CHAPTER 10

“We have to tell us what to do.”

ALL MORNING NEW York Waterway’s port captain, Michael McPhillips, had been fielding questions. NYPD Harbor Unit officers, Port Authority representatives, and captains from a handful of different tug companies, among others, contacted McPhillips for information and sometimes direction. Usually his job involved tracking vessel schedules, managing captains and deckhands, vessel maintenance, and Coast Guard compliance. Being thrust into this position of responsibility out of scale with his position overwhelmed him. When a tug captain called asking where he should pick up and drop off passengers, McPhillips mistakenly sent him to a pier with nowhere near enough water to accommodate such a deep-draft vessel. “I caught it before they got in there, but it would have ripped out the bottom of their boat,” he recalled. “It sucked, honestly. I had all these other boats calling that were coming in to help and I had to make all these decisions.”

Given McPhillips’s prominence on the radio, it made sense that when Coast Guard leadership arrived on scene shortly after the second tower fell, an officer contacted him by VHF. “He asked what was going on. I explained it to him,” McPhillips said. “I asked if I could go over capacity. He responded with a ‘yes’. Then he asked if we needed help. And I said, ‘Absolutely.’” A short while later, McPhillips heard the VHF radio broadcast calling for “all available boats” to aid in the evacuation.

Though neither can say for certain, the Coast Guard officer who called McPhillips that morning may well have been Lieutenant Michael Day aboard the Sandy Hook Pilot boat New York. After the boat had dropped marine inspectors at strategic points along the Battery to help guide evacuees toward boats and prevent vessel overloading, it continued its long, slow “barrier patrol” along the tip of Manhattan, swooping around from the Hudson to the East River and back again.

The goal was visibility. Not only did this sweep afford the personnel aboard the pilot boat good vantage points for looking up both sides of Manhattan to watch for points of traffic congestion or other issues, it also made the boat itself, with the U.S. Coast Guard ensign waving, more conspicuous. Day sought to empower mariners with the idea that the Coast Guard was on scene, present, and available.

From his post in the wheelhouse as the boat moved up the East River, Day watched a ferry pull off Pier 11 carrying a boatload of passengers. A great cheer erupted as the boat backed away. Day found it strange to see people so happy to leave Manhattan, though he only needed to shift his gaze slightly to see the smoke and be reminded why.

Despite the efforts of the inspectors, Day saw vessels precariously loading far more passengers than they were designed to carry. Some mariners even radioed to tell him that they were carrying more people than permitted. They weren’t so much asking for permission as reporting the fact, Day recalled. While witnessing botched Haitian and Cuban migrations on overloaded boats earlier in his career, Day had seen the horrors of drowning refugees clawing for capsized vessels. Now he felt torn. “We were trying to get as many people off the island as we could,” he said. But, he acknowledged, “If a boat flipped over we’d have even more people in the water because of my actions. And I was responsible. I felt responsible.”

Like McPhillips, who couldn’t reach his supervisors, Day was making on-the-fly decisions that normally would have been beyond his authority. When mariners requested permission to violate regulations, Day explained, “I rogered, laughing at myself a little bit. It was just like, wow! I broke more rules than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.” He later joked that at the time he’d reassured himself with the thought, I’m just a lieutenant. What are they gonna do to me? In truth, making leadership calls normally left to those at “flag level” weighed on him.

But Day’s rule breaking was far from reckless. Like many other mariners who took a more flexible approach to compliance that morning, Day made considered decisions in response to unprecedented circumstances. As disaster researchers James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf point out in their book American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11, “Just because rules were broken does not mean that there was a lack of order, organization, or concern for safety.” Instead, rules were being:

“thoughtfully disregarded, even in the desperation of those first hours when people just wanted to do anything. We call this rule breaking with vigilance. Everyone broke the rules, but they broke them gracefully, with sensitivity for consequences and with a sure-footed sweep through a potential minefield of possible mistakes and accidents.”

