Other family members lived close by, including my father’s parents, who were three blocks away. My grandfather Nick, my mother’s father, was a boisterous deputy sheriff in Queens County who sat at the head of the big table at Aunt Nell’s at Thanksgiving and told stories about politics. I never saw him in uniform; when he died, I had to turn his gun in to the NYPD.
After school, we played stickball and handball in the streets, not to mention “ring-a-levio,” a game where two groups of kids faced off against each other. A kid on one team would run and try to break through the other team’s line of linked arms. As the older, bigger brother, I’d break through, but Kevin would get stuck. He was often frustrated trying to keep up with me, but away from the playground we were close. For most of my childhood, Kevin and I shared a room together. We’d talk all night, even though we were three years apart.
In the summers, we had no air-conditioning. To escape the heat, our family decamped to Breezy Point, the westernmost beach on the Rockaway peninsula, where my parents, with the help of my aunt and uncle, paid $3,000 to buy a summer bungalow, a small 500-square-foot fixer-upper. A modest beach community run by a cooperative, Breezy Point got its name from the winds off the Atlantic Ocean from the south and west, and the calmer waves on the north side, Jamaica Bay. It had few paved roads, just sand tracks, which kept development modest. If I walked a quarter mile, I’d hit the ocean; the other direction I’d hit the bay.
My parents, the three of us kids, my aunt and uncle, and other family members all slept in the tiny house on beds crammed into every corner. We spent our days walking on the beach, collecting shells, playing beach volleyball, swimming—and for my brother and me, handing tools to my father as he worked on the house. I learned how to paint, sand, saw, fix plumbing and electricity, helping whenever my dad needed another pair of hands. I would have preferred to play, but those skills later came in handy. It was also my daily job to rake shells and broken glass from the sand of our yard.
At the beach, I started swimming competitively. I’d win races; Kevin would try to copy me. In college, I got a job as an ocean lifeguard at Gateway National Recreation Area, at Jacob Riis Park. To escape the city’s heat in the summer, residents crowded Riis Park until 10 p.m.
It was at Breezy Point that Kevin and I caught the bug that would prompt us to become firefighters.
The summer after I graduated from high school, my friend Peter Collins and I joined the Rockaway Point Volunteer Fire Department (RPVFD), the so-called “Vollies.” I continued to lifeguard, but each Tuesday night we had drills and learned the basics of firefighting from the more senior volunteers, who called us the “snot-nosed kids.”
Every summer during college and graduate school, I lived on Breezy Point with my parents, worked as a lifeguard, and responded to ambulance and fire calls when I was off. In the middle of the night, I’d hear the siren—one blast for an ambulance, three for a fire—throw on clothes, and sprint for the firehouse, about a quarter mile from my parents’ house.
We had brush fires and a few blazes in the little wooden bungalows. We’d get a hose on the fire until FDNY firefighters arrived and took over. They had full jurisdiction but allowed the beach communities to have small volunteer departments because their big rigs couldn’t run on the sand tracks.
Besides learning firefighting, I took first aid classes and was certified as an EMT, a certification I would keep for twenty-seven years. I even competed on the RPVFD First Aid team that went up against other ambulance corps in New York State, winning the state championship year after year.
With all that first aid knowledge, I went on more medical calls than fires. But no amount of training would prepare me for my worst ambulance call. In the middle of the afternoon, the siren sounded for an accident on Breezy Point: a little girl had been struck by an electric-utility van. I worked on her desperately to save her in the back of the ambulance as we swerved through traffic to the hospital. She didn’t survive. The Vollies didn’t have any counseling at the time. Not knowing what to do with the reality of her death, I just pushed it aside.
Kevin didn’t become a lifeguard, but he did first aid on the beach. We ended up working in the same spot. Kevin also joined the Vollies as soon as he was old enough.
One year, after a hurricane, Kevin saw a damaged Hobie Cat in the surf off Riis Park. He swam out and pulled the eighteen-foot catamaran to shore. When the owner couldn’t be located, the boat was going to be junked because the damage was too extensive for it to be sold. It would have cost a couple of thousand dollars to buy a new one, which we didn’t have. So my brother repaired it.
My father thought we were crazy to take on major boat repairs, which required replacing almost all the rigging. But since he had served in the Navy in the South Pacific during the war, he secretly was proud of his sons, especially Kevin, who was motivated to tackle such a huge project.
Then we had to learn to sail. The Hobie Cat had two pontoons and a huge sail, and in certain conditions was very fast. We’d take it to the “Avalanche” sandbar off the Rockaway peninsula and surf waves with the catamaran sailboat in the middle of the ocean.
One day we were sailing with my brother at the tiller. He worked the mainsail while I worked the jib. We had twenty-mile-per-hour winds and were tightening the sails when one of the pontoons started to lift out of the water on our side. We were sitting in the trapeze harnesses attached to the mast, with our feet on the edge of the pontoon, yelling at the top of our lungs, going so fast we were passing motorboats.
