the three firefighters kept going, disappearing into the dust cloud.
Four minutes later, Gédéon saw Rogers, McConnachie, and Pritchard running toward him, pursued by the collapsing North Tower. Gédéon jumped into the belly of Engine 21 and curled into a fetal position, joined a moment later by a passing FBI agent.
“Everything is falling down and falling hard. I could hear pieces of steel crashing,” Gédéon said. The truck windows shattered. Gédéon waited for a huge chunk of the building to crush him, to end his life.
When the collapse ended, Gédéon heard no screaming, no radio, no sound at all. He couldn’t breathe. In the dark choking dust, Gédéon made a vow. If Jules lived, he’d be a better brother.
The truck was covered with debris. He shouted for help. Slowly he climbed out of the fire engine. Gédéon saw a large man he had filmed earlier lying in the middle of the street, knocked down by falling chunks of the building. He stopped to help the injured man.
“Let’s go, you can make it,” Gédéon said, trying to get him to his feet. “You have to walk, sir. You have to walk.” Gédéon and the FBI agent half carried, half walked the injured, semiconscious man to a safer place.
During their rush to escape, Pritchard had been hit in the back by falling debris and was loaded into an ambulance. Rogers and McConnachie continued working, setting up a tower ladder to rescue people trapped on upper floors of nearby buildings. For an hour or so, they tried to put out fires. But Rogers had cut his hand and had trouble breathing. He went to St. Vincent’s for treatment.
As he wandered in the dust, Gédéon felt useless. “I knew there was nothing I could really do. I mean, I was not a fireman. But as a cameraman, yeah, there was something I could do and that was to document what was happening.” Alone, grief-stricken, Gédéon started walking back to the firehouse, filming with trembling hands through a landscape that looked like nuclear winter.
* * *
• • •
Heading north with no idea where he was going, Dennis Tardio, of Engine 7, found Pat Zoda and Jamal Braithwaite, but feared his chauffeur Tommy Spinard and firefighter Joe Casaliggi, who had been outside tending the rig, were dead.
Members of Engine 7 helped Tardio take off his turnout coat, mask, and helmet. They were joined by Lieutenant Bill Walsh, of Ladder 1, who told Tardio he would help look for the missing men of both companies.
In the dust and the chaos, they began finding each other. Walsh and John O’Neill connected and began walking back to the firehouse. They encountered firefighters and EMS going the other way, back to the WTC site to start rescue work.
“It reminded me of the minutemen, these people that day,” Walsh said. “They were just helping out.”
Before noon, a command post had been established on Chambers and West Streets by Chief Frank Cruthers, who responded from home. In all directions were piles of rubble. I carefully picked my way across the debris, searching for survivors.
Ninety-one FDNY vehicles had been destroyed on the streets surrounding the complex. I knew without question it would be the worst loss of life in FDNY history.
Everybody was poking through the ruins—even those in command ranks—unless they’d gone to the hospital. I saw Battalion Chief Bobby Turner searching underneath the bridge. I told him, “Be careful, Bob. Don’t get yourself killed.”
Everyone was searching, listening for sounds of “mayday” or the peeps of SCBA alarms. Some were extinguishing fires.
* * *
• • •
In the afternoon, I heard the heartening news of the miraculous survival of Captain Jay Jonas and Ladder 6, who I had been unable to locate.
Captain Jonas and the entire company of Ladder 6—Firefighters Bill Butler, Tom Falco, Mike Meldrum, Sal D’Agostino, and Matt Komorowski—had managed to carry Josephine Harris down to the 4th floor.
There, she quit. She could go no farther and urged them to leave her. Jonas refused. He tried to find a chair to carry her down, but couldn’t find anything suitable and continued assisti
ng her down the stairs. Then the building started to pancake, blasting air down the stairwell.
When the building collapsed, it formed a small pocket in the B stairs. About a dozen people descending the B stairwell had gotten trapped in black voids of jagged steel. Harris was battered and frightened but alive, thanks to the firefighters of Ladder 6, who’d surrounded her, also alive but trapped.
