Firehouse Magazine Reports---Battalion Chief John Norman

WTC: This Is Their Story

From the May 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Battalion Chief John Norman Special Operations Command - 22 years

Firehouse: Please describe how you became involved.
Norman: I was home in bed and the battalion called and said, I know you’re on vacation, but there’s a total recall because of what happened to the Trade Center. I’m still sound asleep. I said, what happened to the Trade Center? He says you don’t know? He says turn on the TV and he hung up. He had a million calls to make. I turned on the TV just in time to catch Tower 1 falling, so I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs. I had all my FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) gear packed, ready for a FEMA deployment, and I had a second set of bunker gear in my trunk. I just jumped in the car and I headed right to the city, heading for the Trade Center, but I stopped in Brooklyn, stopped at 175 Truck and 332 Engine’s quarters, to see whether they had any word on the recall, what mustering sites there were or anything. They had commandeered a bus and loaded it up with all the spare Scott bottles they had in quarters, because they’re a depot, and as many hand tools as they could find. About 25 of us went from there, drove to the 15th Division mustering site at 283’s quarters. I checked in with the deputy chief there, Seamus McNella I believe was working. They had a bus that was leaving for the Trade Center right at that point, so I hopped on it and we drove to the Manhattan Bridge. (Deputy Chief) Dave Corcoran was in charge of maintaining control of the units, finding out what units he had available, so we switched over from the bus. There was a convoy of apparatus about to go over to Manhattan. (Lieutenant of Rescue 1) Mike Pena and I hooked up there with Ray Graywin, Al Schwartz from 4 Truck and we all piled onto the back, I think it was 264 Engine’s rig, and headed over the bridge and came in on the Broadway side of City Hall Park. Deputy Chief Tommy Haring had a command post set up at Broadway and I think it was Dey Street, so we got a radio off of one of the trucks that had arrived and we sent the team. We could hear Freddy La Femmina calling for assistance. He had trapped firefighters in, I believe it was the north tower. We sent Mike and put a SOC (Special Operations Command) team together. Squad 288’s rig was right there. I went over and took everything we could get that might be of value in the technical operation off of 288’s rig and headed over. I had my digital camera with me. I took some pictures as I was going in and going down Dey. All I could see was 5 World Trade Center on fire. That was a building that I had worked in. I had done a lot of the sprinkler work there when it was going up and I’m looking at this building. You know, it’s not supposed to be like this. There were some companies stretching lines on Vesey Street, so I went over there to see if they needed a hand. They were saying no, no, the guys around on the West Street side really need the help. I started to go down Vesey toward West, but there was a lot of debris blocking the way and they were telling me no, you don’t want to go down there – they’re worried about that building collapsing. I looked at 7 World Trade Center. There was smoke showing, but not a lot and I’m saying that isn’t going to fall. So I went up Church Street two more blocks and went across to West and went right down behind 7 and got a good look at three sides. Again, there were a lot of fires on the ground, some crushed mail trucks, some burned-up engines. It was a scene out of a war zone. I continued around to West and Vesey and reported into the command post. They were very concerned about fire extending into the telephone company building. They gave me a couple of companies and said get into the telephone company building and check on extension there. We had extension on the first and second floors, so we took some standpipe lines, put them in operation and knocked that down. From there, we looked out at 7 World Trade Center again. You could see smoke, but no visible fire, and some damage to the south face. You couldn’t really see from where we were on the west face of the building, but at the edge of the south face you could see that it was very heavily damaged.

Firehouse: Could you see if there was a lot of debris in the street after the building came down?
Norman: Yes, that’s why we couldn’t walk down Vesey. But I never expected it to fall the way it did as quickly as it did, 7. But we took some defensive positions, actually tied the lines off and pulled the companies back into the building. I didn’t feel too bad once we got back away from the perimeter just because that’s a real, real heavy, old-style building. We knocked down any fire and checked for extension in the phone company building. We tied the lines off and left them flowing out into the street onto the debris piles that were burning out in the street there between the phone company and 7. I came back outside and I forget who the IC (incident commander) was at that command post, but he says we’re getting a lot of reports of firemen still trapped. They think they know the location of the original command post and why don’t you get over there and see if you can get a hand, organize something over that way. OK, where is it? And he says it’s on the other side of that bridge right there. You had the north pedestrian bridge that was blocking the entire access. We had to go around, behind and through 3 World Financial Center and come back out onto West Street at Liberty. And again, an absolutely incredible amount of devastation. With the familiarity I had with the whole building, it was absolutely astounding. I really couldn’t see how bad things were up to that point because of the smoke condition. I was still expecting to see large sections of buildings standing and everything. Once I got out onto West and Liberty and see that there’s nothing left, the whole steel of that building is out covering the block, it’s just incredible. Now we’re still worried about 7. We have guys trying to make their way up into the pile, and they’re telling us that 7 is going to fall down – and that was one of the directions from the command post, to make sure we clear the collapse zone from 7 and this is a 600-foot-tall building, so we had to clear a 600-foot radius from that building. Guys are looking at me when I’m telling them to move away, we’re over by the north tower and we got to get out of here. They said what building you talking about? I said that building and they thought the phone company because through the smoke you couldn’t see what I’m talking about. They said that building isn’t going anywhere. I said no, not that building, the one next to it, the big one. It was tough getting them to understand what we’re talking about because until you had done either a couple of 360s around this whole site or if you got an aerial view somehow, you really couldn’t appreciate the scope of the damage. You come in and you see one thing and say oh, this is a big problem. Like 90 West Street. 90 West Street was burning and guys would say we got this big problem over here. 90 West Street would have been a big problem, would have probably been a borough call by itself during normal times. We had fire on South End Avenue in one of the apartment houses in Battery Park City. I’m looking at that and I’m saying that’s a third alarm in normal times and there were two engine companies dedicated to it. There was fire on the third and fourth floors. I guess it probably was debris got into the third floor and auto-exposed to the fourth with a good fire there. There was a fire up on the roof of 2 World Financial Center, again from debris landing on it. All of which would have been something to talk about normally. But now we get out there and we could crawl through this mass of steel. There were window openings in the steel – what used to be the windows of the exterior walls. You’d look down every step and say that’s an aerial ladder down there dropped down into the void. Guys are searching in all those areas. There’s got to be people here, they’ve got to be here. Where are the engine chauffeurs as we come across rigs? Some of the engines you could get in underneath and some of them were just flat right to the ground, pancaked to the ground, so that even if the engine chauffeur dove under the rig, there was no void space. The guys are saying that we’ve got to have a lot of people under here. Then, when they found (Chief of Department) Pete Ganci’s body and (First Deputy Commissioner) Bill Feehan’s body, we said there’s the command post, everybody else has to be right here too. But to lift that stuff – these were the massive, three-finger sections of steel. They weigh 25 tons. There was just nothing we were doing to lift them at that point. That’s when we realized we really, really needed heavy equipment in there, but with the access being blocked, that became a real major problem. I went back to the command post, reported what I saw and we tried to organize a plan. That’s where I said you’ve got to get this north footbridge cleared out of the way. We’ve got to be able to get some big cranes in to start lifting that heavy steel. They were bringing some cranes in. They had some mobile hydraulic cranes by nightfall and started working from the south end, but they were really very small capacity and they were 600 feet away from the north tower. That’s when they gave me the job of getting that north footbridge out of the way. I worked on that all night the first night. By 10 o’clock in the morning, we had started to get some heavy equipment in. We got the excavators in, the grapplers, and started to make some headway on it. We peeled off all the facing. This is a tremendous bridge, it’s a 300-foot-long bridge. It was a steel box, almost a truss, like a space frame. We started to make some headway through that and by about 1 o’clock that afternoon, I was just shot though. I said I’ve got the plan organized, we’re getting the equipment in to do it and this is where we’ve just got to keep going. I left and went up to Rescue 1’s quarters that afternoon. By that point, a lot of the families were there – Dennis Mojica’s fiancee, Maria. Just trying to deal with them was very hard. Mike Geidel was there with his father, Paulie. And naturally, Paul having been a lieutenant in Rescue 1, we’re trying to reassure him that, yeah, there are a lot of areas that we haven’t gotten to yet. We haven’t given up hope. We’re going to get him. It was tough trying to explain that. I went upstairs and laid down for about an hour and a half. I couldn’t sleep. I picked up some dry clothes. I stole some clothes from Mike Pena, a new T-shirt and underwear, and went back down. Worked on the north bridge that second night. First, Fellini sent me with the guys from Harlem, 35 Engine and 14 Truck, went down to check the subway, check the 1 and 9 subway entrance into the concourse to see whether there was a way to come into the collapse area from underneath. And we did. We got as far as up as we could until we were stopped by solid rubble. We came up into the concourse level from underneath. Again, areas that I was very familiar with, I worked in so I knew my way around. Checked right up to the PATH (train ) escalators. We got right up to the PATH escalators, started to go down them, got down to the first level and there were some signs that the area had already been searched. So we went back up.

Firehouse: What did they use to mark those? Did they use paint or markers?
Norman: No, just in the dust. I forget the company. I think it was a Brooklyn company like 204 Engine. “Engine 204 was here.” So I said let’s go back to see if we find areas that nobody’s gotten to yet. And we went down in the east side of the wall. On the east side of the concourse, it’s only three sublevels. We got down into all of them, but there were some real protected areas, but anybody that was in them got out. Nobody trapped or anything in any of those areas. A lot of places where people survived or could have survived without being pinned. The casualty differences were enormous. In a war event, usually you have one killed for every two or three or four wounded. Here, incredibly, it was almost the opposite. Look at our numbers – 343 dead and only a dozen serious injuries. If you were out of the collapse zone, you lived and were relatively unscathed. If you were in the collapse zone, there was no alternative.

Firehouse: If I could just go back, was there any mention of getting FEMA teams or did they already take care of that, or heavy equipment, the first time you saw some of these command chiefs?
Norman: There was heavy equipment already on the way. By the time I got to West and Vesey, it was already very clearly understood that there was nothing we were going to do until we got the big heavy construction equipment up in the way. I talked with Mike Pena early on while we were over at the Broadway side still when we first got into the scene and got a handle on the size of the devastation. One of the things that he took care of was making arrangements to get the New York City FEMA task force on the way. We got the FEMA task force organized from New York City, got the equipment coming. Mike actually handled most of those arrangements.

Firehouse: How much equipment is there and how big of a deal is it to get it to respond?
Norman: It’s a big deal. It’s basically three tractor-trailer loads worth of equipment. You got to get the tractors hooked up, they’re not kept up where you jump in and drive away.

Firehouse: Three tractor-trailer loads of the stuff coming out of FEMA, so it’s a big job at any time to get going?
Norman: Yes.

Firehouse: When did the equipment arrive?
Norman: It wound up there that evening. I guess it was the next day before I got up to see it. Tommy Richardson, John La Femmina, Freddy La Femmina, the whole staff of them pitched in on their own because we weren’t activated as a federal task force. We just brought it there as a New York City resource. We didn’t have the full FEMA staff with an operations chief in charge of that unit and all that because all our people were performing those functions in their own jobs.

Firehouse: At some point in time, did somebody recommend how many FEMA teams were coming?
Norman: Yeah, real early. We said we’ve got to get at least four FEMA task forces on the way. When we got another look at it, went over and spoke with Chief Fellini at the time at the west command post, I said you’ve got to get OEM and get at least half a dozen of them started here. We got at least that many buildings that need to be done. Unfortunately, by the time the task forces arrived and deployed, there was no live victims to be recovered. The last five victims were recovered about 26 hours later, just after noon on the 12th, and most of task forces hadn’t even deployed. Pennsylvania was in at that point already and Massachusetts, and I believe Ohio. They began working, but there were no more live victims for them to recover.

Firehouse: The 26 hours later, was that the woman who was found in the void?
Norman: Yeah.

Firehouse: At the top of the pile?
Norman: Yeah. The Ohio task force was staged over in one of the residential buildings in Battery Park City and in the process of doing a primary search of that building. They did find a person, not unconscious, but unable to move, injured pretty badly, in one of residential buildings and that’s a block and a half away from the towers. At that point, we put many of the incoming task forces as well as our resources, teams of firefighters, police officers and the FEMA people into the job of performing a good primary and then a secondary search of all of those buildings. And remember, we’re talking a lot of big buildings, 50 stories, 300-by-300-foot buildings with no elevators and no power inside them. We told them take their time, if it takes you eight hours to do that, go ahead. You’ve got to walk up. We want everything searched. I want the roof searched for bodies that might have fallen onto the roof. I want every setback searched. I want every staircase, every office, every elevator searched. And they did it. They did a great job. It was a very long, difficult, hot-weather task to do, but it was necessary. Unfortunately, for the some of the FEMA task forces, that’s not really their primary mission. They’re geared for the heavy rescue, the heavy movement of large pieces of steel or concrete. There were very little pieces of concrete to deal with here. And the steel, the voids under it either were empty because people lived and got out or they were so heavily compacted that not even the equipment the FEMA task forces brought with them was going to be satisfactory. We needed the heavy equipment, those 25-ton grapplers, 1,000-ton cranes.

