Ordinary Heroes

by Joseph Pfeifer

  Ten House became the Operations Command Post. On September 17, we moved the incident post six blocks to Battalion 1 quarters on Duane Street. What was now called the WTC Incident Command took over one side of our three-story firehouse.

  Vehicles were removed from the apparatus floor, which became the meeting room; we built a plywood floor over the concrete that was easier to walk on and put staff offices on the second and third floors. Cushman electric carts ferried us back and forth to the Pile.

  I knew we needed a written operations plan with marching orders, so everyone would know what everyone else was doing at Ground Zero, but I was busy handling day-to-day crises. Then twenty-seven people arrived from Arizona: the Southwest Area Incident Management Team (IMT) of the U.S. Forest Service. Called in by FEMA, the team had extensive experience managing responses to wildfires in western states. One morning in the middle of the second week, their planning chief met me in front of the Duane Street firehouse.

  “I’m from the Forestry Service,” he said. “We have an Incident Management Team.”

  You’re from Forestry? I thought. The WTC has one surviving tree. How can you help?

  I’m sure my skepticism was obvious. How could managing wildfires translate to an urban disaster?

  I must have looked overwhelmed and exhausted. He looked at me with compassion.

  “Chief,” he said softly, “I know how hard you have been working and it looks like you can use some help. I can help you put together an Incident Action Plan and manage all the other planning functions. We’re not going to take over anything.”

  His empathy and my exhaustion overcame my doubt. I brought him upstairs to meet Chiefs Cruthers and Hayden.

  “I’m putting the IMT on the third floor,” I said. Nobody blinked an eye. “Okay, Joe,” Cruthers said. Hayden nodded. “Whatever you need to do, Joe.”

  The Southwest IMT was quickly put to work. By September 23, with their help, I wrote our first Incident Action Plan (IAP), which provided interagency coordination for this historic event. Imposing structure through my planning job helped me feel as if I was regaining control.

  * * *

  • • •

  Every morning around 7:30 a.m. at the Duane Street firehouse, we held an interagency meeting with as many as a hundred people from numerous agencies with operational tasks at or around Ground Zero. Eventually, we had so many people involved we had to issue identification cards to manage access to the Pile.

  During each shift, FDNY had hundreds of firefighters on site, in addition to NYPD and PAPD officers and Urban Search and Rescue teams. The National Guard installed a chain-link fence around the sixteen-acre rubble field and worked with law enforcement on security. The military was still flying over the airspace. The FBI was performing its investigation. The city medical examiner set up a temporary morgue. Four major construction companies worked on dismantling the skeleton of the WTC and debris removal. The EPA and the New York Department of Environmental Protection took air samples.

  Before each morning meeting, the Southwest IMT (later relieved by similar teams from Alaska) worked with me to develop an agenda. During those meetings, agency representatives had to answer three questions: What did you accomplish in the last twenty-four hours? What are you doing today? What do you plan to do seventy-two hours out?

  Each day, agencies received a new site map that listed operations in each sector and various logistical facilities, and that pointed out dangerous areas.

  Unexpected issues arose. For example, the DEP required that every dump truck carting debris to a landfill in Staten Island, where it was sifted through, had to be washed down in order to prevent contaminants from leaving Ground Zero. This wasn’t something the FDNY had ever had to handle before on such a large scale, but we figured it out. The New York Sanitation Department was brought in to handle that.

  We also had to deal with some unexpected incidents. Below the WTC complex was a huge underground complex of shops, vaults, and concourses. In mid-October, a security team spotted scorch marks on a basement doorway below WTC-4 that hadn’t been there a few hours earlier, as if someone had tried to break in. Behind the door was a mountain not of rubble, but nearly a thousand tons of gold and silver, worth an estimated $200 million, being held in a vault in the custodial care of the Bank of Nova Scotia. It was hard to believe that someone was trying to pull off an Ocean’s Eleven–type heist. A team of thirty firefighters and police officers was mobilized to remove the precious metals.

  Those were only a few of the situations that cropped up, and all of the situations created coordination challenges. Almost every time something new occurred, we needed to make sure everyone working on the Pile knew about it, even if they weren’t directly involved. We had lost too many people in the attacks, and the last thing we needed was to lose someone else because of a lack of communication. For all our good intentions, a siloed approach had been the norm until I brought in the IMT, but now we were sharing as much information as we could.

  While we coordinated efforts at Ground Zero, the Office of Emergency Management oversaw state, federal, international, and private-sector support based out of a building that ran the length of Pier 92 a few miles away. From them, I was able to order daily flyover photographs and LIDAR (light detection and ranging) pictures, three-dimensional images showing the changing elevation of the Pile.

  Safety Chief Ron Spadafora visited the Pile every day and held safety meetings each afternoon. Miraculously, we had very few injuries on the site. We provided everyone with a respiratory mask. But at the time, we were getting conflicting information from the EPA that the air was safe. We wouldn’t understand the significant environmental health hazards created by the toxic dust and fumes and its effect on first responders until years later.