Crucially, the violations still reflected the guiding principle behind the rules—“Taking positive action to make things better,” as Day described it. And the infractions arose in direct response to extraordinary conditions. “It got easier to break them as time went on,” Day explained. “I won’t say it didn’t matter . . . But you know what? They’re looking at a burning hole. It didn’t really matter in the balance of it.” Ultimately, Day did his best to encourage captains to act safely while continuing to summon additional boats in hopes that more vessels on the scene might reduce the impulse to overload.

Part of what gave Day the confidence to make on-the-fly judgment calls was the leadership style espoused by his commanders, Captain Harris and Admiral Bennis, which emphasized encouraging their people to take the initiative to make their own decisions. “I really felt when I worked for Admiral Bennis that I was totally empowered to do the right thing,” explained Day. “Do the right thing and I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry about it. I mean as long as you can say this is why and the reason.”

“I’m a huge believer in empowerment,” Bennis affirmed in an interview with a Coast Guard historian months after the attacks. His longstanding leadership style had been to encourage his team to “go out and make magic and be brilliant.” His approach on September 11, once he finally made it back to New York at about 3 o’clock that afternoon, was no different. “What I did is what I always do. I went in with the folks. I sat down with them. I got a briefing—the first of thousands of briefings. I asked very few questions—some pointed questions just to be sure we’re going on the right track,” Bennis explained. “I had a team that I had complete trust in, and I let them know that right up front. . . . I just tried to stay there in the midst of them, but, absolutely, I never micromanaged them.”

In fact, that approach had actually trickled down to Bennis and Harris themselves from the highest ranks of the Coast Guard. From his earliest communications with his superiors following the attacks, Bennis was reassured that he and his team would be trusted to do what needed to be done. “They were all pretty confident with our abilities and capabilities,” he explained of his higher-ups, who were located all across the Northeast.

“I knew what I wanted to do. I knew from working with the city the best way to accomplish it. . . . But I wanted to know, was I in fact a free agent? And I was. As the commandant put it out later, he said he allowed his field commanders to let their creative juices flow and do what they needed to do, and I was able to do that.”

Instead of establishing a top-down command and control structure, the Coast Guard, from the top brass down to the on-scene rank and file, allowed for the organic, needs-driven, decentralized response that played an enormous role in the ultimate success of the boat lift. This approach, in turn, allowed mariners to take direct action, applying their workaday skills to these singular circumstances, without being stifled by red tape.

As Kendra and Wachtendorf explain: “Even with an eye for security and safety, [Coast Guard officials] were still able to recognize the value of an improvised citizen response to the terrorist attack.” Instead of interfering with the waterborne evacuation that was already under way, the Coast Guard participated. Commanding officers, both on- and off-scene, granted their blessing, legitimizing the spontaneous, unplanned evacuation through facilitation and support, thereby encouraging more mariners to get involved.

No one had foreseen the sudden need for evacuating a huge swath of Manhattan Island. Yet as terrorized people continued to flee to the waterfront, more and more boats turned up to rescue them. To Harris the white wakes visible in aerial views over Lower Manhattan looked “like the spokes of a wagon wheel.” Mariners were already responding. “Nobody had to be told to help,” Harris explained. “The asking, basically all that did was put people on the right frequency. People were already primed.”

As greater numbers of vessels and evacuees amassed along the shoreline, streamlining operations became the biggest challenge. By midmorning, so many mariners had joined in the effort that the regular passenger piers jammed up with boat traffic, thwarting the vessels most suited for using those piers from efficient operations. “The only way to fix it was to get organized,” said Harris. That organization was implemented in large part by Day and the pilots operating aboard the New York, which continued its barrier patrol. Their efforts were made easier by the relationships that both the Coast Guard and the Sandy Hook Pilots had with the New York harbor community.

Day’s initial broadcasts from the helm of the pilot boat set the tone for the Coast Guard’s position of cooperation and participation rather than interference with or controlling the efforts already under way. “United States Coast Guard aboard the pilot boat New York,” Day began. “All mariners, we appreciate your assistance.” Rather than ordering people around, he and most of his Coast Guard and pilot colleagues did their best to leverage their existing relationships with members of the New York harbor community to foster a team approach.