Firehouse: Those cranes and grapplers, the ones that are in there right now, they can pick up 25 tons?
Norman: The biggest ones, yes. By now, we’re getting into areas where we’re finding firefighters or civilians and they’re in relative voids and people are saying or they’re wondering whether anybody could have survived in those voids. In some cases it might have been possible that they weren’t physically crushed in some of these areas, but given the high carbon monoxide levels from the fires, I didn’t see them as survivable voids. It took us over three months to get to these areas using the heavy equipment at the most rapid pace possible and we’re still looking for remains or victims. Without the heavy equipment, we weren’t making any headway. We were taking I figured about two inches a day off of those piles at the rate we were going with hand equipment. We would be there for a hundred years at that rate. Just had to go to the heavy equipment. One of the things we talked about with the voids was how would we – when we were getting into the 16-day, 17-day range, we were looking to make the decision to go back – to go to a recovery from a rescue operation, a tremendous number of considerations. Certainly, the families were a big one, but then we had to deal with the injury or fatality possibilities to rescuers, and we had to honestly evaluate what the people’s chances of survival would be in that structure. At that point, it didn’t look good at all. We hadn’t uncovered any voids where we didn’t find crushed people. We didn’t have anybody lying there who looked like he could have survived if it weren’t for the fact that he was just stuck there so long. We went beyond the outside window of survivability. We know we’ve had people trapped in earthquakes for 14, maybe 15 days survive. But that was without the carbon monoxide coming up from underneath them constantly. So we went to 18 days just to be certain that we could say that there would be no way that anybody could have survived because we talked about it. We asked each other how we were going to handle our own consciences if we came across a pile of bodies and they had a diary, this is day one, we know you guys are coming to get us, day three, where are you, and, day five, we’re out of air, we can’t stand it anymore, we’re dying here, come get us, help us.

Firehouse: Let me just stop you at one point. Were there any transmissions besides those from Jay Jonas and other people? Jay told me that he had heard three or four Maydays right after it collapsed or in and around that time, a couple of hours. But did you hear any other Maydays or did anybody hear?
Norman: The Maydays that I heard were from rescuers calling for assistance because they had trapped firefighters. Like I said, Captain La Femmina from Squad 270 was working, I believe he was working with 43 Truck on rescuing members from 6 Truck. There were some other members around the perimeter, Al Fuentes. I didn’t hear Al’s Mayday. There were several Maydays for trapped members given by the rescuers, not the members themselves. In some cases, they found firemen, but they were beyond saving.

Firehouse: The FEMA teams are coming in. You gave them tasks to go into the surrounding buildings.
Norman: Some of them we deployed onto the pile looking in the voids. As we got more resources in, then we put them to work. We didn’t have enough work for them to accomplish in their normal missions. The FEMA teams made a lot of void entries and did a lot of good reconnaissance, but the type of debris that we encountered here was unlike anything that had ever been encountered. Even earthquakes topple primarily concrete structures. Concrete is easy to breach. A hundred-foot-long I-beam that projects 90 feet into this pile that’s got three-inch-thick members, it’s a box that’s five feet by three feet with three-inch-thick web members, you’re not penetrating. Even with the heaviest torches that we had in all the FEMA caches it would take hours to burn a single hole through that beam. This was something that we needed ,the heaviest industrial-sized equipment available. The grapplers that could lift that. We were we were cutting with the FEMA torches. We were cutting those box beam sections into eight-foot lengths because that was what was able to be moved. When we got the excavators in there, they could take the entire 40-foot-long section in three pieces out in one piece. We had to segment that probably into a dozen pieces, so we were really overwhelmed by the type of construction. It wasn’t a question of punching holes with a pavement breaker or jackhammer and getting through anything. Up to that point, we were burning up a lot of resources and it wasn’t very productive. That was a little bit of controversy within some of the FEMA responders. They wanted to continue burning, but again at that point I made a decision that we were being ineffective. We were putting people in bad places, places that had been searched. We knew we didn’t have any survivors in those areas and we were just burning up oxyacetylene. It was almost a feel-good effort, kind of like the bucket brigades. The bucket brigades that a lot of the police officers and firefighters were manning were ineffective. They didn’t do anything to get to anybody, but it was a feel-good effort. Everybody wanted to pitch in and everybody wanted to help, but in reality and hindsight now, we were moving tiny, tiny fragments of debris. Actually, it was impeding the operation, what we needed to do. We needed to get the big equipment in so we could start moving the big steel out of the way. At one point, we were getting a lot of cell phone calls, people reported to be cranks or psychics. They were in contact somehow with people trapped in the supposedly bombproof Port Authority police bunker. It was not anything that we could ignore. And we would get this call and (Assistant) Chief (Frank) Cruthers sent me, go find that bunker and somebody get to it, get a probe into it, however you do it, get to it. We had the plans for the building. We knew exactly where the supposed bunker was. The bunker was not a bombproof bunker. It had explosion-resistant glass in it, but the walls were Sheetrock walls. It had bulletproof glass so nobody could just shoot in through the window at a cop, but the walls were nothing substantial.

Firehouse: Is that where the fire command station was?
Norman: Yes. We had the plans and we looked at it from every angle of approach and there was 40 feet of solid steel between us and the bunker from any approach. And I had to just tell him there’s nobody that we’re going to get there. If they’re in there, which I seriously doubted, just because I was able to look into the B-4 level from the Marriott garage inside the Trade Center walls. It was just packed solid debris. If they’re in there, we’re not going to get them. We’re not going to get them for months, three months with the heaviest equipment available moving and we were just getting to that area.

Firehouse: By now, you’re now into the recovery mode. How did it change? The first couple of days you had a lot of guys there. You sent sent a lot of people home, so they can get some sleep?
Norman: We had to break off of the recall, absolutely. We had nearly 100% percent of the department. We had 10,000 firemen wanting to come to the site. Some of them who had gone to mustering sites by late that evening, we said we don’t need any more personnel here. The scene was overflowing with people, we didn’t need any more and we sent them back to their firehouses. But the guys in the firehouses, they weren’t going to rest, they weren’t going to sleep knowing that there were all these guys missing and buried. Then we had the problem with all the out-of-town units that came in unsolicited and out of control. We didn’t have any good handle on who was where. They really created a major, major morale problem for us. We would have our people in their firehouses wanting to come dig out their brothers and then we’d tell them no, we don’t need you, we don’t want you here, stay back there, protect the rest of the city, do what you have to do for the rest of the city. And they would turn on the TV and there would be coverage of a firefighter from out of town telling them how he just spent eight hours digging out New York City firemen. The guys were in rebellion. They wanted to come to that pile. We had many, many reports that guys were just saying if you don’t let us go, we’re going to leave the rigs here and go on our cars or we’re going to take the rigs with us and go and you’re not going to stop us. That was a real, real serious problem, especially the first week. Once the guys saw the capabilities of the FEMA teams and that these were not just volunteers who drove in on their own, that they had expertise, that they had all this ability and that we had requested them, that solved some of the problems. It didn’t stop it all because nobody could stop Joe Blow from giving an interview out in the street. The FEMA personnel were very disciplined that way. They didn’t give interviews off the cuff. They explained that they were part of the system and so on. But anybody who put a turnout coat and a helmet on and walked down outside the fence in the perimeter area was interviewed by some news network. A lot of them never spent any time at all on the pile, but they showed up in fireman’s gear and now they’re telling guys what a great job they did. We had cases of people arrested as impostors. Some of it made the news about the guy who was living up in I think 16 Truck quarters. Absolute impostors that got their hands on some turnout gear. Security was a major issue for us. We went through many many types of IDs. It created a couple of problems. One was without it, anybody and his brother walked into the scene. Right away I requested a company of Marines, active-duty U.S. Marines, for perimeter security and that was rejected. We ended up with police and National Guard. I wanted the Marines because I wanted some 19-year-old kid standing on the corner who, when his sergeant gives him an order, he stands to and nobody passes that point without the proper credentials. Instead, what we got was, well, listen guy, I got a friend of mine in there, or my brother’s in there, and some of that was legit and people let them go. And then there were others who just didn’t really care who showed up dressed as a fireman or a police officer, a mailman, if you had some kind of uniform on, they just waved you in. It took a long time to get security under control. We went through numerous challenges with it. OEM (the city Office of Emergency Management) was in charge of giving out the badges. They hadn’t pre-planned any of that or they had pre-planned it, but they hadn’t pre-arranged any of it. So now to get badges, everybody had to personally report to the pier. The operation at the pier wasn’t set up. Everybody and his brother went through the same line. Rescuers spent hours and hours and hours waiting on line to get their IDs so they could get down into the site. When they get there, they’d see other people walk right past them with no ID at all who weren’t even part of the rescue teams. If you brought a box of sandwiches in, you walked in through the gate on your own. Several times, we changed it because people were giving out ID badges to anybody who showed up. Now we had badges that basically became useless. Yes, you had a badge, but you didn’t belong getting a badge or maybe your commitment has expired, the things that you could do were no longer needed. We don’t need you coming into the site and gawking anymore. We ended up changing our system of badges several times. Some of the FEMA teams, FEMA teams in uniform on buses with an escort, were stopped at some checkpoints. Other guys, if you just drove two blocks over to the next checkpoint, nobody was there to even guard the gate, so security was an ongoing issue. The threat of secondary issues going on at the site was a severe issue for us. We had no certainty that there wasn’t going to be a secondary attack on all the rescuers working there. It was a challenge.

Firehouse: The recall was stopped. People went home and you went 24 hours on/24 hours off?
Norman: The first few days it was continuous duty and guys would take breaks whenever they could. I probably worked about 30 hours straight the first day and went back, took about three hours off, came back and did another 24, 25 hours-plus. By the Friday when they made me the search manager, all our SOC units were committed there. Their personnel were committed and their apparatus in many cases being destroyed, we didn’t have a place for them to go anyway. We started getting the spare rigs back in service and we started getting the units rotated out. Of course, with the losses that we had suffered in the SOC units – we lost 94 people out of Special Operations. We had a lot of concern about how are we going to man the units. We had units where two platoons were wiped out, so the question was where are we going to get the people from to man these units. Tommy Richardson and the staff worked out a schedule where we looked at it. We lost almost 30% of our personnel, but that left us with enough to do a three-platoon system. We lost one-quarter of our personnel. We could put the other three-quarters back in as three shifts instead of four and keep us operational. By the second Sunday, the 23rd, we were still doing 24 on and 24 off. By the 23rd, we were looking to go into the three-group chart that we’re in now. We’ll be returning back to our 25-group chart. It took us a long time to rebuild. We had four classes of people through the hazmat tech and rescue technician school.

Firehouse: Now, you’re filling the officer ranks?
Norman: Yes. We’ve had plenty of officers come in. We’ve had a lot of people promoted out of the system who have come back to help us after the attack. Some of the people again had to be trained. We’re still rebuilding. It’s going to take a long time to get us back where we were before. I used to tell guys it takes two years to turn an experienced firefighter into a rescue firefighter, so this isn’t going to happen overnight. But the training that they’re getting is certainly going to be helpful. They’re very highly motivated people. The guys who are coming in here, they want to do the right thing.

Firehouse: You had meetings several times a day at the Duane Street command post. Can you tell me who attended those meetings and what was discussed?
Norman: The 5 o’clock meeting in the evening was the planning meeting. What we did there was reviewed the operations that had occurred up to that point and then planned the actions for the next day’s tour. Overnight, the incident management staff wrote up the planning process meetings of the planning notes and developed the action plan for the coming tour. Seven o’clock the next morning, we’d brief everybody on the actions for the day. After the 7 o’clock meeting, usually by 8:30, we had a safety meeting. The 5 o’clock meeting, the planning meeting, involved just a few key organizations, the fire department, DDC (Department of Design and Construction), the Port Authority, police department, National Guard. The health department I don’t think was involved at that point. Certainly the FEMA incident support team was involved. And that was a problem because FEMA representative Fred Endrikat was also supposed to be at another meeting, a FEMA IST (Incident Support Team) meeting, basically the same times each day just because the planning process works at the end of each shift and at the beginning of each shift so that was a little bit of a problem. We needed more help. The next morning, the 7 o’clock meeting was for everybody. Every agency that was involved had a representative there.

Firehouse: How many people would you say would be at that meeting?
Norman: Fifty. Usually one from each organization except for the key players. The Port Authority had several reps. Port Authority police had one or two reps. NYPD had two or three reps. The fire department obviously had a large staff. The 8:30 or 9 o’clock safety meeting was representatives from the contractors and involved directly DDC, the Port Authority, the fire department, discussing specific safety issues. Then there were the myriad meetings throughout the day for specific events or purposes.