  Some of the most vital people working on the Pile were managers from four major construction companies who brought in ironworkers and cranes to safely dismantle and remove the steel skeletons and large chunks of concrete. At one point, we had twenty-seven cranes at the site.

  Since there were no recognizable landmarks on the debris field—which changed daily as material was removed—rescuers relied on the map broken into 75-square-foot grids. Our assumption was that victims would be found together. In reality, some were located in the buildings’ footprints, others in the collapse zone, but overall they were found all throughout the complex.

  In some cases, we were finding intact bodies. Some firefighters were well preserved because of their bunker gear. But more often, we found body parts, sometimes just equipment, or personal items. Human remains were taken first to the makeshift morgue at the World Financial Center, and later to the regular morgue at Bellevue Hospital.

  Our paper method for recording where victims were found proved unwieldy and inexact. If human remains, equipment, or personal items were found, the searchers marked an X on the paper grid showing the location—at best a guess. The task of writing notes by hand then transferring that information to a database only complicated the recovery process.

  However, the location of remains found at this enormous crime scene was crucial for medical examiners trying to identify victims and therefore help grieving families. I certainly had a personal interest in finding my brother and members of Engine 33.

  On September 26, I held meetings to challenge thirty scientific experts to develop technological alternatives to help streamline the recovery process at the WTC.

  After much discussion, we concluded that a handheld GPS device offered the best solution in terms of simplicity and functionality. But there was no device fitting our requirements on the market.

  Working with two companies, Symbol Technologies and Links Point, we came up with the solution. The idea was to use a wireless device with a bar code scanner, and programmed with GPS applications, that could be uploaded to a database.

  Symbol Technologies had already manufactured something similar tha
t was used by the Red Cross to track blood supplies. Digging around existing inventory, they found a supply of rugged handheld gadgets that could withstand heat, dust, and manhandling by our searchers.

  Software engineers with Links Point, based in Norwalk, Connecticut, began working around the clock to create a GPS attachment and software for the device. The two companies accomplished in three days what would normally take three months.

  At first, we were worried the GPS component would not work well because of the canyon effect caused by the city’s skyscrapers. You need at least three satellites to ensure a good GPS reading. But the large space created by the buildings’ collapse opened up the skyline for the devices to connect to the satellites.

  Proper use of the device required less than thirty minutes of training—another big plus, especially for people under extreme stress.

  Once we were using the new devices, each recovered victim or item was identified by a numbered tag with a bar code. The firefighter scanned the item, then automatically recorded the date, time, and location of the evidence, usually within three meters. The firefighter could choose from a list of categories to describe the item: apparatus (division car, battalion car, engine, ladder, other); human remains (FDNY, law enforcement, civilian); gear/equipment; other. The database meshed the GPS latitude and longitude readings with our grid maps.

  We started using our GPS Victim Tracking System on September 28. Two days later, I assigned a team of one officer and six firefighters from the hard-hit Ten House, armed with the devices, to begin patrolling the four quadrants of the site and record findings of victims and equipment. Everyone on the Pile knew to call the Ten House GPS unit to record the location of any recovered person or equipment. Ten House continued this role for the next thirty days; then another unit would assist them.

  At the end of each tour, the GPS device was inserted in a synchronization cradle, which automatically uploaded the captured information to a database. Updated several times a day, the database gave us an accurate picture of where remains and equipment were being found. It was tough seeing the multiple red dots on a single map marking bodies, which covered the entire 16-acre rubble field.

  This was the first use of this kind of GPS tracking in an urban setting. By the time the search ended months later, firefighters had recorded the location of 4,000 body parts, tagged each with a bar code, then passed that information and the remains to the medical examiner. The FDNY GIS team used this database to show on a map the recovery location of those victims—a tragic and graphic picture of a catastrophic event.

  12

  UNTHINKABLE LOSSES

  After eighteen days of desperate digging, we’d found no other survivors at the Pile. We had held out hope, but we had to accept reality; thousands of missing people would never go home to their families. As painful as it was to acknowledge this, there was also an element of relief; the urgency that had driven us to find possible survivors had carried its own risk.

  Now, as September ended, we moved officially into the next stage: recovery of bodies. We had to remove twelve stories of debris, six aboveground and six underground, which required heavy equipment. With engine noise, working at the Pile was an assault on your ears, nose, and eyes, as the dust and smell of burned concrete lingered.

  When a rescuer found human remains, all the equipment was shut down. If the person was a firefighter or uniformed officer, their unit was contacted. The remains were draped with an American flag and members of the company carried out the stretcher as onlookers observed a moment of silence. We treated each person who died with dignity.

  The FDNY had needed almost a week to compile a comprehensive list of missing firefighters. The command board in the North Tower had been destroyed. The riding lists on the dashboards of rigs and in officers’ pockets had been lost. There had been a change of tours at 9 a.m. the morning of 9/11, which complicated figuring out who had been on the scene. Firefighters who were going off duty got on the rigs trying to do the right thing, but there was no way to track who was where. Firefighters were “riding heavy”—if there was an open seat on a rig, even if they were not on duty, they jumped in a seat and came anyway. Some people responded from home.

