by Dwyer, Jim
The oral histories from the firefighters presented fresh evidence of how deeply unaware firefighters in the north tower had been of their own peril after the south tower collapsed. The bleak picture provided in the accounts is in stark contrast to the depiction by public officials—most particularly, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, in submissions to the 9/11 Commission—that firefighters were broadly aware of the dangers they faced but stayed in the building to carry out their rescue duties.
In actual fact, of the fifty-eight firefighters who escaped the north tower and gave oral histories, only four said they knew that the south tower had fallen.
Lt. William Walsh of Ladder 1 said he had heard the order to evacuate when he was around the 19th floor. Yet he did not know that a plane had struck the other building or that it had already collapsed, and as he descended he encountered firefighters who had significantly less sense of what was going on than he did.
“They were hanging out in the stairwell and in the occupancy and they were resting,” Walsh said. “I told them, ‘Didn’t you hear the Mayday? Get out.’ They were saying, ‘Yeah, we’ll be right with you, Lou.’ They just didn’t give it a second thought. They just continued with their rest.”
Long after September 11, long after studies had identified breaches in New York City’s preparedness for a mammoth disaster, city officials struggled to mend the gaps. The inherent difficulty of using a small, hand-held radio in a high-rise setting was addressed by issuing new Command Post radios to chiefs, twenty-two-pound devices that a fire captain had designed using an old marine radio and a battery taken from his daughter’s Jet Ski. They were carried to the upper floors of a large building and were effective at establishing clear communications with commanders below.
The protocol of police and firefighters sharing one set of helicopters as response and reconnaissance aircraft was also resolved, and the two departments resumed training flights together. The need to establish a single, joint command post and to share information was embraced, at least in concept.
Some problems, however, could not be solved with battery power and bandwidth. The enmity between New York’s fire and police agencies did not seem to dissipate, even if it resembled the animosities of divorce within some families—dreadfully apparent but still not spoken about. Years after the disaster, New York was still working to install radios that would allow firefighters and police to talk to each other on the same frequency in special situations. And when the city unveiled a new emergency response protocol for disasters in the spring of 2005, the police were assigned primary responsibility for biological and chemical attacks, an adjustment that provoked open bitterness in the Fire Department ranks. Chief Peter Hayden, who had been the commander in the north tower, responded to the city’s decision by telling a reporter for The New York Times: “If the question was posed today—would the response at a terrorist incident be different than it was on 9/11?—the answer would have to be no. Now if that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.”
The next major disaster that New York responded to was not man-made and it was far away, in New Orleans, where 650 firefighters and police officers arrived in September 2005 to help bail out a city that had disappeared beneath flood waters. Some of the firefighters drove down in a pumper truck that the people of New Orleans and Louisiana had given to a Brooklyn firehouse in December 2001 to replace one destroyed on 9/11. The truck was called “The Spirit of Louisiana.”
In the days after the towers collapsed, a group of New Orleans firefighters had traveled north to help out, cooking and cleaning at firehouses while the New Yorkers searched for lost colleagues in the rubble. Now the New York crews were in the south riding to calls with a fire force that had been depleted by the hurricane. Bill Butler of Ladder 6. Sean Halper of Engine 279. Liam Flaherty of Rescue 4. Many of the firefighters were veterans of the towers and the pile, repaying a debt, offering lessons learned, losing themselves and finding themselves in someone else’s catastrophe.
On the morning of September 11, 2005, the Spirit of Louisiana was parked on the lawn of Our Lady of Holy Cross College, near the buildings where the firefighters were staying, in the Algiers section of New Orleans, which had not been flooded. At 8:30 A.M. eastern time, a quarter hour before the time the first plane had hit, Father Peter Weiss, a Brooklyn native, began an outdoor Catholic Mass in observance of the anniversary. Hundreds of firefighters stood on the field in front of the administration building, a red brick Georgian colonial that had lost one of its white columns to the storm. The lawn was edged with twisted oaks and magnolias, some with branches that hung limp or lay on the grass. “We are here today with another community devastated by another tragic event,” said New York’s Assistant Fire Chief Michael Weinlein. “We feel your pain and understand your frustration. It may take some time, but I promise you from personal experience, things will get better.”
At 9:35 A.M., as the Mass wound down, word of a house fire nearby came in over the radios. Firefighters from Maryland, Illinois, and New York ran for their trucks parked along the road in groups of five and six. A company from Chicago pulled its truck out of a formation of rigs that had been arranged around the altar. Firefighters, who a few minutes before had waited in line for communion, now stood along Woodland Drive, hurrying to pull on their gear.
With the passing of years, the emotions of the day no longer surged with the same force. Still, they retained unique power.
Esmerlin Salcedo, thirty-six years old, worked the afternoon shift as a security guard at the trade center, often stationed in a basement command center where he monitored the elevator intercoms and other emergency gear. Since his workday did not begin until 3 P.M., he was not present when the planes struck; he was not down in the basement, on the B-1 level, when the first, urgent calls came from the elevators or by phone from the people upstairs, seeking guidance. In fact, he was just a block or so away, taking a computer class at the Chubb Institute, a business school. Those in the command center had no time to think of who was not there: The cries for help were raining on them, unceasingly.