Firehouse: When you needed equipment or supplies, was it delivered to the scene?
Norman: OEM was the clearinghouse for requesting resources. Some of the resources that we had in-house we handled ourselves. The Technical Services Division under Robin Mundy Sutton did a terrific job of delivering stocks of expendables and tools and anything that they had in-house and some of the stuff that we had purchased contracts with vendors they were able to bring in. A lot of vendors pulled the old softshoe on us, gave us the fast one – they brought in truckloads of tools and equipment and said here, this is for you guys, this is a donation.

Firehouse: Then they turned around?
Norman: And two and three months later we were getting bills from them. That upset me greatly. Like I say, most of the purchasing was done through OEM. We also had great resource later on into the incident after a couple of weeks into the incident, the federal government brought in these interagency incident management teams, basically wildland firefighting logistics teams. The first one was from the southwest region, New Mexico and Arizona, and they were terrific. These are people who have a lot of experience running these campaign-type operations which we never do. If we have a fire that goes beyond one shift, something’s wrong, so we don’t do this. We didn’t require relief. We provided our own relief. We didn’t require a large quantity of tools or equipment. This was very different for us. The incident management team took over our logistics operation, handling it, setting it up for us, maintaining inventory controls and tracking. They were an excellent resource. As a matter of fact, I took a picture from the command post. We had Cruthers and (Deputy Chief Peter) Hayden and (Deputy Chief) Charlie Blaich. Blaich is huddled up with the guy from the U.S. Park Service and another guy from the IMT (Incident Management Team) from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I had to take the picture. I’m going to use it in the chief’s command course because if you had told anybody on September 10th that you would have people from the U.S. Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service helping us run an incident this heavily involved in our command structure, everybody would have said you’re out of your mind, it could never happen. And here they were and they did a great job.

Firehouse: As things sort of got back to normal, did they have 100 guys at the scene every day?
Norman: Originally, we had about 225 people at the site each day.

Firehouse: Was that a day tour or 24-hour tour?
Norman: Twenty-four, around each shift.

Firehouse: So a day and a night shift?
Norman: Day and a night shift. Initially actually, it was working on eight-hour rotations, I believe. Then it went to a 12-hour tour.

Firehouse: Is that when they were reporting to Shea Stadium (in Queens)?
Norman: Yes.

Firehouse: OK, we’re at 225 a day each shift, eight-hour rotation into 12 hours. The guys reported to Shea Stadium. They were on buses. They were outfitted and then they went down there. Later, it was reduced?
Norman: To about 100. The commitment has been that it this continues as long as we need them. Certainly, as the work site was shrinking, we didn’t need that many people. Buildings 4 and 5 were cleared. They were searched. They were down to the ground level. There was nothing to be done in those sites. Six was almost to that stage and all the accessible areas were searched. The commitment has been that we’re going to try to get every last body. When the thing is down to the ground level, that’s when our last commitment will end. But we may only have an engine for the last month or thereabouts. When we’re not digging through heavy steel, when there’s no need for any specialized equipment, we’re not going to have it there.

Firehouse: I heard they found Ladder 4?
Norman: I saw some TV footage of it down in the fourth subbasement covered by the pedestrian bridge between Banker’s Trust and the concourse, on the south side, right at the south edge of the slurry wall.

Firehouse: That would be right by the Engine 10 and Ladder 10 quarters?
Norman: Very close to 10 and 10, just actually west of 10 and 10, about 100 yards. We’re digging throughout the entire area. I mean because of the extensive engineering that has to go into it. The thing has to be excavated relatively evenly so that the foundation walls don’t cave in. As the debris is removed all the way down, there’s tremendous hydraulic pressure behind that wall pushing in. As a matter of fact, one of the fellows told me that as they drilled a hole in to sink one of the tie rods and they pulled the drill bit out, water came squirting out and everybody looked at it kind of nervously and it’s routine, we’re going to stick a rod in there and anchor it into the bedrock and that will hold the wall in place, but there is that tremendous pressure. You can’t just excavate in one particular area until you get to the bottom. We have to go down and tie the wall back in stages as it goes. There’s an awful lot of investigation still to be done. I mean the department has started it. They’ve started interviewing everybody who was on the scene prior to the collapse trying to gain insights, trying to record for investigation as well as for historic documentation purposes. I mean the investigation isn’t aimed at Monday-morning quarterbacking. From what I can see, it’s aimed at gaining lessons learned and preventing it from happening again if, God forbid, anything similar ever happened. I was told yesterday by Chief (of Operations Sal) Cassano that there will be a fact-finding commission established. He has six people under Chief Meyers who will be doing an analysis of what happened.

Firehouse: What about the FEMA teams? Will a lot of things be looked at in that part of the operations?
Norman: Yes. Right after each deployment, each of the teams is asked to submit a list of comments or items for discussion about what happened. They’re given to the FEMA staff who then collates them. And in list form they’re discussed first by the Incident Support Team. And then there’s a task force leaders meeting, again, for those people to sit down and discuss them.

Firehouse: Were there any tools that you saw that worked particularly well?
Norman: We had a Holmatro hand-powered combination jaws and shear which we used for cutting rebar, cutting the tubular steel, cutting cable. That seemed to work well because of the places that we had to go with it. It was light enough and portable and it had enough power to do a lot of good. I went through battery-powered sawzalls – I probably saw 50 or 100 of them abandoned up on top of the north tower when we evacuated people off of there and fire ended up coming up and burning them up. We burned up 100 sawzalls, but they were invaluable. One of the things that we talked about with Tech Services is creating mobile tool cache similar to what we have in place down at the Trade Center now. We have a van that is stocked with batteries, batteries on charge, disposables, the blades, extra sawzalls. At a scaffold collapse and again at the plane crash in Rockaway, that van proved its worth where we could quickly get a stock delivered to the scene. That’s something that we’re definitely working on.

Firehouse Magazine Reports---Battalion Chief Michael Telesca

WTC: This Is Their Story

From the April 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Battalion Chief Michael Telesca Battalion 19 - 23 years (detailed to Safety Battalion on 9/11)

Battalion Chief Larry Stack and Brian O’Flaherty were working the Father’s Day investigation. I had the investigation for the firefighter from Staten Island who died of a heart attack, and an apparatus accident. I had to file a lot of interviews.

Larry Stack was on the road. Brian was in there already and somebody yelled into the office look at the tower. I have a perfect view from my office. I looked at the tower. Now I start hearing the radio pick up and I hear Pat Brown saying, 3 Truck, we’re available for that. He takes it in. I hear Orio Palmer talking about the crossband repeater. Joe Callan is asking what alarm’s been transmitted?

With that, Larry Stack walked into the kitchen and he said, everybody get dressed. I called everybody in from Safety, left messages on everybody’s machine to come into quarters. We loaded up the car with all our gear and it was Brian Meyers, who is Larry’s aide, Larry Stack, Brian O’Flaherty and myself in the car. We drove across the Manhattan Bridge. We parked on Church and Vesey by the back of St. Paul’s Church.

I got dressed first real fast. Larry called up his wife and told her he had a real bad job going on and it could be a long day. I sized up the building. I said to Larry, I count a minimum of five completely involved floors in 1 World Trade Center, and I said there are two to three in the south tower. I said that’s what I could see, fully involved. Then I turned to him and said, you got over a 50-minute burn time now on the steel.

At that point, we started heading over. I said to Larry, what’s our game plan? He said we have to get up to the command post. We have to get radios from Field Comm. We have to get some lights, some masks and the only thing we’re concerned about is the structural stability. I said OK. We walked down the escalator stairs into the concourse level. There were three sprinkler heads going off and there was about two inches of water on the floor. And I remember telling him, why are sprinkler heads going off here, there’s no fire damage here whatsoever, there’s no reason for sprinkler heads to be going off.

We saw Special Operations Battalion Chief John Pailillo, Deputy Chief Galvin and 22 Truck. We headed right past them. As soon as 22 Truck came through the doors, we went into the lobby of the Marriott and then walked in maybe 50, 100 feet and all of a sudden, we heard an explosion. We stopped dead in our tracks and Brian goes, ooh, that doesn’t sound good. And there was a second of nothing. Then you felt a heavy vibration like an earthquake, then you start hearing the pancaking collapse.

Brian said it’s coming down, and we all just scattered. I just looked around the room and I thought I have to get next to something and I saw the biggest column. I just threw my arms around it. As soon as I did, I got whacked on the head. It laid me out. I lost my helmet. Then I just went to the fetal position and I’m saying, you’re going to die here today. And then we rode it out. There was no visibility, it was completely black. I remember several times having to make myself throw up just to get this stuff out of my throat so I can inhale.

Visibility was still next to nil about a minute later. I thought for a while I was the only survivor and then I heard somebody yell out an eerie scream, help me, I’m trapped and then I heard Larry call out and Brian Meyers and I yelled out Larry, who’s that? It’s Mike, I’m all right. I’ve got Brian here, and we were all within four or five feet.

In a few minutes, we saw a flashlight. We started looking for a way out. I remember running into Brian O’Flaherty coming out of a room. I said Brian, I already did that. Everything was a dead end, we weren’t finding any way out.

Certain portions of the lobby had a lean-to collapse, but there was enough to walk around. I never found my helmet; that was weird. I ended up with another chief’s helmet. I just found a helmet on the floor, threw it on my head.

I yelled out, does anybody know this building? One guy had blood from head to toe. He was standing next to a guy with an Achilles tendon injury. I said you’re going to have to walk. I said to him, where are the stairs, get me to set a stairs. And I remember thinking this thing can’t hold the weight, it’s going to pancake, it’s going to come down more, let’s get lower so we don’t get crushed on this level if it comes down a second time, and settles down.

He took me over some debris to a set of stairs, and a sweet smell was coming out of it. I got into a mask. What are we going to do, we’ve got to try and find it. I shot down to the bottom of the stairs and found an electrical room that was completely collapsed, pancaked. Two of the rooms I couldn’t even push the doors open in. I couldn’t get in there and everything else was a hallway. It was a dead end so I came back up. I said where are there any other stairs? He said there’s another set deeper. Let’s go, take me to it. The floors were collapsed. I remember holding onto, sliding on a BX cable electrical line. I was hand over hand on a water pipe at one point.

We went over all of this stuff and I got to the stairs. I went down two complete levels, return stairs, twice down so I assumed it was two levels. And when I came out, it was into the garage area. There was debris down there, some parts were completely collapsed on cars. There were other parts that were rubble, but the cars were intact. I went through there maybe 50 feet, then I saw the ramp going up to the street and I noticed the four-foot rolldown that prevents trucks from driving in. I saw the top of that and I saw a little light, daylight at the top of it. Oh, the nicest thing I ever saw in my life was that daylight.

I said stay here, I’m going to go up. I went up to the top and said, come on, let’s go. Brian and those guys were following. I must have taken about 10 or 12 civilians with me and they were just following me. I was moving fast. They followed me the whole way. One of the firemen didn’t have a flashlight and he lost the civilian in front of him. I just found that out from Brian Meyers. He said he didn’t know which way they went, then he saw an exit sign. They found a way out through the wall right out to West Street. This is where I saw them.

So I came up. I climbed on top of the four-foot ramp and I climbed up on the top of the debris pile. I yelled at them. They followed me up and I waited and I gave it 30 seconds. I saw some debris coming down and I just started heading out on West Street. I thought I was on Liberty at that time. I headed about halfway, 100 feet or so, and I turned around and I looked up and I see the tower’s gone. I see the collapsed debris. I’m looking down at the roof of the Suburban to see the rigs. I looked down, there wasn’t a soul there. I saw no firemen, nobody. Everybody’s gone out here too.

With that, I continued out and they started calling me – the people, fireman, fireman, help me. I turned around. I said come on, let’s go. I said you’re ambulatory, come on, you got to help yourself now. As I crossed over, I got to where the command post was. I ran into First Deputy Commissioner Bill Feehan and Chief of Department Pete Ganci standing there. They’re both completely, completely gray ashen, there’s soot to their eyes. And I turn to them and I said to them – I said, Brian, Larry and our aide didn’t follow me out. I said, I just got out, they didn’t follow me out, they have no radios.

Captain Al Fuentes comes over with Chief of Rescue Services Ray Downey. And the two of them, they don’t look like Pete and Bill do. They weren’t talking. They were just looking up at the building. I told Ray the same thing. I go, Ray, Brian O’Flaherty, Larry Stack and the aide didn’t follow me out. Now I look over. I had lost my glasses in the collapse, but I’m looking over and I think I see Larry. I found out from Brian Meyers later on that in the original collapse Larry’s coat was pinned against something and he had to get himself out of his coat and he left his coat, so that was Larry’s profile I see. I tell Ray Downey and Ray goes right there. I’m showing him the thing. I start going with him. He goes, no stay here, Mike. I go right there, you see the ramp right there where those people are, that’s where I came out of. So Ray and Al start heading over there.

