A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  Ken Haskell

  Ken Haskell is a New York City firefighter, as was his father. Ken is an expert in rescue techniques and teaches this important lifesaving subject to firefighters all across the country. His two brothers, Tommy and Timmy, were also FDNY firefighters, and both were lost in the mayhem of 9/11.

  My father was a marine. In 1969 he joined the New York City Fire Department, starting out with 35 Truck and then moving over to Ladder 174 in East Flatbush. He had an active firefighting career, but he had a minor heart attack in 1979, and so he retired. Afterward he started his own contracting business, which is how he supported our family, and my brothers and I basically grew up learning the trade. Working with my dad was an invaluable experience to me, for I learned so much from him. He died in 1994, but I still learn from him today.

  Timmy was two years older than me, and Tommy was four years older than me. My mother and father had a big family to raise, five kids, all close in age—my sister, Dawn, is the only girl, and then there’s also Kevin. Our father was very involved in our lives, in a good way. He was our coach for Little League and football and always taught us things. We lived on the water in Brooklyn, and he’d show us how to take care of a boat and drive it around the bay. He was very comfortable just letting us do our own thing, be ourselves. My father gave us guidance to be the man that he was, but it wasn’t as if he ever forced anything on us. I think he would have liked to have seen us all join the marines, because we all knew what the marines did for him, but he never pushed it. It was the same with the Fire Department. His attitude was, Look, guys, when you’re ready you’ve got to take these tests if you want the job. It’s a good job. If you don’t want it, it’s something you can fall back on if whatever else you decide to do falls through.

  I remember that some of my fondest memories as a kid were going to his firehouse for Christmas parties, and being in the city was always unique, but becoming a firefighter wasn’t something that I aspired to as a young boy. As I got older, though, I saw that the people my dad employed in his contracting business were all firefighters he was working with. I was really struck by the bond they had with one another, and the work ethic every one of them had. Each guy brought something to the table. They all busted their asses, and their being guys from my father’s firehouse really resonated with me as a kid. Working alongside my dad and those guys, and hearing the stories they would tell about the job they had the night before—who got hurt, who got burned, or something funny that happened in the firehouse kitchen—probably had more to do with my going into firefighting than anything. Besides, of course, the fact that my father was a fireman. As I got older it just became my natural progression.

  I was actually a police officer before I was a fireman. The NYPD hired me, and I did about three years with the PD before I rolled over to the Fire Department. I worked in the Fifty-third Precinct and the Seventy-first, which are in the Flatbush and Crown Heights areas. I was part of the Street Crime Unit, where there was a lot of interesting work, and I was doing real well. But then the Fire Department called. I almost didn’t leave, and the whole time I was in the fire academy I had some regret, thinking about how much I had enjoyed the Police Department. But my father was going, Are you crazy? Just give it some time. And once I got a taste of firefighting, I thought, This isn’t so bad. I don’t regret it at all. I love the Fire Department.

  And my brothers, Tommy and Timmy . . . They were great firemen. They loved it too.

  Timmy was more of a laid-back kind of guy. He wanted to be in Special Operations, and so he requested a Squad Company. Tommy was actually kind of a buff: You could rattle off a box number [an area] and he’d tell you what street it was on. Timmy loved being a firefighter, but Tommy wanted to go up the ranks. He would have risen higher up earlier, but they froze his list for two years. He was a rising star, no doubt, a superstudent. He was in the top five of every list—the lieutenants’, the captains’, and the battalion chiefs’. He wrote a ninety-five or better on each test. When Tommy was studying, that was his life for the year leading up to the test. Because I was so involved with the carpentry business, I never put that kind of studying time in.