Kevin was more adventurous than me by far. I was trying to dump wind so we didn’t flip over. He was shouting, “Sheet in—go, go, go!” He loved speed.
He later bought a Trans Am and also owned a one-propeller Cessna with several friends. After taking lessons and earning his pilot’s license, he’d fly it from Republic Airport on Long Island to Block Island. It was a five-hour trip by car and ferry, but only a half hour in the plane. I was hesitant to fly with him; by then, I had little kids and didn’t want to take unnecessary chances, one of the few areas in our lives where we diverged.
Through it all, our parents accepted the risks we embraced, though I know they worried about us. They never tried to squelch our desire to be firefighters or Kevin’s ambition to fly.
When firefighters died in the line of duty, Kevin and I told ourselves privately, That will never happen to us. The idea that I’d have to be the one to tell my parents that Kevin had died was inconceivable. But here I was, standing before them, struggling to maintain my composure.
My parents and I huddled in the middle of the living room, dreading the next moment.
“We’re not going to find Kevin,” I said. “Kevin is gone.” Shattered, my parents looked at me with disbelief and held each other’s hands.
“Are you sure?” my mom asked softly. My dad said nothing. But I could tell they both were heartbroken. All of us stood there in a sea of emotions not knowing what to do.
I knew my mom would now tell her sister, my aunt Marie, and then my sister, Mary Ellen, in emotional phone calls. Our private sorrow would become part of public grief. There would be no escaping the endless newscasts of the WTC collapse, the attacks, the hunt for the perpetrators. But through the sadness, we found unbelievable kindness. Though my parents never really recovered from the heartbreak, the coming together of family, friends, the Fire Department, and people throughout the world became our strength.
Now I had to go home and tell Ginny and our children that Kevin was gone. When I walked in my front door, Ginny saw the pain on my face and knew that I had broken the news to my parents. Somehow, I got the words out.
Ginny later told me she felt numb, but she could see my pain and sorrow, knowing I had lost my best friend. Our kids got very quiet, in disbelief over losing their favorite uncle. The events were just unimaginable. For several weeks, they believed he might walk in the door at any moment.
11
A RACE AGAINST TIME
The next morning, after Dr. Ky plucked more debris from my eyes, I returned to the firehouse.
After learning of our losses, New Yorkers had started showing up at firehouses with donations: cookies, cakes, towels, bottled water. A little boy came to the firehouse with three dollars of his own money to donate. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with so many donations, but it was heartening to see people who wanted to help, to do something from their hearts. The previous night, they had lined the streets in lower Manhattan and clapped as firefighters returned from the Pile to their quarters.
I was going from the apparatus floor to the battalion office when I ran into Captain Tardio on the stairs, who told me that he had seen Kevin in the North Tower.
Engine 7 had made it up to the 30th floor when Tardio had encountered a battalion chief who told everyone to evacuate. They started descending the C stairs. On the 9th floor, they ran into Kevin and members of Engine 33.
My brother and Engine 33 had reached the 32nd floor; after hearing the evacuation order, they’d turned immediately and started down the B stairs. Kevin stopped his team on the 9th floor and told his unit to redirect firefighters from the C stairs to the B stairs, a safer route leading directly out of the building. Captain Tardio encountered Kevin on his way down and made the shift to the B stairs.
“Your brother saved my life. He saved a lot of lives,” Tardio said. It was a special moment, and his story of meeting Kevin meant so much to me.
I walked to the Pile picturing that event in my mind. Kevin and the firefighters of Engine 33 had slowed their retreat to direct others to the B stairs, the safest and fastest exit. I wondered how long he had lingered on the 9th floor, knowing that anyone who continued down the C stairwell could get trapped by falling debris or slowed by a more cumbersome way out via the mezzanine. Captain Tardio and many others had made it out. Kevin had given his life to save others.
* * *
• • •
Our rescue operation ran twenty-four hours a day. Time was of the essence. Studies of earthquake rescues indicated people had survived up to fourteen days in collapses of buildings. We decided to add four days to make sure. After eighteen days of search and rescue, we would move officially into recovery operations.
Firefighters and other rescuers dug and listened for sounds, hoping for a miracle. People went down into the subway tunnels, into the stores in the underground concourses, into many crevices.
Chief Nigro had appointed Frank Cruthers WTC incident commander, with Hayden as his deputy commander. Operations chiefs rotated for each of the four sectors at Ground Zero. I recall it felt like Division 15 Deputy Chief Charlie Blaich and I flipped a coin to determine who would do what role. Blaich became logistics chief and I the planning chief based on who would work best in each function.
The assignment gave me much-needed focus. As planning chief, writing operational plans allocating resources and documenting the recovery process became a major area of my responsibility. To build a command structure my first task was to provide information about the collapse area.