I was hobbling. My foot was killing me. I’m heading up West Street. I kept walking up, walking up, and then two firemen grabbed me under my arms and we were all heading up. I remember a news guy coming over trying to say something.

Then we heard the explosion of the second one, which was the same sound I heard when I was down in the lobby. I remember turning around and looking at the north bridge. I remember looking over my shoulder and going oh, and I saw you’re on your own. The guys dropped me, and I don’t blame them, you had to run for your life. The cloud was coming. And I kept heading up West Street. I kept going, kept going. Another guy helped me, a captain from Brooklyn. I kept going up to the first ambulance. A couple of people helped me and I jumped into the first ambulance. I went to Columbia Presbyterian

Firehouse Magazine Reports---Deputy Chief Nick Visconti

WTC: This Is Their Story

From the August 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Deputy Chief Nick Visconti Division 14 - 34 years

Firehouse: Please describe your experiences on Sept. 11.

Visconti: I was in my car. I was listening to the traffic reports because I was going to Queens. I was doing primary work for the UFOA (Uniformed Fire Officers Association) and I heard the first radio report, there’s a lot of smoke around the World Trade Center. They said it’s awful black and it’s getting worse. Now the news media must have started getting calls and they broke back in with a story that a plane just hit the World Trade Center. Because the weather was clear, I thought it must have been some nitwit buzzing the tower, and that he lost control of the aircraft and crashed into the tower.

I was listening to all these things and everybody’s estimating what’s going on and it’s tough to listen to that. They had a guy who said he’s a pilot and he’s an expert, and he saw the plane hit and it was a small two- engine plane. I said somebody ran into the trade center by accident? They’re interviewing another woman who said, I saw the plane and no, it was a very big plane and oh, my God the plane hit the tower. So they said, yeah, we know that. She says no, no, no, another plane hit the tower. They asked if she was sure. She said, I’m telling you, another plane hit the second tower.

I was saying to myself, oh, my God, I can’t believe this. I kept listening to the reports. When I got to the Whitestone Bridge, I could see that both towers were burning, burning fiercely. Cars were slowing down and stopping. When I got onto the other side of the Whitestone Bridge, I actually pulled over where the Whitestone Expressway meets the Grand Central Parkway. A bunch of cars were stopped. I looked at these towers and I thought to myself this is the biggest fire in the fire department’s history, I’ve got to go there.

I got back in the car and drove to the 14th Division, which was not five minutes away. I ran upstairs. Everybody was watching the television. They were asking me, Chief, Chief, do you know what’s going on? Yeah. I said, I’m getting my gear, I want a vehicle and if any of you guys want to come down with me, get your stuff. A couple of the off-duty aides said yeah, we’ll go down with you.

I started getting dressed and the office manager said there’s a phone call, they’re looking for any off-duty deputy chiefs. I picked up the phone. I was told, Nick, we need you, we have a recall in, we need a staging area set up at Shea Stadium (in Queens). I said, I want to go down to the fire, but I was told, we need the staging area, we’ve got guys coming in, we need somebody to get control of them.

We got into the van and went over to Shea Stadium. All we had were pads and pencils and papers. We didn’t have any tables. We didn’t have anything. Thank God the weather was good because we were able to set up right in the parking lot, right outside the police department office. The P.D. has a constant presence at Shea Stadium. They gave us access to a phone – we had been using cell phones.

People started showing up, firefighters with bunker gear, firefighters with tools, firefighters with masks. They must have stopped at their firehouses. They just kept filling the parking lot and pretty soon we were going to lose control. So we set up some pads on a table and we told the guys to write their names on a pad just to record that they were there, and we started taking a list of names.

At that point, we were still getting phone calls. Now, I’ve got these guys here, what do you want me to do with them? They told me that they have buses on the way, and when they arrive, load up the buses and we’ll get instructions.

As they’re coming in, I decide that I can’t just start throwing people into a bus until it’s full. We told the company officers to each take five guys, make sure you know them, write their names down on a piece of paper, and we started designating the teams as 1401, 1402, because it was the 14th Division. And we’re waiting for the buses, waiting for the buses. It seemed like forever.

Five buses showed up and I started assigning people to get on the buses. I really wanted to go down to the fire. I turned to the battalion chiefs, all the guys from the 14th Division. I said listen, you’ve got it. I said I’m going to jump in one of the buses, I’m going to go down with these guys because they’ve got to have somebody with them.

I went to get my gear just as the buses were starting to pull out. Now I’m thinking, oh, my God, I’m going to miss the buses, then lo and behold, a cop pulls up in his own private car, with the red light on the dashboard, and he says, Chief, do you want to go down with me? I jumped in his car. One of my aides jumped in the back seat and he took off, trying to catch up to the buses.

We got separated from the buses because of the traffic they’re pushing off the highways. The highways were clear. We eventually made our way down to the ramp. I was told to get the five buses, we’ll give you instructions. The instructions they gave me were to proceed over the Triboro Bridge, across 125th Street to the West Side Highway. That way is clear, take your buses down. So that’s what we did.

We got to West Street and Canal and there were a lot of vehicles there, all kinds of vehicles all over the place. A police officer drove us as close as he could get. We jumped out and started walking down. As I’m walking down, there were other guys walking down. There were apparatus and police cars and all kinds of vehicles.

We were threading our way through and I got to the bridge, that bridge near Stuyvesant High School, and (Battalion Chief) Joe Nardone was there. Joe Nardone had the staging area. I walked up to Joe and I said, look, I’ve got five busloads of guys. He said, Nick, we’re holding everybody here, but they want the chiefs down at the command post. So I handed him a piece of paper. I said here’s the companies or the teams we set up. I gave him a list of all the companies. I said if you want a team or you want teams, just call out 1401, they know who they are, I told them to keep their guys together, I’m going to go down.

So I walked down. And I asked him Joe, what’s going on, do you know what’s going on. He said, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s good, I know it’s not good. (Assistant Chiefs) Frank Cruthers (citywide tour commander) and Mike Butler were there too. I asked Frank what he wanted to do. I also asked him, Frank, and I don’t remember my exact words, but basically I wanted to know if anybody had gotten killed. And he said, it’s bad. We don’t know where (Chief of Department) Pete (Ganci) is. We don’t know where (Special Operations Command Chief) Ray Downey is. We don’t know where anybody is. He said (Assistant Chief) Frank Fellini’s got the operations post at West and Vesey, I want you to go down there and report in to him.

I walked down to West and Vesey and Frank was there. I vaguely remember something being on the ground, maybe a command post. And a lot of people were around the command post and a lot of firefighters were right on Vesey and West all standing there.

I got to Fellini and I said, Frank, what’s going on? He said, we think Pete is dead, we think he got killed. All I could say is oh, my God and I start to think of names and I might have even mentioned a couple of names, but I don’t remember the answers I got, but I was thinking about (Deputy Chief) Al Turi and the other people that I expected to be there. I knew (Deputy Chief) Pat McNally (of Division 14) had responded down there. I didn’t see Pat right away. I was thinking that if the 3rd Division was there, possibly (Deputy Chief) Tommy Galvin was down there.

He said to me, 6 Truck is trapped. They transmitted a Mayday, find out where they are, you take care of that. At that point, I realized I hadn’t taken a radio. There was a company officer there. I asked him for his radio, and he gave it to me.

I got on the radio and for lack of better terminology I said, Operations to Ladder 6, Operations to Ladder 6 and (Captain) Jay (Jonas) replied. And I don’t think it was with the very first transmission that I recognized his voice and I said what’s your location, we need to know your location. And he was very clear, very calm. He said, Tower 1, Stairwell B.

Now there were other chief officers around there and we didn’t have any teams set up or anything, but I turned around and I said, look, we’ve got to try and find out how to get to them. So I sent a couple of guys over to the pedestrian walkway to take a look. As this is going on, I was talking to him. I said. OK, tell me, explain to me where you are, we need to know where you are. He said, I’m in Tower 1, Stairwell B.

Now, there were radio transmissions going on all the time, people talking to people. And I think about it now and I think about how nuts that was, but I said everybody stand by unless urgent, like there could be nothing else urgent going on. Everybody stand by unless urgent.

I got him. I said, OK, Jay, now explain to me how to get to your location, you’ve got to tell me how to get there. He said, you go into the main entrance of Tower 1. I swear, it was like everybody looked at each other – what is it, what is it, ask him where? I said, hold on, hold on, OK, Jay, all right, after you go through the main entrance, what do you do? He said, you go through the glass doors, very matter-of-factly, you go through the glass doors. What then? Go to Stairway B. Explain to me how to get there. And I didn’t hear him getting short or anything like that, but I could hear a little frustration in his voice. At some point during this conversation, somebody said where is Tower 1? I thought to myself, if anything tells him that this is more serious than he thinks, this is going to tell him, but he didn’t even realize at the time. I said, OK, Jay, we’re going to get to you, hold on, just let me get people moving. I turned around and I picked out five officers. I said to them, pick out five guys, get their names, record them here at the command post and then I’m going to give you jobs, and I did.

I told one group to go down a side entrance on Vesey Street down into the basement, the lower level of Building 6. Then I gave other people instructions to get up on the mezzanine of building 6.

Then I sent some people over to examine the west pedestrian walkway to see if they could get through. Then I’m not sure if anybody went up to the Financial Center, but I’m pretty sure I said, keep going west until you can get around this thing.

I got these people moving. I just couldn’t let Jay think that we forgot about him.

I got on the radio and I said, look, I need to know what your status is. Are you pinned, are you pinned under the debris? No, we’re not pinned, we’re in the stairwell. I said OK. Do you have any smoke there? No, no smoke. Do you have any fire? No fire. I said, all right, is anybody injured, are any of your people injured? He said, no, my people seem to be fine, but there’s a chief below us, we can’t get to him and he’s gravely injured. I could hear in his voice the ‘I-can’t-do-anything-for-him.’ I could hear the frustration.

So now I was in contact with Jay. I found out what kind of shape he was in and I kept getting reports back from people that we’re not there yet, we’re working our way, there’s a collapsed area in 6. I’m standing not too far from Frank Fellini. He says, Nick, I’m really worried about this building. We were all worried because there was a lot of fire in it and we were concerned about the building collapsing. We weren’t sure that it was stable enough that it wasn’t going to collapse.

Firehouse: Which building was that?

Visconti: Building 6. So I had put a battalion chief with each of the groups that went into 6. I kept trying to talk to him, walking over there, walking down a little bit into the ramp they went down, the door they went down into and how are you doing? You know we’re trying, we can’t find it.

I don’t know how long this was going on, but I remember standing there looking over at building 7 and realizing that a big chunk of the lower floors had been taken out on the Vesey Street side. I looked up at the building and I saw smoke in it, but I really didn’t see any fire at that time.

I kept walking back and forth. I walked over to where Rescue 1’s rig was underneath the bridge and over to that area. There were people trying to make access. They were trying to search. What I didn’t mention when I was walking down West Street, all the paper and debris in the street. I said what the hell is this from, but there was a tremendous amount of papers. When you walked you were kicking papers and checks and there was dust, real thick dust all over the place, and everybody was covered. Anybody that was there when the collapses occurred was covered in this dust, so I must have looked relatively clean.

I didn’t realize that there were people on the other side, on the Church Street side, who had people trying to get to Jay, that there were so many other people involved in this. I might have talked to a couple of people to tell them we were trying to get to Ladder 6. I know that during my transmissions to Jay I stopped calling him, Ladder 6, Jay, Jay, look, I’m sorry but I got to repeat this because there was a lot of traffic. I asked him how he was doing. He said, we just made contact with 43 Truck, 43 Truck is here, we’re going to try to get out, we’ll let you know.

Now I gave him a few minutes, then I got back to him. I said, what’s your status? He said we’re getting out, we’re going to walk out of here, they’re helping us. I told Frank Fellini, I think they’re getting him out of there. He says, OK, make sure and then let me know. So I got back to Jay. I said, Jay, I’ve got to ask you again, are you definitely going to get out of there, is everybody going to be able to get out of there? Yeah, we’re going to be able to get out. I said OK.

Frank Fellini said, get those people out of 6. So now with the radio we were walking over to the different locations, starting to get the people out, but we were very concerned about it collapsing. I climbed up to the mezzanine. I wanted to see what it was like. I climbed in the window. I got in as far as the guys who were there. They were outside on a sort of terrace that was around it. I kept telling them come on guys, we’re out of here. No, no, we’ve got to get to these guys. I said they’re taken care of, come on, get your guys out, get your guys out, we’re concerned about this building.

That took a few minutes and then we climbed down the ladder and I got back to Frank Fellini. As I’m standing there, it must have been 20 minutes, a half hour maybe, I’m not sure, Richie Picciotto shows up. I saw him coming like from West Street, from the World Financial Center. I was looking at the buildings. He came from my right and he grabbed me. He was covered with all this stuff and he said, Nick, Nick, you’ve got to help Jay, you’ve got to help Jay, he’s trapped in the stairwell. I said to him, Richie, I know, I just talked to him, he’s OK, they’re getting him out. No, no, no, he needs help, he needs help, you’ve got to help him, you’ve got to help him.