  I feel there’s got to be some type of competence and fire experience prerequisite for a guy to get promoted. It shouldn’t be enough just to pass the test and go out in the field to a fire. Most people can pass the test, but doing the actual work is a whole other ball game. Tommy was good at both, the tests and the work. One day we caught a job, a good fire in a threestoried frame building. We were on the floor above the fire, in the rear of the third floor, and the guys were having a bit of an issue with the water—a hydrant was shut down or something. The fire got out the windows underneath us, and it got pretty hairy. The chief ordered everybody off the top floor and out of the building because it didn’t look as if the engine company was making any progress. No sooner did we hit the streets than the whole house lit up. We would have been jumping out the windows. So I’m thinking, This chief is good, making that call, pretty heads-up. When I got outside I could see that it was my brother Tommy, Captain Haskell, acting chief for that tour.

  I said, “You just saved our ass.”

  And Tommy replied, “No problem, just go get a drink of water somewhere, rest up.”

  You know, a fire in Staten Island and a fire in a high-rise in Manhattan, they’re two totally different animals, but Tommy was equally proficient at both and could get his head wrapped around either scenario. He was going to make a great chief. Tommy was very intense, almost to the point where it could be a little too much. My father always used to chastise him, saying, “Would you freaking lighten up, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack.” He was always busting his chops.

  Before Tommy got promoted he went up to Squad 41 in the Bronx, after working in 332 in Brooklyn. It had been very competitive in Brooklyn, where they would race one another to be first in, and I guess Tommy bought into that whole act when he worked there. But up in the Bronx he saw that the guys were more relaxed and respected the response protocol. It really rounded him out as a fireman, and prepared him to be a good officer. When he got promoted he eventually went to Engine Company 82 in the South Bronx, where he served as lieutenant. After a year or two there he got promoted again, to captain, and he knew he would have been promoted within the year to battalion chief, but then 9/11 came.

  On the morning of 9/11 I was off duty. I was working on my house, reconstructing my bathroom, and I was in Farmingdale buying the tile. It was about ten minutes to nine, and there was nobody in the store. My cousin Frankie actually owns the store, and I thought, Where the heck is everybody? They were all in the back office watching the TV. Someone said that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. I said, “Really?” I looked at it and said, “Oh, my God,” and I thought right off the bat that it was a terrorist attack.

  I was at the Trade Center in 1993. I was a police officer then, and remember thinking, and feeling strongly after that day, that they were going to try to attack that building again. So I said, “Son of a bitch.” Then the second plane hit. I just walked out of the store and called my wife, who was at work, and told her I was headed to the firehouse. “Just be careful,” she said.

  I got to Brooklyn within half an hour—they had started closing the roads, but I was able to get through with my badge, and sailed right in. At the firehouse I thought: What the hell do we do now? There were about ten of us there. Right behind the firehouse is a bus depot, so we went there and told them we needed a bus to get to Manhattan. We threw all our gear in and started heading up Flatbush Avenue, stopping at Ladder 157 and Engine 255, Ladder 113 and Engine 249 to pick up more guys. The bus then was full.

  We got to the Manhattan Bridge, which was one of my most vivid memories of the day—just the faces of everybody coming over that bridge. Flatbush Avenue southbound from Tillary Street was just packed with people walking out of Manhattan, all covered in dust. The first collapse had just happened. They were, I guess, the f
irst group of people walking out of that dust storm. I’ll never forget that sight. All of those people, half of whom didn’t even have their shoes, who must have lost them running.

  There were several hundred firemen on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge waiting for orders. A chief was trying to gather everybody together and come up with a plan to direct us. There had been reports of a third plane coming, and of a secondary explosion, so I think they were a little apprehensive about sending us in. At that point everybody’s asking around, Do you know so and so? Is he working today? We knew we lost guys. Obviously. I felt that because the buildings had collapsed, there were going to be multiple heart attacks too.

  A guy I worked with, Brian O’Neil, came up to me and asked if I had heard about Daniel Suhr, a mutual friend of ours in Engine 216. I said, “No, what happened to Danny?” “He’s dead.” I said, “Oh shit. No.” He had been struck by a woman who had jumped, as I later found out, just as they were headed into the South Tower. Ironically, his death saved everybody else’s life in that company, because no sooner did they stop to get him out of that area than the building collapsed. And so they all survived.