  We had sent 112 Engines, 58 Ladder trucks, 5 Rescue companies, 7 Squad companies, a Hazmat Unit, a Field Com Unit, 4 Marine Units, dozens of chiefs and civilian leadership, numerous ambulances, and many support units. Overall, about 250 units—roughly half of FDNY’s on-duty members—responded that day.

  Though Duane Street firehouse had no deaths, other houses in Battalion 1 had suffered terribly. Of those who responded from Ten House, three firefighters and one officer, plus retired Captain James Corrigan, who I had talked to on the morning of 9/11, had died. Engine 6 on Beekman Street lost three firefighters, and the South Street firehouse, Engine 4 and Ladder 15, lost twelve.

  FDNY Special Operations Command (SOC), such as Hazmat and Rescue and Squad, had been decimated. In total, seventy-five elite rescue workers were killed. One of them, Firefighter Stephen Siller of SOC Squad 1 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, had just gotten off his shift when he learned about the first plane hitting the North Tower. He grabbed his gear and drove to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which had been closed to traffic. In full bunker gear, boots, and helmet, he ran through the tunnel to join his unit. He and eleven other members of Squad 1 were killed.

  Every night the dispatcher read the list on the radio, I’d recognize a name, or two, or a dozen. It was like a member of your family dying every day. So many were personal friends going back years. Captain Walter Hines and Battalion Chief John Moran had been in my original study group. Walter was a co-owner of a bar in Rockaway where I’d held my bachelor party dinner for the whole firehouse.

  The department had suffered a catastrophic loss: 343 members, including our chaplain, two paramedics, and a fire marshal, making it the largest single-day loss of life of any emergency response agency in American history. Among those killed were the highest-ranking, most experienced chiefs, dealing a devastating blow to our ability to reorganize and go forward.

  The Port Authority Police Department had lost thirty-seven officers, including Superintendent Ferdinand Morrone and Chief James Romito. The NYPD lost twenty-three police officers, including four sergeants and two detectives.

  The ultimate casualty count at the World Trade Center was 2,753, including passengers and crew on the two airplanes. Though we consoled ourselves that our efforts had saved thousands of people who might otherwise have died, the staggering losses were hard to comprehend.

  In the days after the attacks, New Yorkers continued leaving flowers, teddy bears, notes, food, and other tokens of sympathy at the doors of firehouses all over the city. Firefighters are seen as heroes, saving rich and poor alike. Residents wanted to show their affection and respect for “their” firehouse, to share in the sorrow.

  Large crowds of people gathered on Canal Street, where we had set up a security checkpoint, to encourage rescuers coming from and going to the Pile. They cheered when any first responder vehicle drove through. The Battalion 1 chief’s car was replaced, and whenever I passed through their ovations, my heart soared, knowing they appreciated the tough job we were doing.

  People from all five boroughs—and from around the region—posted photos of missing civilians and first responders on fences and walls in various spots around Manhattan, hoping against hope that their loved ones were still alive. Some workers at the WTC complex had successfully evacuated, left the island, and found refuge outside the city. But many others had simply disappeared.

  At the same time, from across the country and around the world, volunteers started coming together to help families whose loved ones had died or were missing. Pier 94 provided a place for families of the dead and missing to get financial and emotional assistance, while Pier 92 was continuously used for operations. We also took over the Javits Center to house rescue teams.

  We wound
up splitting the FDNY, at first rotating 1,000 firefighters for two weeks at a time to work on the Pile, and later rotating 600 firefighters and EMS workers every thirty days. At the time, the force had about 11,000 firefighters, plus 4,000 EMS workers and 1,000 civilians. Those not assigned to the Pile responded to emergencies in their neighborhoods. Firefighters worked hundreds of hours of overtime, earning time and a half. The extra income was welcome, but toiling such long hours, especially in a recovery effort involving human loss, was also stressful. Many of our members weren’t going home for days at a time.

  I worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for two months, only rarely taking a day off. Twenty years of experience helped me manage the anxiety, as did my education. I had a master’s degree in theology and the equivalent of half a master’s degree in counseling and knew more than many about what to expect in the aftermath. And I was protected to some extent by having a job to accomplish.

  But we knew there were risks beyond those on the Pile itself for those working the site. People who had been involved in responding to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 warned us that, in the aftermath, survivors were at risk for substance abuse, divorce, depression, and suicide.

  I wanted to inoculate myself. Immediately after 9/11, Ginny and I pledged not to drink any wine, beer, or liquor for more than a year—not even a drop of champagne to toast someone at a wedding. To make sure our marriage wasn’t impacted, we made a vow to support each other.

  Ginny and I could sense the pain our kids, Chrissie and Greg, were experiencing. She tried to keep their schedules as normal as possible. She needed to care for my devastated parents and was working as well. Ginny loved her job, but at times the combined stresses were too much to bear. Though she was glad I had survived, she felt alone in taking care of the kids while I was at the Pile.