I said, hold on, Richie, and I grabbed onto him. I got on the radio and I said Jay, I’ve got to ask you again, are you out of the stairwell? Yeah, I’m out. Are you out? He said, we’re walking out, we’re helping a woman out. He said, we’re walking out of this place. I said. OK, do you need any other help? No, I think we’re good. I said all right. A couple of minutes later, I said to Frank, 6 is taken care of, what do you want me to do? He said to me, get a group together, go on the other side of this walkway and find Pete (Ganci). Find Pete.

So I turned around and I did it again. I picked out officers. I said get five guys, report to the command post and then come with me. As I was walking around there, waiting for these guys to get squared away, I walked around on the side of an apparatus and I heard either there’s my buddy or there’s my sweetheart or something like that. It was Al Turi and he was sitting on this rig, I think, or he was sitting on something. I remember him sitting down and I was shocked to see him because I thought that he hadn’t made it.

I couldn’t believe it. He was sitting there and we started hugging and crying and stuff, and he asked me, what are you doing? I said, Frank Fellini just told me to go find Pete. And Al said, you’ve got to find him, you’ve got to find him. He grabbed me by the shoulders and I said, OK, we’ll get him, we’re going to go. I had no idea what was going on over there. I had no clue, so we got the guys and I walked back to Fellini. I said, I’ve got these guys, but I’m figuring it had to be by the command post, if there was a command post. I said, was there a command post outside? He said yeah. He said, we’ve got a guy here who might know where it is. He was a fireman and I don’t even know who he was. I said to him, do you know where the command post was? He said yeah. I said, how do we get to it? Then somebody said we can go through the Winter Garden.

We started walking. It was me and, I don’t know, 30 guys, 40 guys maybe. We walked with this fireman up Vesey to the side entrance. We walked through the plaza of the Winter Garden and there were two escalators there. For some reason, we went up the escalators. We looked in the hallways. We didn’t think we could get out to West Street, so we went up to the escalators and we walked around.

Lo and behold, there was a staircase down to where all these windows were broken out. We walked through over the windowsill and we were there. We were right in front of where World Trade Center 1 was, where this big pile of rubble was. The pedestrian walkway was on our left and I couldn’t believe the amount of steel lying there. I was dumbfounded at how much there was and how it was like nothing I had ever seen, piles of it sticking out, little depressions, big, unbelievable.

I said. OK, where was the command post? And he looked around. He goes, I don’t know. He was a little confused and I could understand because I don’t think he had seen what this looked like since he escaped. And he turned around and he said, oh, it was over here, I think it was over here. I didn’t know the story at this point, but there were two garage doors there. And he said, yeah, we were here, then when the first collapse occurred, we ran down there, then everybody came out.

So I asked him, if Tower 2 collapsed and they came out, did you see where Ganci went? He said, no, I don’t know where they went. I was standing there, saying that they didn’t go that way, they had to go down toward 2. Guys were just starting to poke around and look and this went on for a few minutes, and I said, wait a minute, hold on, hold on, we’ve got to do something here, let’s get in a line and we’ll start walking. It was very slow and we actually started from where the command post was south. We had this line of guys that started walking. Almost immediately, we found where we could see 34 Engine and a couple of guys went over there. The first guy down said, hey, I’ve got a couple of guys down here, I’ve got a couple of guys. To be very honest with you, when he first said that, I was praying that they were alive. I said are they alive, are they alive? And everybody went running over and everybody collapsed on that area, and he said, no, no, no, no, they’re not. A couple of minutes passed by, then I said, look, can we get them out? They answered, it’s going to take time. I said, OK, see what you can do.

I turned to everybody else. I said we’re looking for live people, guys, we’re looking for live people, we can’t stop here. We’ll get a couple of guys for this, but spread out, we’re looking for live people. So guys started looking around. We started moving and to me it felt like maybe 20 minutes or so, somebody said, I’ve got somebody, he’s got shoes on. So we went. Everybody again collapsed on the area. We saw these shoes and work-duty pants, I think. Well, they were blue pants. And somebody said, I think it’s Chief Ganci. I thought to myself, oh, no. They were picking the stuff off of him and sure enough, it was Chief of Department Ganci.

Did you ever see that picture? It’s all of us, Al Turi, me, Richie Blatus, guys from 124 with our helmets off and you can’t see him, but Pete is there on the Stokes. We had a moment of silence before we took him out. I said everybody take off your helmet and had a moment of silence. We didn’t say a prayer or anything like that. Everybody was blessing themselves though and Al walked him out.

So now I told the guys, come on guys, come on, we’re going to find people here, we’ve got people trapped, we’re got to find live people, get moving, spread out. And bang, 15 feet away, 25 feet away tops, we found (First Deputy) Commissioner (William) Feehan. I got on the radio. I said, we found Commissioner Feehan. And we did the same thing, had a moment of silence, put him in the Stokes and we took him out.

At that point, again we told the guys to spread out. We started getting hits all over the place, I think there’s somebody here, I think there’s somebody there. And we realized that we’re not getting these people out. The steel was just incredible and the sheet metal was all over the place. And it wasn’t just flat. We had to walk around this mound of stuff to get to where some of these places were. The thing started to really spread out. More guys were coming in and at some point they were asking me, do you need more people, do you need more people? Yeah, keep sending people. And we just had groups of people out there searching and guys were looking for voids.

I saw pictures later on that gave me the impression that all the steel was just pointed that way. As a matter of fact, the last I saw the picture I said, yeah, every time I walk to where Tower 1 was or Tower 2, there’s a piece of steel a couple of pieces of steel like that made like a platform. Guys were standing on that, it’s very visible. You had to walk from beam to beam to beam as opposed to if you were going from the Winter Garden toward Tower 2, you could walk on one or two or three beams.

Everybody was searching those voids and we realized that we had to do something. We had to mark the locations. Some guys had rags, I guess, with paint. It was early and it took a while to get that stuff, but we started painting these orange arrows on the beams, pointing down where we found somebody and couldn’t get to them. We were going along and guys were coming in from all over the place. I remember a lot of people down on the right- hand side toward Liberty Street, a lot of people were coming in from there. This went on for I don’t know how long.

Now, World Trade Center 7 was burning and I was thinking to myself, how come they’re not trying to put this fire out? I didn’t realize how much they had because my view was obstructed. All I could see was the upper floor. At some point, Frank Fellini said, now we’ve got hundreds of guys out there, hundreds and hundreds, and that’s on the West Street side alone. He said to me, Nick, you’ve got to get those people out of there. I thought to myself, out of where? Frank, what do you want, Chief? He answered, 7 World Trade Center, imminent collapse, we’ve got to get those people out of there.

I was looking at the mass of people out there. There was no unit identification. I felt that I was losing control over this thing to begin with and now he was telling me to get them out of there. I was thinking, how the hell am I going to do this? There were a couple of chiefs out there who I knew and I called them individually. I said to them, listen, start backing those people out, we need them back up to the command post. While this was going on, I saw individual company officers. I was whistling, Captain, bring your guys this way.

I was getting some resistance. The common thing was, hey, we’ve still got people here, we don’t want to leave. I explained to them that we were worried about 7, that it was going to come down and we didn’t want to get anybody trapped in the collapse. One comment was, oh, that building is never coming down, that didn’t get hit by a plane, why isn’t somebody in there putting the fire out? A lot of comments, a bit of resistance, understandable resistance.

Now, it got to the point where I had some people moving, but there was still a tremendous number of people who were not moving. Here’s what I decided to do – there was a company there and I grabbed the officer. I said, I need you and your guys. There was a guy, Danny Messina from the 14th Division, with me the whole day and I sent him out as a runner. I said OK, go out, see that group over there, grab them, get somebody’s whose in charge, get one of the bosses, tell them we’re backing out of here. I sent him to these different places and I don’t know how long it took, 40 minutes, half an hour, an hour, I don’t know, but we started to get them out.

As I was getting them out, they were asking, where do you want us to go? Then somebody tipped me off, tell them to go to the North Cove Marina, that’s where the water was, tell them that go out that way. I said there’s a North Cove Marina and I think they had already started setting up water and triage and stuff, so we sent them out that way and it took a while. There were individual stragglers and everybody was walking this way and then some guy would walk in, we’d have to get to him.

I got a chief. I said, stand here, if you see anybody out there, get them back. I had to get the guys away from the north pedestrian walkway. There were a lot of people out there.

I walked out and I got to Vesey and West, where I reported to Frank. He said, we’re moving the command post over this way, that building’s coming down. At this point, the fire was going virtually on every floor, heavy fire and smoke that really wasn’t bothering us when we were searching because it was being pushed southeast and we were a little bit west of that. I remember standing just where West and Vesey start to rise toward the entrance we were using in the World Financial Center. There were a couple of guys standing with me and a couple of guys right at the intersection, and we were trying to back them up – and here goes 7. It started to come down and now people were starting to run.

I said, that building is not coming this way, you could see where it was going, but I was concerned about debris. I got over near a vehicle, I don’t know what kind of vehicle. I sheltered in there a little bit and this dust cloud of debris came up and next thing you know, silence. Guys were all right. Nobody was running, hurt or anything like that. I heard later on that somebody got trapped in the debris of 7, but I don’t know.

Firehouse: I was going to ask you about that.

Visconti: I heard this from more than a couple of people that the guy got trapped. Now I don’t know that it was on the Vesey street side or if it was on the Church Street side, but I heard that repeatedly. I walk back to Frank Fellini. I said, Frank, I said this is an excellent opportunity for us to get this organized, to regroup. He said OK, tell those people on the North Cove Marina that we’re relieving them, we want them to take a blow. I’m pretty sure he assigned somebody back there or he told me to send somebody back there, so I sent somebody back there. I told them just tell them to relax, to take a blow.

Firehouse: Five o’clock is when Tower 7 came down.

Visconti: Five or 5:30. I was saying it’s good to know who’s here, but there’s no imminent collapse, there’s nothing hanging over us. It’s more stable. I said OK, pick out six or seven guys and walk over this way, we’ll pick up some, we’ll get over there.

And I did the same thing when we got back there, got them lined up. We started searching there and I think I used 105 or another apparatus that I saw. I started in that place, spread out. I gave up hopes of forming a straight line because of the terrain. I said, just start walking and let’s start searching and see if we can find anybody. And again, we found people in apparatus, people under apparatus. They were all dead. And that’s how the rest of the day went until it started getting dark and then we had to get lights.

During the middle of the day, it was evident that we needed water, so we kept sending people out to get some water. Guys were coming back with cases of water. I don’t even know where they got the water, but cases and cases of water, bottled water, and they were handing them out. As a matter of fact, I remember that Danny Messina was standing next to me with a couple of bottles of water in one pocket, a bottle of water in his hand and he was handing me one and following me all over the place.

I realized that we needed a lot of stuff. We were finding people. We were in the process of getting them out, so I would tell guys. This went on for a couple of days. There would be a company there, I would say, look, we need Stokes baskets, we need water, we need this, go and get something and after you get it here, you leave it here.

We started a storage area for equipment right at the bottom of the stairs before you walked through those windows. We had Stokes there. As a matter of fact, they put them at the top of the stairs, Stokes, water, this, that and the other thing. During the day, I went in and out a couple of times and I came back one time and the company officer said we found a couple of guys. I said, do you know who they are? They weren’t sure, but said there were two guys there and one of them was a captain. I said where they were. They said, we didn’t have manpower to carry them out so when you walked into that window, there was a corridor to the left, we went through this corridor and there was a room to the right. I don’t know if it was a table or desk, but they had the two Stokes stretchers up there.

When we took Commissioner Feehan out, I walked out with him and I brought his helmet to the command post because his helmet was really in good shape. I went back. I walked out. I had walked in and out to the command post several times. I got back there and Frank was saying why don’t you guys take a blow, you guys take a rest. Pat McNally’s eyes were all swollen. I think I ran into Tommy Galvin, but I had heard he was alive and then Patty said that he wanted to go back to quarters.

So I said all right. I said yeah, I’m going to take a blow. I was soaking wet. At some point, I had walked underneath the AT&T Building, there was some kind of water main break, trying to check something out. I had gotten wet and then just climbing around and the legs were killing me, so we decided to go back. We went back. We showered up, went to bed. Nine o’clock in the morning, three hours, four hours later, we took the car and went back down.

As the day went on, most of the activity was at the top of Tower 1. They started finding people, some removable, some not removable. And we had to do something about supplies and everything, because I was constantly sending people back and I finally came to the realization that when I kept asking for people, I said send me in two companies and I said tell them not to come in empty-handed. I told them, get a Stokes, fill it up with water and body bags. We had more body bags than we needed, but we thought we were going to find thousands of people there and we actually didn’t. I asked the crews to bring water, batteries, flashlight, radios. Radio batteries were another big item. Everybody’s radio wasn’t charging. Just different things. Hey, Chief, what about this, what about that? I would tell them to bring this stuff. Guys would come right out to the command post and tell me they had a Stokes full of stuff, is that OK? I’d tell them to stack it up over there, put it up with the other stuff. The Stokes were packed here, the body bags were in there, they were stuffed there.