In a lower pocket near the 3rd floor was Richard Picciotto, a hard-charging Battalion 11 chief who knew Jonas well. He’d made it up to a floor in the mid-30s when the South Tower fell. He started yelling a command to evacuate by radio and bullhorn as he descended, telling people to get out with real urgency, which undoubtedly saved lives.
Unable to go down, the men talked to each other to share information and keep their spirits up while trying to figure out how to escape their claustrophobic, unstable catacomb. Many of them were injured. Battalion Chief Richard Prunty initially answered their roll call but died from his traumatic injuries before he could be rescued. There seemed to be no way out, but they began working to move rubble inside their precarious prison, talking only rarely to preserve their radios.
Jonas got a response from Deputy Chief Nick Visconti. At least they knew people were looking for them. Picciotto made contact with Mark Ferran, Chief of Battalion 12, who informed the shocked survivors that the entire building had collapsed. They were entombed in a mountain of rubble with no distinguishing landmarks. Even when Picciotto triggered the siren on his bullhorn, Ferran had no idea where the staircase was.
As fires raged in the rubble field, Ladder 43 searched for stairwell B and its small band of survivors, who grew more anxious as the minutes ticked away. By early afternoon, the black smoke and dust trapped in the voids began to settle. Sunlight from the outside penetrated their surroundings, literal rays of hope showing a glimpse of bright blue sky.
With the help from a spot of sunlight, Picciotto climbed up to Jonas. They had to go up, not down, to escape. It was decided that Picciotto would go first. Ladder 6 tied him to their lifesaving rope for safety, in case he fell. When Picciotto got out, he tied the rope to a beam. Then some of the injured firefighters of Ladder 6 climbed out of the rubble.
When rescuers from Ladder 43 saw them, they couldn’t believe it. Quickly Lieutenant Glenn Rohan from Ladder 43 led his firefighters into the collapsed stairwell. They followed the rope to get down to Jonas and the other firefighters from Ladder 6 who remained with Harris. Once Ladder 43 made contact with Harris, Captain Jonas took the rest of his unit up and out. The rescue operation required Harris to be carried out in a Stokes basket to safety. It was a remarkable tale of firefighters’ strength, endurance, caring for others, and determination to survive.
Other searches were bearing fruit as well. Lieutenant Joe Torrillo, head of the FDNY’s Fire Safety Education Unit, was buried in the South Tower collapse near the West Street pedestrian bridge. He had been found with a fractured skull, broken arm, and broken ribs.
Captain Al Fuentes of the Marine Division, who commanded Brooklyn’s fireboats, had rushed to the WTC after the attack. He was pulled from the ruins alive about two hours after being struck by steel beams in the collapse of the North Tower. In a drug-induced coma for a week, Fuentes had suffered six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a skull fracture, and he’d needed several hundred stitches on his scalp, broken wrist, and fingers.
* * *
• • •
As I heard these remarkable stories, I hoped that Kevin had survived as well and was awaiting rescue.
I saw Engine 33 intact on the corner of West and Vesey. For some reason, I checked the officer’s riding list of everyone working that day. I had to convince myself that I had really seen my brother that morning, that he really had gone up in the tower. Kevin’s name was on top of the three-by-five card on the officer’s dash. I thought, Well, he’ll find me. I was wearing a white battalion chief helmet. There were far fewer chiefs with white helmets than the hundreds of firefighters wearing black helmets. It would be easier for him to see me before I saw him.
As chiefs took over sectors, they organized some units to fight fires that were burning everywhere. But the hydrant system and city mains in the vicinity of the WTC were compromised by the collapse of the towers. FDNY fireboats, along with the retired fireboat John J. Harvey, which had rushed down the river soon after the attacks, began drafting water from the Hudson River to fight fires on the west side of the complex.
Remarkably, a flotilla of citizens’ watercraft began streaming toward lower Manhattan. Bridges, tunnels, and highways had been shut down, as had the airspace over the city. Hundreds of thousands of panicked people were trapped on the island with no way off. Ferries and boaters already on the water had come to their rescue and had quickly been overwhelmed.