A picture is more easily comprehended than a page full of words. I contacted the FDNY’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) office, called the Phoenix Unit. Captain Justin Werner pulled maps showing city streets and the sixteen-acre site with building footprints of the WTC, then overlaid those with a 75-by-75-foot grid. We divided the area map into four sectors, or divisions, with each four-acre section under the supervision of a deputy chief.
Officers and firefighters were given these paper maps and instructed to mark where they found human remains or equipment on the grid. This system also allowed us to keep track of who was working where, enhancing searchers’ safety. All that information had to be logged in at the end of the day by a supervisor.
This time-consuming process slowed us down. But it was vital to know where people and evidence were found, not only for the FDNY in reviewing our tactics, but also for law enforcement for their investigation, engineers determining how the buildings fell, medical examiners trying to identify victims, and families who wanted to know where their loved ones were found.
But the information we were getting was disheartening as, day after day, we found no survivors.
* * *
• • •
The world was watching events at Ground Zero. Though I had no time to view TV, Ginny told me extraordinary pictures were being broadcast of the eerie rubble pile and our desperate efforts to find survivors. People all over the country, all over the world were thinking about us.
President Bush announced he would come to Ground Zero at the end of the week. He had flown over the site but wanted to visit in person for that important national ritual: the presidential walk through the disaster area. The commander in chief wanted to show his support for the victims and signal his determination to hold those responsible accountable.
On the afternoon of Friday, September 14—which had been declared a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance—President Bush arrived at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. Accompanied by New York Governor George Pataki and Mayor Giuliani, he observed the tip of Manhattan by helicopter, along with thirty-seven members of Congress in Marine helicopters. The choppers landed and a long convoy of limos wound its way to the WTC site.
President Bush, accompanied by Pataki, Giuliani, Fire Commissioner Von Essen, and other VIPs, emerged from the vehicles and picked their way across the site. People who had for days been doing backbreaking work, physically lifting chunks of concrete and passing buckets of debris, stopped what they were doing. They looked skeptical, angry, and tired.
Bareheaded, wearing a windbreaker, Bush climbed onto a burned-out fire truck. Someone handed him a bullhorn. He looked around the crowd, at the devastation in all directions. He draped his arm around Bob Beckwith, a retired firefighter in street clothes and FDNY helmet, who had volunteered to search. I was standing thirty feet away.
“Thank you all,” President Bush said. “I want you all to know . . .”
“We can’t hear you,” someone yelled.
“It can’t go any louder,” Bush said. He raised his voice. “I want you all to know that America today—America today is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut, and we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.”
“We can’t hear you!” we shouted.
“I can hear you!” Bush shouted. “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
The crowd roared. It was what everyone on the Pile needed to hear.
“The nation sends its love and compassion,” he said, “to everybody who is here. Thank you for your hard work.” President Bush said, “Thank you for making the nation proud, and may God bless America.”
Speaking from the heart, President Bush gave us a sense that we’d get through this.
Then President Bush began walking through the crowd of first responders, which I’m sure drove the Secret Service agents crazy. It made me nervous. The rubble pile was still very dangerous.
The president came over to me. To my right stood Captain Tardio, and on my left, Father Brian Jordan, a childhood friend and Franciscan priest.
The president put both of his hands on my shoulders.
“Mr. President, we can’t find my brother,” I said, almost choking on the words. “He’s a fire lieutenant.”
“God will provide,” he said, looking at me with deep empathy. He had no political agenda; he really felt my pain.
Bush turned to Captain Tardio, whose grim face looked to him for answers.
“Mr. President, you need to do something about this,” Tardio said. Bush leaned
over and whispered in his ear, loud enough for me to hear, “We will get them.”
He moved on to other people, touching shoulders, shaking hands, looking deeply into faces, obviously very moved. His presidency had been dramatically changed by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and what he saw at Ground Zero. I wondered what was going through his mind. Would we really get the people responsible, and how?
* * *
• • •
As I grappled with the magnitude and horror of what had happened, I felt overwhelmed. Not just that my brother had been killed, but that so many had died, so much had been destroyed, at the hands of violent extremists. Studying psychology in college and counseling in grad school, I had learned that, for crime victims, losing control is often as devastating as the trauma of the offense. I knew I needed to take back that control, to establish a personal strategy to move forward. I turned my focus to my new job as the Incident Command’s planning chief.
Finding survivors was still our main goal. But who was in charge of the recovery effort? According to the City of New York’s executive orders, in cases of fires and building collapse, the FDNY is the lead agency in charge.
While the FDNY was officially in charge of the collapse operations, we had to coordinate the efforts of multiple agencies like the NYPD, the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD), the FBI, FEMA, and other city, state, and federal agencies that began arriving in New York to help. It was an enormous challenge.
By early in the second week, we concluded that our Incident Command Post at Ten House on Liberty Street was much too close to the search scene. The operations were getting too big. Our primary mission was searching for survivors, but the command staff along with the chiefs of operations, planning, logistics, and safety needed some distance to focus on the big picture. We were building a system to coordinate our efforts.
Ordinary Heroes Page 10