More and more people kept coming in, people from Jersey City, people from all over the place, and I just put them on the bucket brigades. I said, look, get over here, get on the other bucket brigade, as guys get relieved, as guys leave, you’ll be moving up. I said, this is what we need done. That’s what we kept doing.

After the first night, at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon on the second day, I realized that we were going to need the lights and generators. I was standing there and somebody knocked one over and I said oh, man, we’re going to need these lights and generators. So I got a couple of truck companies that came in and I said, look, there are lights all over the place with generators. They’re lying all over the place, the generators lying on their sides. I had a few guys with me, like Danny Messina and a couple of other guys. I was talking to the officer, I said, look, Pat, you’ve got to check out the lights and start up the generators to make sure they’re working. And somebody said yeah, make sure you check the oil on some of them because in some of them there was an oil reservoir, so gas and oil had to be mixed. I sent a couple of companies out there to work on the lights. Some of them were broken, they wouldn’t work, and some of the generators wouldn’t start, so we had to start with that process all over again. We had to get the generators and get the lights and get them working. And that’s basically how it was going that day.

Firehouse: Did they finally get your paint?

Visconti: Oh, yeah, we got paint. Somebody had said that they were asking for all this stuff, like socks and underwear. They said if we had asked for paint, we probably would have gotten a hundred thousand gallons. But that was the first day, when we were trying to mark everything. I did ask for paint. Somebody showed up, they had a case. I was expecting a can. They showed up with a case. So we’re doing the arrows and even some guys wrote victim and now we had paint there.

Firehouse: Did you get a chance to walk around? I know people were sectored geographically because you couldn’t go very far. Was there a point in time when you had a chance to get around and see the whole picture?

Visconti: I tried to go south. I walked south right through the debris field and I got to Liberty Street. I saw a lot of people coming in that way.

Boats were coming in and out, which I didn’t realize, and they had a triage area set up. As a matter of fact, that’s where the temporary morgue was. They had a temporary morgue down there and they had one up on West and Vesey, right outside the entrance to the World Financial Center. (Battalion Chief) Billy Blaich was down there and I heard other people on the radio. They still had the problem with the fire in the building on the corner. They put that out, then there was another fire. And I looked around, thinking that if I try to get around this whole place, I’ll never get back.

I think it was Thursday or Friday, when we had a full-fledged commitment to Tower 1, that at one point I had gotten nervous about it. I asked for a structural engineer to come in. The guy had surveyed it and said, look, the sides are not that stable, but if you’re on top, it should be stable, I think those guys are good up there, but he wasn’t going up there to find out. Anyway, it was reassuring to me because guys were working under my control.

Different people had been up there. We tied guys onto guys. I didn’t even know how many people we had up there. There was nobody giving head counts, I’ve got 12 guys with me, anything like that. So (Battalion Chief) Joe Nardone, I remember this distinctly, he called me on the radio. It was getting dark or it was already dark, I’m not sure. He said, look, I need an assistant chief up here to make a determination of the stability. I said, Joe, am I good enough? Yeah. So I went up there. It took me 25 minutes to get up there, I had to get all the way to the edge where the trench was. I had to go down on ladders and hold on to these ropes. There were people all along there, not that they were passing me hand to hand, but there were people there to help – not only me, anybody who was going up there or coming down and who needed help. You got to these ladders and you climbed up a ladder. Then there’s a ladder horizontal, then there’s a ladder up at an angle.

I got to the top. I was a little bit winded and I looked at Joe Nardone and I said to him, there had better be an escalator on the other side. He said, no, there’s no escalator, so he took me around to this location where this huge beam was. He said, we think it moves a little bit and we sent people in there to check these voids and I’m concerned about it. I asked how deep we have been and he told me. I said how many times? He said, maybe a couple of times. I said, all right, Joe, we’re not moving that piece of steel. I said, we don’t want somebody in there and then have them get sealed in, so we’ll just stay away from there.

I asked where everybody was working, so he took me around the perimeter of Tower 1. We looked around and down into this hollow and they had lights up there, and there must have been half a dozen guys, with guys backed up behind them in a straight line, and they were working on getting people out of there.

They had just found what they thought were five or six people. They were all firefighters. They were on the stairs, but there were big pieces of concrete. We had to break the concrete in some cases and they were using rebar cutters. I was just so impressed with the care and dignity that they used.

I’m right up there and there’s a big tall guy from Rescue 4. I just saw him the other day, one of the senior guys. He was like the straw boss up there. He was really running a few things. I was concerned about how many other people were up there. As I got up there, I walked around and I took a look. As they removed guys, an FDNY chaplain would say a prayer. So now we’re there and they’re working and they got a guy. Hey, we got somebody. A guy was on his back. And I remember his face was unidentifiable. They were trying to get his coat open and somebody said, roll him over, look at his back. I don’t know why they thought it was a chief, maybe it was the shirt. Roll him over. So they worked on getting him out. They worked on getting another guy out.

All of a sudden, the short time I was up there turned out to be about seven hours or more that I was up at the top. I even forget who I left in charge down at the bottom, but I know I left somebody in charge and I stood up there with them.

Now, I was getting concerned about relief. These guys were up there all day. If I’m up there six or seven hours, they were all up there. I tried to relieve some guys, but they were hesitant. I grabbed Richie on the side. I said, come with me.We got to a place where we could talk. I said, look, Richie, I really feel that these guys need relief. We have 50 guys stacked up. I want some of these people out of here. I didn’t want to take anybody out of here who has somebody here, but the rest of the guys have got to go, so I’m going to need your help with this.

I saw there was a guy who wasn’t saying anything. I said, hey, bud, come on, take a blow. No, he said, I’m staying, I’ve got guys up here. I said, we’ve all got guys here, go take a blow. No, no, he said, I’m staying, I’m staying. I said, look, I’m telling you I want you relieved, do you understand? I said, do you understand I want you to take the blow now? I said, everybody else is taking a blow, we’re going to get new people in here, I want you to take a blow. I think that was the harshest thing I had to say.

As I said earlier, there was an unbelievable amount of care and respect. They got these guys out, got a Stokes, the chaplain said something and down they went.

At some point, at 2 or 3 o’clock on Saturday morning, Joe Nardone was there. I said, Joe, I’ve got to take a blow, I’ve got to go. I said, are you going to stay up here? I’ll send some chiefs. He said, yeah, I can use a blow. I said OK, I’ll send somebody up here.

When I got back to the bottom, I reported to the command post and said, I’ve got to take a blow. I think it was about 3 o’clock or thereabouts and Danny Messina was with me, as usual. I had a couple of guys who wanted to go back to the 14th, so we went back. I took a shower and I was going to go home, but I realized there was no way I could drive. I was just shot. So I lied down and I slept for a couple of hours, then I went home for the first time.

To tell you the truth, I felt a little out of place because I was actually doing stuff, but that first week I just didn’t feel like I had an option of going or staying, so I had stayed.

I got home sometime in the afternoon and then it was my intention to go back in the morning after spending some time at home. My son from Albany came home and my daughter who lives in the city was home, and I realized, I think for the first time, how awful this was for them.

I remember something that happened on the first night, Tuesday night. It was one of the times I walked out. I tried to find out if there was land line someplace because I had lost my cell phone. Rescue found it about two weeks later.

I walked up to the school. A bunch of cops were there. There was a stage and there was a phone at each end, and on one phone you could call out. I called home, I think it was about 9 o’clock at night. I realized a little bit then how awful this was when I called up and I got my son Christopher on the phone and he said, I never thought I’d be this happy to hear your voice. We got a little laugh out of that. We get along fine, it was just that I never had felt that from him.

Firehouse Magazine Reports---Captain Chris Boyle

WTC: This Is Their Story

From the August 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Captain Chris Boyle Engine 94 - 18 years

Firehouse: Please describe what was happening when you came in on the recall.

Boyle: I got here probably about a quarter after 10. Everybody was starting to roll in. I was at home and I didn’t see the first one hit. I called Division 6. I asked if there was a recall. And they said no, stay by the phone. This is before the second one hit. The second one hit, and I just went in and got here like I said probably about a quarter after 10. Guys were starting to collect, I called the Division. I was able to get through once and they said everybody stay where they were, don’t come to the Division, don’t go downtown, just stay where you are right now.

Just before the first tower came down, I had one of the probies calling, making sure that we were getting everybody on the recall in case they didn’t see a TV.

Right after the first tower came down, Division 6 said come to the Division, we’re going to muster up there.

Firehouse: When you got to the firehouse, did you know that there was a recall? Did you hear on the radio?

Boyle: I was listening to the radio on the way down and they said there was a recall.

Firehouse: So you got in a couple of cars and went to Division 6?

Boyle: There were about 10 of us. When we got there, (Deputy) Chief (Tom) Fox was there and he said I need one officer and five firemen. Both Ladder 48 and I were one guy short.

So guys were starting to roll into the Division there and everybody was looking to fill out their roster of five guys. There was only one bus at the time and everybody wanted to be on it, so we were scrambling around trying to get a guy. Ended up I picked up Chris Delisio I think from 47 Truck. He ended up my fifth man. And right there who was collected the riding lists was a captain who was just promoted, Jimmy Rogers.

We grabbed some radios and anything else that was lying around. We didn’t think of goggles and stuff like that before we left, but we had oxygen bottles, blue gloves. There really wasn’t much. Chief Fox got on the bus with Sal Gigante, he’s an aide with the 6th Division – we started getting on the bus just after the second tower came down. We were there at the 6th Division when the second tower came down. It was just numbing. Everybody was just real quiet.

Firehouse: Was somebody listening to Manhattan or how did you know about it? How did you know the second tower came down?

Boyle: We saw it on TV. You had a sense of what was going on. They just had a bus, we’re going down. That’s all it was.

Firehouse: So was the bus filled up by then?

Boyle: Probably after about five or 10 minutes it was full. Chief Fox had said there’s going to be another bus, don’t worry, so guys weren’t panicky to get on it, but it ended up that was the only bus that left that day. It was one of those double buses, the articulated ones.

Firehouse: Did you have an escort?

Boyle: No, not initially. I think we headed for what was it the Third Avenue Bridge. I think it was the Third Avenue or Second Avenue Bridge and it was a total traffic jam because the bridge was closed. We were totally blocked. It ended up that a lot of the cars were firemen trying to get downtown, but Chief Fox and Gigante and another officer at the front of the bus moved a bunch of cars and we were on our way. As we got farther down south, everybody was heading north and we were in the one lane going down. We probably got down there about 11 o’clock because we left after the second tower came down.

We stopped at the Civic Center area there and we disembarked. And that’s where the dust was heavy. We got off the bus and there were some people handing out paper masks. We went up Park Row toward City Hall and we were carrying our bunker gear because we figured that we would get as close as we could before putting the boots on and everything, because it was kind of tough to walk around in. As we got to Park Row, we suited up, and we started heading toward what looked like a group of firemen gathering.

After that, we headed to Vesey and Broadway. That’s where (Deputy) Chief (Tom) Haring was. He was starting to put together a command post. I think he was the 6th Division that day. He had an officer there collecting the riding lists and I noticed a face, (Battalion Chief) Butch Brandes. I said what are we doing. He said just wait and see. So all the officers were making a line to get assignments and the other officer was collecting the BF-4s and Haring, I guess he got some type of order from somebody and all of a sudden, I see him grab a guy from the 21 Battalion and this was the first assignment he was giving out, so I rushed right into the small circle of guys and I ended up getting in on the assignment. And what it was was four engines, three trucks to World Trade Center 7.

Firehouse: Did that chief give an assignment to go to building 7?

Boyle: He gave out an assignment. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but he told the chief that we were heading down to the site.

Firehouse: How many companies?

Boyle: There were four engines and at least three trucks. So we’re heading east on Vesey, we couldn’t see much past Broadway. We couldn’t see Church Street. We couldn’t see what was down there. It was really smoky and dusty.

Before we took off, he said, look, if you see any apparatus, strip the apparatus for hose, nozzles, masks, anything you can get. As we headed east, we reached Church and then we were midway from there and then all of a sudden, we could see 5 come into view. It was fully involved. There was apparatus burning all over the place. Guys were scrambling around there. There were a lot of firemen, and there was a lot of commotion, but you couldn’t see much that was going on. I didn’t see any lines in operation yet. But we found a battalion rig there. We got a couple of harnesses out of there. We had some bottles from another rig, so we put together a couple of masks.

We went one block north over to Greenwich and then headed south. There was an engine company there, right at the corner. It was right underneath building 7 and it was still burning at the time. They had a hose in operation, but you could tell there was no pressure. It was barely making it across the street. Building 6 was fully involved and it was hitting the sidewalk across the street. I told the guys to wait up.