“People were calling from the elevators, from the floors, pleading with us to get them out,” Roselyn Braud, a member of the staff, recalled. She fell apart, thinking of her children at home. Suddenly, a door opened. Esmerlin Salcedo had arrived.
“He came flying down here, threw his book bag on the ground, and started answering phones,” Braud said. She was too upset to continue. Salcedo said he would escort her upstairs. “We linked arms, and he came up with me,” Braud said. He led her to a door near Church Street.
“He told me to ‘Run, run for your life,’ and that was the last I saw of him.” A moment later, Salcedo was seen helping another security guard shortly before the south tower collapsed.
Off-duty, he was paid nothing; on-duty, his salary was $10.51 an hour, on which he supported his wife and four children.
In September 2005, the case of a belligerent, disrespectful teenager from Atlanta, Georgia, was put before a television judge. The girl wanted to be adopted by another family; she hated her own parents, she said. The judge fashioned a television solution. She sent the young woman to meet another sixteen-year-old girl in New York City.
They met at Ground Zero—the girl from Atlanta, and the other sixteen-year-old, named Melody Salcedo. She explained who her father was: Esmerlin Salcedo. And she warned the other girl of learning too late the value of loving the people who cared for her.
Postscript
NEW YORK, 2011
The firefighters from Ladder 6 carried Josephine Harris again on a wintry morning in January. They moved slowly, as they had nearly ten years earlier. But this time there was no worry that the walls around them might crumble as they moved Harris’s blue steel casket toward the steps of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village.
The entrance to St. Joseph’s, two miles north of the trade center and six miles from Harris’s Brooklyn apartment, was framed by Doric colum
ns and had a simple, unadorned look, unusual in a Catholic church. The nine pallbearers—eight firefighters and Lieutenant Dennis Lim of the Port Authority Police Department—wore their dress uniforms, the fire officers in white hats. Each rested one hand on the casket, the other on his heart.
Many of them had seen a lot of Harris in the years since the attacks, since the painfully slow walk down stairway B in the north tower’s final minutes, the pleading procession with Harris and her fallen arches that had left them in a precise place when the building fell, the only stub to survive as the tower dissolved around them.
Harris had been to Sal D’Agostino’s wedding and had flown down to Florida with Jay Jonas to speak to retired firefighters. The men would meet with her several times a year and when Jonas was picked to lead a firefighters parade in upstate New York, Harris rode behind him in a silver convertible, waving to the crowd.
The men of Ladder 6 regarded Harris as a guardian angel, a blessing who had arrived very much in disguise when speed down the stairs had seemed the safer choice. Instead, her halting descent had given them all an opportunity to continue on with their lives.
Most of the men were still on the job.
Jonas had been promoted from captain to deputy chief and was now responsible for a large swath of the Bronx and upper Manhattan.
Billy Butler and Matt Komorowski were now lieutenants, serving in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
Tommy Falco and Mike Meldrum of the company had retired, as had Mickey Kross from Ladder 16, who had been with them in the stairwell.
Lim, the Port Authority K-9 officer, had also been promoted, and his dog, Sirius, a yellow lab who died in the attacks, had been remembered with a monument in Canada and a dog run in lower Manhattan.
Josephine Harris had died nine days earlier, at age sixty-nine, of a heart attack. She called 911 from her apartment at 2:20 a.m. on Wednesday, January 12, 2011, but the Fire Department medics could not revive her. Her life, like those of the others, had not been frozen by the calamity. For all their impact, the attacks were powerless to stop a future that swept forward with fresh moments of joy and achievement, as well as new encounters with panic and sadness and illness, like the heart condition that eventually felled her.
After the attacks, Harris, a widowed bookkeeper for the Port Authority, had briefly returned to work, but she did not follow in 2004 when her job was transferred to Newark. She lived alone, somewhat reclusively, surviving on disability assistance as her financial and health problems mounted. Papers found in her apartment indicated she had recently filed for bankruptcy.
Six months earlier, though, she had been energetic during an interview for a new TV show, Miracle Detectives, which recounted the story of the stairwell survivors.
“Somebody was with us,” she said. “Somebody was watching over us.”
Inevitably, time drained color and details from memories of the day. For many, it became difficult to recall just how shaken, how apocalyptic everything had seemed in the days and weeks after the attacks.
Had there really been a morning when just the sound of an airplane engine could send New Yorkers screaming down the street? Who were those people who hoarded bottled water in their basements, or asked their doctors for radiation sickness pills, or flew American flags from the antennas of their cars?
Needless to say, many people confronted—in some cases embraced—lives that had been completely reshaped by the catastrophe, and searched for ways to make lasting answer to those 102 minutes.