  I remember being very pissed off. I’d played with Danny on the FDNY football team, and he was just an all-around good guy. He’d just had a baby too. When I heard about Danny, that’s when I determined, We gotta get the fuck over there. Enough of this dicking around here in Brooklyn. Five minutes later we were told that another command post had been set up on Broadway, right by City Hall. We got on the buses and, just as we were going over the bridge, we saw the second collapse.

  After getting off the buses, we were walking on Broadway and all the dust and debris came blowing through. We had to find shelter until everything could lift. I think I waited for about an hour for some kind of direction and to find out what was going on. I finally got fed up and decided, I’m not sitting here anymore. I grabbed a little dust mask. They had been trying to get equipment gathered up at that time, piles of shovels and brooms and stuff in the streets.

  When I got to Church Street, on the east side of the site, I was just dumbfounded by what I was looking at. Right in front of me an entire building, six or seven floors, was on fire. A firefighter was trying to get a hose line going on that, and I helped to stretch that line. Buildings, fire trucks, and police cars were all destroyed, everything burned. I remember how dark it was, even though it was about 11:30 in the morning. It was a surreal experience. I thought that if I were to imagine what a nuclear holocaust would look like, this was it: no color anywhere, everything ash and gray.

  After working for a while, trying to get some water on building 5, I moved to building 7, the one that collapsed in the afternoon. Parts of it started falling off and landing in the street all around us, and I was thinking, We’ll be all right, it looks like a pretty well-constructed building. But looking across Vesey Street and seeing that the entire World Trade Center was gone, I began to think that we should probably get out of here. Moments later building 7 collapsed, and the streets were filled with running cops and firemen. I ran east to the side entrance of the Woolworth Building.

  When [building 7] collapsed I did not have a feeling of fear but just went right into work mode. I did start to feel a bit uneasy, though, when I saw that the radiant heat from the initial fires in the Twin Towers was causing problems. The Deutsche Bank Building and the building next to it were also on fire, and building 7 had just fallen. These were all huge buildings. Now I’m thinking that the structural integrity of the foundations of all the surrounding buildings was probably undermined from the collapse of the Twin Towers. Shit, we’re going to lose half of Lower Manhattan. Every time one of these buildings goes down, it’s going to compromise the structure next to it in a domino effect. We’re a little lucky that that didn’t happen. People say that if the Twin Towers had been built better they wouldn’t have collapsed, but they took the impact of two jumbo jetliners, fully fueled, so it’s a miracle they didn’t fall right off the bat. Because the support columns were on the outside skin, they fell inward with the interior weight, floor by floor. It’s pretty remarkable that there wasn’t more collateral damage from the collapse.

  I’d been thinking about Tommy and Timmy the whole day. When I’d left for the city I called [my wife] Genene and asked her to call Tommy’s wife, Barbara, and my mother to see if she could find out if Tommy and Timmy were working. I didn’t know if either of them was actually on duty that morning. I assumed Timmy was there, because even if he wasn’t working, he lived in the neighborhood, in Tribeca, and his firehouse was not far away, on Greenwich and Tenth Street.

  At about seven o’clock I made my way over to West Street, because I knew that’s where the original command post was. I figured, I’m going to find out if my brothers are here or where they might have been. The chiefs at the command center would know.

  The destruction down there was just gargantuan, and it took a couple of hours just to get over there. Every time you turned around there was something to do. I originally walked south and came up behind the Engine 10 Ladder 10 firehouse on Liberty Street to make my way over to West Street. There was a body in the street there, literally sheared in half. It’s hard to describe what that looked like. Try to imagine someone lying on his side in water, so you could only see half the face, half the torso, and one arm. That’s all that was left of this man, this victim. His eye was open, expressionless. It is impossible to imagine the trauma he went through. His face didn’t have a mark on it, and I was kind of fixated on it. I just couldn’t believe the condition of his body, and I was thinking, How the hell did he end up two blocks south of the Trade Center? He had to have been on the airplane and just flew out of the building. That thinking really got my blood boiling, and seeing him there, that pissed me off. A cop was there, next to the body, and he was going to wait with the remains.