A little north of Vesey I said, we’ll go down, let’s see what’s going on. A couple of the other officers and I were going to see what was going on. We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what’s going on. So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good.

But they had a hoseline operating. Like I said, it was hitting the sidewalk across the street, but eventually they pulled back too. Then we received an order from Fellini, we’re going to make a move on 7. That was the first time really my stomach tightened up because the building didn’t look good. I was figuring probably the standpipe systems were shot. There was no hydrant pressure. I wasn’t really keen on the idea. Then this other officer I’m standing next to said, that building doesn’t look straight. So I’m standing there. I’m looking at the building. It didn’t look right, but, well, we’ll go in, we’ll see.

So we gathered up rollups and most of us had masks at that time. We headed toward 7. And just around we were about a hundred yards away and Butch Brandies came running up. He said forget it, nobody’s going into 7, there’s creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped. And probably about 10 minutes after that, Visconti, he was on West Street, and I guess he had another report of further damage either in some basements and things like that, so Visconti said nobody goes into 7, so that was the final thing and that was abandoned.

Firehouse: When you looked at the south side, how close were you to the base of that side?

Boyle: I was standing right next to the building, probably right next to it.

Firehouse: When you had fire on the 20 floors, was it in one window or many?

Boyle: There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a huge hole. I would say it was probably about a third of it, right in the middle of it. And so after Visconti came down and said nobody goes in 7, we said all right, we’ll head back to the command post. We lost touch with him. I never saw him again that day.

We ended up getting back to the command post at Broadway and Vesey. By that time, there were probably 50 officers standing in a row. And I was like, I’m not going to stand on another line like that. So we came down with Fox. I knew Fox was somewhere. So we found out that Fox was over at Cortlandt and Church. They were putting a tower ladder into operation, so we made our way over to there. We ended up helping.

They had no pressure at all off of any of the hydrants from Broadway. He was asking if there was any way that we could do anything at Broadway or West. From Broadway to West westward toward Church Street there was no pressure at all. We spotted one of the squads up on Cortlandt over by Broadway and he was hooked up to a hydrant, and it was running. There was nobody there. I don’t know which squad it was, but you know they were in there. We were just sitting there, so we stretched the line off of him. We relayed it to 274, who relayed it to another engine down the street and eventually we got more pressure. I think it was 22 Truck on Church and Cortlandt and they were operating to number 5.

We did that for a little while. It took a while to get the hose there because there was a White Plains company helping us and they had some different fittings. So we got water to 22, but then that’s when they said all right, number 7 is coming down, shut everything down. I don’t know what time that was. It was all just a blur.

Firehouse: Did they shut the tower lines and remove them from there?

Boyle: No, just left them. Everything was left where it was. Just shut everything down, moved everybody back.

Firehouse: Could you see building 7 again from there?

Boyle: Seven, no. You got a half block away, you couldn’t see it, couldn’t see a damn thing. All we heard was they were worried about it coming down, everybody back away. We ran into the people running around for water for the eyes because everybody’s eyes were burned and I don’t know who they were. I think it was the doctor and some other people. They were just running around, washing people’s eyes out.

We were there about an hour or so until number 7 came down and everything was black again.

Firehouse: So number 7 comes down. Everything went black?

Boyle: It was like it was night again. First, we went to Liberty and Church and that was the big pile from the south tower that came down. There was a pile there, had to be 15, 20 stories high with guys roaming around on the pile.

That was the first time I really saw one of the towers fully down. I had no idea. It was an amazing site, stunning, it was surreal. Guys were climbing around in the pile, but I figured we had to try to hook up with Chief Fox again, so we headed north on Church and we ran into Fox again on Church and they were putting the tower ladders back into operation.

Then he had us do a search of the Millennium Hotel. There were some glass shards that were missing. We headed up into the hotel and after we were on the second floor, removing some shards, I was missing one of my guys, I couldn’t find him.

We started searching around the hotel. We figured maybe he fell down, collapsed, something like that. It ended up he never made it into the hotel. He had walked in and all of a sudden he just made a turn, went to the corner, sat on the corner and never came in.

I didn’t even realize it until we got up onto the restaurant floor and it ended up we came back out. They found him out there. An ambulance was working on him. I was going to give a Mayday, but nobody was giving Maydays for missing guys. I told Chief Fox. I said he’s gone. He said, well, look around. So then we found him on the corner. We were searching around the hotel figuring we lost the guy, so we just hung out with Fox there at Cortlandt and Church for a while just relieving the guys.

That was pretty much the day right there. It was bizarre. You would figure that it would be Beirut, but it was Manhattan. You couldn’t believe what was happening. You see it on TV everywhere else, but not here. This was the first time I ever thought anything was possible.

We heard the fighter jets overhead. You couldn’t see them. My brother was in Vietnam. I remember walking down the street with him one day and he heard a backfire. He fell to the floor, this was soon after he came back from Vietnam. That was bizarre. Jet fighters shot overhead and you could see everybody, you saw the head duck. The first time I ever felt like that.

Firehouse: How many guys had stretched out the line?

Boyle: There were probably about 30 guys involved.

Firehouse: It was a long stretch?

Boyle: The closest engine, there was an engine, probably I would say, about a hundred feet east of Church, so we had to go across Church, across the courtyard, up those little steps in between, past 5 and 6 and then they went probably four or five flights into the pit after that. It was tremendous. They ended up using the line and they were in there for a while, but I don’t think they found anybody at that time and we ended up leaving.

As soon as the line was in place, they wanted everybody out, except that they had a rescue, a squad and I don’t know who had the nozzle at that time. I think it was the squad. One of the squads had extra guys and they were in there and they had wanted everybody else out, which was just fine.

Firehouse: Did it take a long time to get out of there?

Boyle: It was probably about 10 minutes getting in, 10 minutes getting out.

Firehouse: Were there a lot of voids and drops?

Boyle: In the side of pit, it opened up and you could drop 30 feet, 40 feet because that whole courtyard was built on I don’t know how many levels. It was all collapsed. You could see the dome in the middle. It was like an old movie, like an old painting you see from the Middle Ages . It was weird.

Nobody had a map, nobody knew the numbers initially of the buildings and so Fox sent us in. A couple of cops and some other firemen and I took the kiosk. It was the only thing with the numbers. It was right outside number 5. We took the poster off the kiosk because nobody had numbers in the buildings.

Firehouse Magazine Reports---Firefighter Declan Grant

WTC: This Is Their Story

From the August 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Firefighter Declan Grant Ladder 48 - 6 years

Firehouse: Did you volunteer to go down or were you detailed?
Grant: I volunteered.

Firehouse: There was 14 crews of six working every tour?
Grant: Yes, five firemen and one officer.

Firehouse: Did you always work with the same group?
Grant: Yes.

Firehouse: Could you describe the average day when you went in and where the different teams were situated? Were you always in the same spot or did you move around?
Grant: No, you moved around. Sometimes, you were at the base of what they call the tulley road. The first day we got there we got a guy. All we got was a piece of bunker gear with a bone in it, right above the knee, and it was cut and at the ankle. And like I said, it was all yellow and it was charred at the top right above the knee where it had been cut off, I guess, and it was all charred there. And the rest of it was yellow. Basically, it was just like a bone inside of it. I guess the other stuff had decomposed.

Firehouse: When the grappler was moving the material, was it easy to see around because it had bunker gear?
Grant: We smelled it first and then we went in with hand tools and dug it out. The grappler would take a couple of scoops. Someone watched what he was pulling up and what he was dumping out in case you’d see something. A lot of times, you’d see a flash of the yellow striping on the gear.

Most of the time, the grappler saw it before you did. Then he’d point and you would look through what he had. He may have seen something. Or once you got an odor, you’d stop him and you’d start hand digging.

Firehouse: Were you wearing the respirators and dust masks or what were you wearing?
Grant: We were given respirators and hearing protection and eye protection.

Firehouse: The ramp was installed two days before you started?
Grant: This ramp was put in service the second day we were there, our first two days there. They hadn’t tested the ramp yet, so they weren’t using it. They were still using that road to bring the trucks up and down. But they could see where they were, but they couldn’t get to them because they didn’t want them digging around at that. There was too much of a collapse hazard.

Firehouse: Did you find anything that was recognizable?
Grant: Parts of chairs, like the whole back of a chair or the whole seat of a chair or the wheels and the metal on the bottom. All the concrete dust was compacted and it was like clay, digging in it. So I’m digging around in it and I pull out an eyeglass case. The glasses were fine. It was like they were brand new, not a speck of dust or a crack or anything on them. And in the same area I got a ladies purse and I opened it and a calculator was on inside. Nothing in the bag was messed up. The outside of bag was dirty, but that’s about it. It was fine.

Firehouse: Did you find any firefighter tools or radios or anything?
Grant: I found a radio case, but it had no markings on it.

Firehouse: And you said one day you found a battalion car?
Grant: Yeah, we found Battalion 1’s car. That was the first week. It was all mangled up and we uncovered a little bit of it. The tires were all mangled up and the axles and we found the license plate and the license plate frame, not a scratch on them, about 20 feet away from the car.

Firehouse: Did they wind up uncovering most of the car?
Grant: It was pulled out by the time I got back there. They took it all out.

Firehouse: It said Battalion 1 on it?
Grant: Yes. We also found tool boxes. I guess they belonged to guys who worked in the building, tool boxes that were completely crushed flat. Others were half crushed. You opened it up and you found a lot of that kind of stuff. One was an electrician’s tool box. All the wire nuts were in it.

Firehouse: The one toolbox that was flattened all the way down, could you open it up to look inside?
Grant: No, we just threw it to the side. We found boxes of Metro cards and I found a guy’s credit card. It had expired on 9/11/01, that was the expiration date on the credit card. Literally and figuratively. I thought that was creepy.

Firehouse: What else?
Grant: We got a civilian. We just got an odor, so we were digging and we got a pant leg first and then you start going gingerly then around. We got his belt and from just above his waist and his full left leg with a construction boot on the bottom and maybe down to just below the knee of his right leg and his wallet was still in his back pocket. We got a name off his AAA card.

Firehouse: No other equipment or anything, Scotts or tools or axles?
Grant: A mask assembly. They got a serial number off of it.

Firehouse: When they were finding people, would you be in the procession and carry a guy out?
Grant: Yes, every time they carried someone out, everything stopped. Every machine stopped on the site.

What happened first was this: If you were digging a person out, the chaplain would come there to whatever spot you found them. They would do a little ceremony there, just you guys, and then they would line everybody up. A lot of times they waited for a company to show up or a family member.

A lot of times, if they knew there was other people there, if they knew there was another body, they would bring one to a waiting area at the bottom of the ramp and they would wait until the second recovery or the third recovery was made and then they would take them all out together up the ramp. So we would all line up on the ramp and they would call over the handie-talkie, the chaplain would do another little service at the bottom of the ramp and then uncover and they do the service over the handie-talkie and recover and hand salute. Then they would carry them up to the top of the ramp and put them in an ambulance that was waiting and then you’d finish your salute and then we were dismissed.

Firehouse: On the month that you were there, there were a lot of recoveries, so were there some days you had many recoveries?
Grant: I think we got 11 recoveries on one night tour.

Firehouse: All firefighters?
Grant: No, seven firefighters and, I think, one was a cop and a few civilians. One of the days I was working, they recovered one EMS guy. But everyone would come, like the cops. If they knew we were doing a recovery, they would come and stand on the ramp with us.

Firehouse: Anything else unbelievable or that stands out that you’ll always remember?
Grant: Yeah. When they took the trains out, not one pane of glass was broken on the train car. It was all charred outside. It looked like they could put it right in service the way it came out. I think there were X amount of trains. A couple of them were flattened down like pancakes. The rest of them were OK.

Firehouse: Did you find any helmets?
Grant: Yes, we found a helmet that was flattened. The whole helmet was flattened. Maybe it was an inch and a half to two inches thick, all the way from front to back, but you could make out the numbers and the company off of the frontpiece. Instead of being put it on your head this way, the thing was pushed down all the way down. I don’t know if you heard about the civilian they recovered. She was standing up. Her hand was coming up out of the dirt.

Firehouse: Were you telling me about that there was a guy in a box beam?
Grant: The guy we got was inside a box beam when we found him.

Firehouse: How tall would that section have been?
Grant: It was maybe a 30-, 25-foot section of beam and he was inside. Here’s the 25-foot, so he just fell and he was down over here. It was when it was lying flat that we saw it. I think they cut it and they moved it out of the way and we were digging through stuff. There was dirt compacted in there too. So whatever way he slid into it, he was inside there. We got wine bottles, full wine bottles, nothing wrong with them.

Firehouse: Is there anything else you could think of?
Grant: Just a lot of pictures, a lot of ID cards. They told us not to keep it. They said it doesn’t mean they were in the building just because the ID was there.