Then the U.S. Coast Guard put out a call for help. Water taxis, tugs, party boats, fishing boats, vessels big and small streamed toward the docks and began evacuating people, taking as many as they could, dropping them off in Staten Island or New Jersey, then returning for more. An estimated 150 boats helped nearly a half million people get off the island, facing considerable risk since we had no idea if another attack was imminent. Their willingness to help was impressive.
* * *
• • •
Gédéon had returned to the firehouse after his own near-death experience. As the hours passed, he asked each person trudging in from the WTC if they had news of Jules. No one had seen him since that morning in the North Tower lobby.
“Everyone’s asking me, ‘What happened, what happened?’ ” one firefighter told Gédéon. “I said, ‘Hell is what happened.’ ”
“It just came down,” said another. “And it wasn’t supposed to come down.”
As people continued to straggle in throughout the afternoon, Gédéon came to accept that Jules was dead. But he continued to ask. When a newly arrived firefighter approached him, Gédéon asked, “Have you see Jules?”
“Yes,” the guy said. “He’s behind you.”
Gédéon turned to see Jules standing in the apparatus bay, his shoulders slumped in exhaustion and grief, his eyes red from debris and crying. The brothers embraced and wept as they tried to sort out what had happened to each of them since breakfast that morning. Jules told Gédéon, “I know now what it’s like to think you’re going to die.”
A firefighter later went up to Jules and hugged him. “You know, yesterday you had one brother—today you have fifty.”
* * *
• • •
As dazed and dust-covered firefighters returned to the firehouse, they would hug each other with watery eyes, glad to be alive.
“It was like getting home,” Walsh said. People that O’Neill thought didn’t know his name were embracing him, saying, “John, I’m so glad you made it.”
Tardio and several others stayed at the debris field. After getting their eyes washed out by EMS, they started digging, trying to find survivors.
But after searching through the afternoon, they’d found only one deceased civilian. They immediately set up a temporary morgue in the World Financial Center.
They made it back to the firehouse early in the evening. Firefighters were throwing up in the street, trying to purge themselves of the dust. Crying. Hugging each other.
Tardio learned that Casaliggi and Spinard had been injured in the fall of the South Tower. While being treated in an ambulance, they’d had to get out and run to escape the fall of the North Tower. Though they tried to radio Engine 7, they never got an answer. Casaliggi ended up at the hospital for treatment and was released in midafternoon. He’d believed everyone but he and the chauffeur were dead.
Spinard was “going nuts, thinking, Where’s my guys?” He stayed in the rubble to look for survivors. He saw many body parts but only one or two whole bodies. Spinard, who had spent all 102 minutes of the event outside the buildings, developed breathing
problems and would spend five weeks on medical leave.
I would return hours later, but Jules, who was back at the firehouse, told everyone that I had survived. Besides me, one of the last to return to the firehouse had been Tony Benetatos. The probie had worked with retired Chief Larry Byrnes to find survivors. Tony had seen chilling sights, including one man holding his right arm in his left hand as he ran screaming, “I need a medic! I got a bad bleed.”
Tony was sent to lower the American flag at the firehouse to half-staff in honor of the many firefighters we’d lost that day.
* * *
• • •
That night, the firehouse ordered twenty pizzas. But it wasn’t a party atmosphere. People talked about what they needed to do next. Some were already talking about going back to the site to join the search.
O’Neill told the guys they had to get back down to the site to find their truck. “I left my wallet on the dashboard,” he said.
“The truck is crushed,” Zoda told him. “I don’t think you’re getting your wallet back.” Then he realized O’Neill was pulling his leg, something to bust the guys out of their daze.
The firehouse was dark, lit only by candlelight and partially by a generator. In silence, the firefighters listened to President George W. Bush on the radio. Everyone tried to make sense of what had happened that day, how they had been in the thick of it from the beginning but survived. It seemed statistically impossible.
It was a sobering thought, especially as the enormity of their losses was becoming apparent.
Tardio couldn’t sleep. Eating an apple at about 4 a.m., he walked down to Church Street and looked south. The two 110-story buildings, such a prominent feature of his daily skyline, were gone.
Ordinary Heroes Page 7