  I kept going until I got to the firehouse, and then tore through the place looking for an ax, a halogen tool, anything to work with. But the firehouse had already been pretty much raided. Chief Brian O’Neil grabbed me and ordered us up to the roof to get some lights set up. We did that and helped as they were trying to get a pumper backed up to the block to try to put some water on the Deutsche Building and on the pile of what was left of the South Tower.

  It was now about 8:30 P.M. and starting to get dark, and it was still very smoky all around. Looking over toward the World Financial Center, I saw beyond the smoke that it was just a beautiful day, the sun beginning to set over the Hudson River.

  I don’t remember what company it was, but they finally got a ladder tower backed up right next to 10 House—Engine 10 and Ladder 10—on Liberty Street. They put the bucket up and started to put some water on the fire in front of the Deutsche Bank Building. There were three flagpoles there, and they were all kind of bent, listed over, and one of them had the American flag. As the bucket was going up, the firefighters stopped the water flow and swung over to the pole, picked up the American flag, tied it to the bucket, and then continued up.

  Every so often there would be some visibility through the smoke, and as we watched the flag going up, it caught the light from the setting sun, which made it glow. It was a very patriotic moment, and I got renewed energy when I saw that. It was probably the most poignant moment of that whole first day for me.

  I then made my way over to West Street, where everybody was asking, Hey, did you see so and so? I found a couple of guys who knew Timmy and I asked, “Is Timmy working?”

  “Oh, yeah, I saw him,” one of them said.

  So I thought, Oh, good. And for seven or eight hours after that I went around thinking he was just around the corner, that I’d run into him at the pile somewhere.

  I still hadn’t heard anything about Tommy. To get to the command center I had to walk all the way around and through the Financial Center. The lobby there was like a ghost town. There was maybe a foot of that ash in the building, and all of the windows were blown out. A phone started ringing at a
security desk there. I dusted it off and couldn’t believe I got through when I called Genene. She told me that Barbara said that Tommy was working, but that she hadn’t heard from him since she called the firehouse and was told that they had responded. Oh boy, I thought. I asked, “What about Timmy?”

  And Genene said, “Timmy’s working too.”

  I just remember saying, “I pray to God they weren’t in there, because if they were in there they’re dead.”

  I felt like crap after that; a lot of emotion hit me at that point. I didn’t cry or anything, but I said, “I’m going to go; I want to get back to work; I’ll call you later.” She said, “Please come home tonight,” and then repeating it. “I can’t come home, Genene,” I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be all right. I have to get back to work.”

  At around one o’clock in the morning, I was still digging. We had recovered a few remains on West Street. Somebody came up to me and said, “You know, everyone from 132 is missing.” I said, “I figured that.” And Timmy . . . I already knew. I just had a feeling in my gut. I thought then that I needed to go home and tell my mother. I left the site near 2:00 A.M., somehow hitching a ride. To tell the truth, I don’t remember how I got back to my firehouse. I made it to my mother’s house by three o’clock in the morning. She was up, watching the news. I remember she stood up, just had this look on her face, as if she were hoping I was going to tell her something good.

  I lost it. I gave her a hug. “What can I say, Ma? If they were there, it doesn’t look good.” I didn’t want to say they were dead, but I knew they were gone, and I didn’t want her . . . She was clinging to the hope that everyone was still just missing, and I wanted her to have that hope. I didn’t want to dash that. I was honest with what I had seen, and what was going on down there. She just sat back down and continued watching the news. She asked me some questions, and we talked for a little while, until I finally said, “I’m going to go home and try to get a little sleep.”