Firehouse: Did you feel that it was a rewarding experience? Can you describe what you felt when they made the most recoveries?
Grant: Good is not the right word. It was rewarding. At least I wasn’t there in vain. If I didn’t find anything, I would have felt like I was wasting my time. It was trying being there and just all the work we were doing. A lot of times, you got this little four-pronged rake and you were raking through stuff that was only a couple of inches thick and it just seemed absurd at times and you’d get really frustrated. And then you’d find a bone, maybe, that was only two inches long – and you knew you had to look at it like if that might be the only thing that someone has of someone. That could be the only thing that someone gets. And if someone’s religious, I thought it was real important because they can’t have a funeral without a body part, the church won’t give you a funeral without a body part. I guess most of guys all felt the same way?

We put it in a red bag and they would GPS where they found it and EMS would come and take it away. I think all those remains were going to the temporary morgue. I know when I was there someone told me they had 14,000 pieces. They were up to 17,000 the last I saw. It’s probably way up higher than that now.

Firehouse Magazine Reports---Rescue Lts - Rescue 1, Squad 252

WTC: This Is Their Story

From the April 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Lieutenant Steve Terulli Rescue 1 - 11 years (Instructor at Rescue School on 9/11) Lieutenant John Citarella Squad 252 - 13 years (Instructor at Rescue School on 9/11)

We heard Marine 6 give an urgent message that a second plane hit the tower. We responded to Squad 41 to get gear. We arrived and met Chief Fred Sheffold and Joe Marchbanks, both from the 12th Battalion.

We saw six people jump from the north side of Tower 1. There were four or five cars on fire near the south side of Tower 2. We heard that a jumper hit a firefighter from Engine 216. All four of us ran into the lobby entrance of the hotel from Liberty and West streets. We met Deputy Chief Tom Galvin in the hotel lobby. Engine 58 was there with their rolled-up hoses.

We were ordered to the 90th floor in the south tower. The deputy said take Engine 58 with you and start walking up. Chief Sheffold said, did you say 90? Sheffold said, hold on. Just then, the south tower collapsed onto the hotel. It sounded like a train noise.

I made a ball, but when I got hit I flattened right out. I tried giving a Mayday three or four times. It took five minutes for me to get out from under the debris. I saw Chief Stack from the Safety Battalion. There was a pile of debris up to the ceiling of the lobby, which reached 20 feet high. I heard someone calling for help. We took a roll call. Lieutenant Citarella was pinned under a large pile of debris. I started to tunnel in to remove him. Pipes, sheetrock, insulation, wood and brickwork were passed out to Chief Stack and his aide. I asked the chief for a sawzall and to transmit a Mayday. He said there wasn’t anyone else around.

I backed out of the tunnel I had made to get my mask. I pushed the mask in front of me and gave the facepiece to John. He could now breathe easier. There was a six-by-six-foot I-beam on his leg. I was able to move the beam one half inch. John was able to back out on his belly. He gave me a kiss, and I said welcome back.

The chief said, let’s get out of here. We walked out towards the north tower. We came out near a four-foot-high wall. Chiefs Peter Ganci and Ray Downey, Deputy Commissioner Feehan and Captain Al Fuentes were in the middle of West Street. Chief Brian O’Flaherty of Safety was injured. We helped him over the wall. Downey came over and told us to report to Chief Ganci now. Downey stayed with Stack. There was a civilian with a leg injury and both chiefs stayed with the man. We crossed what was left of the street. We fell down a few times.

When we reached Ganci, he said to me, let me use your radio. Feehan couldn’t believe his eyes that we made it out of the hotel. The radio didn’t work. Ganci said go north. We ran north on West Street for about 25 yards and the north tower started to collapse. We were maybe 15 yards past the north pedestrian bridge when the air knocked me down under a tow truck. Dust got into my eyes, ears and mouth.

After a while, the sun started to come through the dust and smoke because the tower was down. I saw a few fighter jets fly by. I could hear explosions and heard ammunition going off.

Firehouse Magazine Reports---Firefighter Mike Fenick

WTC: This Is Their Story

From the August 2002 Firehouse Magazine

Firefighter Mike Fenick Ladder 48 - 15 years

Firehouse: I think somebody said that there were 14 teams of six guys each. Is that what they had?
Fenick: Yes.

Firehouse: Was that each tour?
Fenick: Each tour.

Firehouse: You worked with different guys from all over the city?
Fenick: Yeah, there were Bronx guys, Brooklyn guys, Harlem guys.

Firehouse: Did you work with the same guys every night?
Fenick: We worked with our same team every night.

Firehouse: What would your basic day consist of?
Fenick: You would get either the transfer station where the excavator would shake out debris in front of you and then you would go through it with the rake.

Firehouse: In the pit?
Fenick: They had one up high in front of 10 and 10 and they also had two or three of those down in the pit.

Firehouse: They told you what to look for and that if you found anything, you were supposed to stop?
Fenick: Yes, any kind of clothing, body parts, of course, and it’s common sense, purses and anything that could be related to a human being.

Firehouse: So what were the kind of things that you’d see when you were there, let’s say down at one of the transfer points?
Fenick: At the transfer stations, not much. Bags, handbags, really not like a woman’s handbag. Attache cases. Small bones. Sport bags, some clothing, some shoes and sneakers.

Firehouse: Did you find any fire tools?
Fenick: No fire tools. A couple of radios we found smashed up.

Firehouse: Could you tell where they were from?
Fenick: Not the ones that we found, no.

Firehouse: Did you find anything that was recognizable besides rebar or steel?
Fenick: As far as debris, recognizable debris? You mean structural type?

Firehouse: Anything, like a desk or a computer or a chair?
Fenick: Most of it was pretty crushed. You would find a lot of books. One area was filled with books. It must have been in the library. You could tell some chairs.

Firehouse: Could you smell when you found a body?
Fenick: Usually you could smell it. You would also get a lot of smells and there would be nothing around. If you got by a body, you were going to smell it first.

Firehouse: Was it difficult to take a body out of the debris? Did you use other tools besides a rake?
Fenick: Rakes and rebar cutters. It could be difficult. Some of them took quite a while. We had a sifter. They were pouring buckets of dirt into that sifter, sifting it out, finding a lot of bone fragments in there. I did some torch work. That’s about it as far as tools.

Firehouse: Did you ever have to go over to the SOC truck? They had the SOC truck over there with extra tools and supplies.
Fenick: No, they had a tool shack at 10 and 10 and you would just say send me this or that and the guy would come zipping down.

Firehouse: What would you ask for?
Fenick: Basically, rebar cutters or that’s where they would bring the body bags from, buckets, the sifter.

Firehouse: When you did find a firefighter, was the company called after the extrication was completed, if you knew where he was from? For most of the remains, did you know where they were from?
Fenick: Somebody said there was like 80 in March. I don’t know if that’s true or not, 80 bodies they found. I would say close to it. I thought it was more like 50 firemen. Well, it could have been other people, too. There were civilians.

Firehouse: Out of the 50, many of them could not be identified?
Fenick: Some of them they couldn’t identify.

Firehouse: So now would you put them in the body bag in the Stokes and then carry them up or would somebody else carry them up?
Fenick: That depends. If you were right there when it was going into the bag, you helped put it in the bag.

Firehouse: They called them down there if they weren’t there?
Fenick: Yes.

Firehouse: If the guys happened to be there, they took them out or they’d wait for the company to come?
Fenick: If they were local companies, they came. You know 4 Truck came down.

Firehouse: Let’s say they couldn’t identify a guy, whoever was there walked him all the way up and everybody else got in the line?
Fenick: Right.

Firehouse: So if you were sifting, they just stopped?
Fenick: Time out, shut down all the machines. Everything shut down. Get the M.E. (medical examiner) down there, the chaplain down there.

The chaplain would say a prayer right over the body. The M.E., there was a little bit of a process with the M.E. He would tell you what to do, this and that and he would check all the I.D. Then they put a flag over it and then somebody carried it out. Put them in the bag, put the flag over it and put them in the Stokes.

Firehouse: So then they put an American flag on the remains?
Fenick: Yes.

Firehouse: Everybody then got into position?
Fenick: Everybody lined up on the ramp. Then they would have an honor guard.

Firehouse: So you have a 500-foot walk up that bridge?
Fenick: I would say that’s a good estimate. That was a long, long way. So guys took a position all the way on either side. Yeah, all the way up and the ambulance waiting at the top.

Firehouse: When they did that, did everybody go to work when the ambulance left?
Fenick: Yes.

Firehouse: So did that happen sometimes several times in a day or a tour?
Fenick: Yes. The first couple of days I think they found – what did they find, nine guys in one day. They took them up three at the time or two at a time. We must have broke four or five times in one tour.

Firehouse: Were the guys happy that they found them or was there some other feeling that you felt when they found them?
Fenick: It’s not a happy feeling. It’s a rewarding feeling. I know it’s a hard emotion to put a finger on. It’s nothing to be happy about.

Firehouse: It’s a tough job to do, but was that rewarding?
Fenick: Very rewarding.

Firehouse: That’s why everybody was down there?
Fenick: I think so. Most of the guys were volunteers. It seemed like most of the guys had at least 10 years and over that I saw down there. The young guys I think were ordered. You could tell who wanted to be there.

Firehouse: Over the course of time when you were working, did you find a lot of bodies?
Fenick: Yes.

Firehouse: So the same process continued, with the medical examiner and the chaplain, and then getting the remains boxed up and bringing them out?
Fenick: Right. Stage them. Sometimes, they would stage them in an area and wait for the company to come. Everything was pretty much shut down. A couple of times, the fathers came down. I saw a wife go down there one time. We had a bunch of women.

Firehouse: Did many top chiefs come down there?
Fenick: Yes, Commissioner (Nicholas) Scoppetta led the procession. He would walk in the front with the chaplains and chiefs. And the guys would carry. A construction worker said something about what do you do with the civilians? We said we’ll have an honor guard for them. Then the construction workers would carry them. We’d have an honor guard for the civilians when the construction workers carried them out which I thought was nice.

Firehouse: Did everything stay shut down when they did that?
Fenick: Everything shut down. They would stop every five minutes if they had to. If they found two guys, that’s two recoveries. Then they would carry them up two or three at a time. If they found one, stop everything, honor guard, go back to work. Five minutes later find another one, stop everything. It slowed everything down there, but —

Firehouse: Did you see any apparatus or anything?
Fenick: They pulled out an engine, I think, and a chief’s car from the northwest corner.

Firehouse: Were you there when they removed the two trains cars?
Fenick: Yes.

Firehouse: How did they remove them?
Fenick: They put them on a big flatbed lowboy and drove them up the new ramp.

Firehouse: Did they have a crane lift up the train cars?
Fenick: Yes.

Firehouse: Were those the two rail cars that were smashed or were they in good shape?
Fenick: They were in good shape.

Firehouse: That’s the lowest level?
Fenick: Yes, I would say they were down to that in most of the area except for where they had built those two dirt roads.

Firehouse: How about the “bathtub”? Were there parts of it that you saw that were cracked?
Fenick: There were some good cracks. There was some pretty good water seepage here and there.

Firehouse: Did you see anything unusual down there like some pieces of glass?
Fenick: The biggest piece of glass was about two feet by two feet. That was the biggest piece I saw. That’s it.

Firehouse: Where were they, all the way down in the bottom?
Fenick: They must have came from the bottom of the south tower. Then some big chunks of concrete came out of that too after a while. One strange thing was we found a bag, an attache. It had the newspaper on Sept. 11, the morning before the planes hit.

Firehouse: How was the weather most of the time you were there?
Fenick: Most of the time good, a couple of cold nights. We had a couple of wet nights, a couple of rainy days. Those weren’t too bad. There was plenty of rain gear to be had.

Firehouse: That tent across the street where they put those lights up – what did you do there? Did you eat in there or did you shower?
Fenick: We ate in there. They had a little area you could take a nap. You could take a shower. They had bathrooms. You could wash up, brush your teeth, eat. We got in there together to chitchat, have something to eat, gather, meet. It was nice. They had lots of volunteers all over the place – what do you guys need, can I get it, do you need this, do you need that?

Firehouse: So you felt rewarded that you did it? Are you pleased that you did it?
Fenick: Yes. It was very rewarding, probably the most rewarding thing I’ve done on this job.

Firehouse: And it was probably the busiest month that they had for recoveries?
Fenick: It was good month. The guys going off told us we were going to have a good month. They didn’t find much. They were very disappointed. I kind of felt sorry for them. They were full of good advice, pace yourself. They all gave us their lockers with locks and everything. They knew that when they dug up that road, that that’s where everybody would be.

Firehouse: When you left, how much would you say was still there? I know there was still a lot of work to do, but in the areas closest to like the bathtub and certain areas that they hadn’t touched before, were they getting into those areas?
Fenick: I’d say 80% of it was to the bottom. Eighty percent of the bathtub was right down to the foundation.