The family of Peter Alderman, the Bloomberg employee who could not escape a breakfast conference at Windows on the World, used funds they received under a federal compensation program to create a foundation that helps the victims of terrorism and mass violence cope emotionally with the trauma. The impulse to build something enduring—gardens, parks, literacy programs, cross-cultural learning opportunities, scholarships funded by golf outings and road races—was a common response by the surviving families.
About a hundred survivors refused compensation grants because they would have had to surrender their right to file civil lawsuits against the public and private parties they believed bore some responsibility for actions, and inactions, that exposed airline passengers, office tower workers, and the country to the attacks. The power of subpoena in a lawsuit could compel answers under oath. Among those filing suits were Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, was injured and trapped on the 78th floor in the south tower while waiting for an elevator, and Beverly Eckert, whose husband, Sean Rooney, had found doors locked when he tried to get onto the roof in the same building.
They were part of a determined band of 9/11 family members whose gaze fell on everything from building codes that left the skyscrapers without enough stairways for emergency evacuations, to a system of national intelligence that seemed to have a hard time passing e-mail messages from one agency to another. Their status gave them general—though hardly absolute—immunity from accusations that they were seeking partisan advantage, or that by asking questions about what went wrong they were subverting a president leading a war in one country and preparing for an invasion in a second one. At a meeting in the White House, senior officials explained to the family group that a far-reaching inquiry was too risky for a country at war, as it might lay bare the failures of national defense.
“Are you going to stand here and look me in the eye and tell me we are not going to have an investigation into the death of my husband and the relatives of all the other people in this room?” Beverly Eckert asked.
Well, no, as it turned out. The 9/11 Commission was reluctantly created by Congress and the president, and it would often be hamstrung by delays and evasions at all levels of government. Nevertheless, due in large part to the doggedness of a Family Steering Committee, scholars believe that the 9/11 Commission cut more quickly and deeply into the secrets of two presidential administrations than did earlier commissions that studied national calamities like Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Iran-contra affair. Yet many of those who had fought for the creation of the commission felt that it had left important questions unanswered. They believed that the commission’s declaration that the attacks had not been prevented because of “a failure of imagination” had shielded many senior officials from being held responsible. New systems without true accountability, Monica Gabrielle and others argued, would leave the country as vulnerable as ever. On Christmas Day 2009, a Nigerian man who months earlier had been identified as a terrorist threat by intelligence agents—and by his own father—was able to board a flight to Detroit and ignite plastic explosives stitched into his underwear. He was subdued by another passenger. The United States was spending $75 billion annually on national security intelligence. None of it had stopped him.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the U.S. military had fewer soldiers, sailors, marines, and aviators in its ranks than at any time in the previous sixty years. American governments had been engaged in overt and covert wars almost nonstop since 1941, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United States was still enjoying a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War. The 9/11 attacks roused a spirit of service and duty that had been embodied that day by the valor of firefighters, medics, and police officers. Military recruitment surged. Over the next decade, two million members of the U.S. armed forces would be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Among them was Christian P. Engeldrum. He had already served in the U.S. Army from 1986 to 1991 and completed his obligations as a reservist in the Army National Guard. By 9/11, he was working as a firefighter in New York City. He had responded to the trade center attack and spent days there, experiences that his family said had prompted him to reenlist. In 2004, he was one of thirty New York City firefighters on active duty in the military, and he arrived in Iraq on November 2 of that year. Before the month was out, he and another soldier were killed by a roadside bomb. Firefighter Engeldrum was the first of fifteen emergency responders who survived 9/11 but died in Iraq or Afghanistan. H
e was thirty-nine years old, the father of two sons, and his wife was expecting their third child at the time of his death. His eldest son, Sean, said in a eulogy, “He was brave and courageous all the time, but able to cry over a sick dog.”
Sister Cynthia Mahoney, the nun who jumped into the city ambulance to volunteer after the attacks, later developed crippling respiratory ailments. One of the first civilians to join the rescue workers, she had ridden back to the collapsed towers with Richard Erdey and Soraya O’Donnell, two emergency medical technicians who worked for the Fire Department. Months later, the nun was still there, showing up day after day to comfort families and bless remains as they were pulled from the debris.
Sister Cynthia, a member of the Anglican Order of St. Helena, had moved to New York from South Carolina only a few weeks before the attacks. Her convent was near Bellevue, the hospital where the ambulance crew had taken Danny Suhr, the firefighter who died after being hit by a falling body.
When she approached Erdey and O’Donnell in the hospital parking lot, the crew had been direct with her: the dangers at the trade center could not be minimized.
“Oh, I understand,” Sister Cynthia replied. She had been an emergency medical technician herself in South Carolina before leaving that job to join the religious order.
As it turned out, the threats she faced were never as obvious as fire and falling concrete. Years later, more than 60,000 people who had worked in the buildings or had participated in rescue and recovery efforts would sign up for health monitoring or treatment programs because they feared the lasting effects of the foul soup of dust, ash, and smoke they had inhaled after the collapse. Sister Cynthia, a nonsmoker, developed asthma and lung disease after her work at the site.