“The New York maritime public probably responds better to someone they know than someone they don’t,” Day explained. “New York as a city and the maritime community in particular, is built on relationships.” Day’s history of “externally focused” work within the Coast Guard, including the year he’d spent in an “industry training” exchange program, helped him have more engagement with the community than a typical Coast Guard officer.

In 1998, he had worked with the Port Authority in 1 World Trade Center, meeting with maritime industry people to learn about the impacts that Coast Guard regulations and actions had on commerce. He had also been working with the Harbor Operations Committee, which held regular meetings bringing the Coast Guard together with commercial operators, the Sandy Hook Pilots, the Port Authority, the Army Corps of Engineers, and other harbor stakeholders to “seek nonregulatory solutions” to port problems. “I was in a unique position to understand relationships between the Coast Guard and the public,” Day explained. “As a result of it I had a degree of trust.”

What struck Day that morning, and stuck with him thereafter, was what he called the “clarity of purpose: hey, we’re doing a good thing to help people.” Helping others “is a core ethos of the maritime community,” he explained. “It’s just part of the culture. . . . You’re at sea and someone needs your help and you’ll divert hundreds of miles out of your way to help someone.”

Day also recognized that the Coast Guard’s regulatory functions and role as “enforcers” could end up as a divisive force if not carefully managed. Day was mindful about fostering “a unity of effort,” as the guiding principle of operations that day. One choice that helped serve that approach was the decision to join forces with the Sandy Hook Pilots and use their boat as a floating command center. By nature of being a law enforcement and regulatory agency, the Coast Guard would, of course, have some clashes with boaters during a normal day. The pilots’ daily operations, however, routinely included more exclusively collaborative relationships with other harbor operators.

Harris explained the success of the evacuation’s collaborative approach this way:

[Day] “had a really good relationship with the maritime industry in the port. But it wasn’t just him. Also on that boat was Andrew McGovern. Andrew was recognized, had a lot of personal leadership power. Between the two of them, it became conversations. Nobody demanded anything. Nobody yelled at anybody. Nobody ordered people to do things. Everybody said what they wanted to do and the guys on the New York, the pilot vessel, made it possible for them to do it. They could talk to them. They knew them. They had sat through meetings with them for years.

Aboard the Chelsea Screamer, Captain Sean Kennedy didn’t count heads. Instead, he and crewmate Greg Freitas focused on loading as many people onto the 56-passenger thrill-ride speedboat as they could, as fast as they could. “We filled it up. If we peaked it, it was by only a few.” And then the captain shot straight across the Hudson to the closest New Jersey dock: at Liberty Landing in Morris Canal. As passengers disembarked, Kennedy took a few empty water bottles and filled them from a hose on the pier. He wanted to be able to offer water for people to wash their hands and faces, to clear their mouths and throats.

On his second run, Kennedy headed toward a cluster of people in Battery Park who walked clutching clothing to their faces. They’d gathered four blocks south of the World Trade Center near Pier A, a historic municipal pier built in 1886 that had stood vacant since 1992. Kennedy called out to a firefighter on land there, asking him to cut the lock on the gate that prevented people from reaching the water’s edge. Seeing the gate opened, people scrambled toward the boat.

After Kennedy had offloaded more passengers back in New Jersey, the camera crew that had originally chartered the boat as a platform for shooting footage earlier that morning told him they needed to submit tape to their office near Rockefeller Center. Could he run them back to Manhattan anywhere near there? Kennedy said he could drop them off at a pier near West Forty-sixth Street. Hearing this, some passengers asked if they, too, could disembark there instead of New Jersey.

As he set up to land on a barge at the south side of the Intrepid, an aircraft carrier that’s now part of a sea, air, and space museum, Kennedy saw mobs of people queued up to board Circle Line and World Yacht boats from a nearby pier. He spotted a man waving and trying to get his attention and sent his crewmate Freitas to run over and ask what the man wanted. The man was looking for a way to cut the line. He offered $4,000 cash if the Screamer would deliver him and three others across the river now. But Freitas refused. “That’s how desperate people were to leave immediately,” Kennedy explained. “Money didn’t matter.”

Already off the island, Karen Lacey had no money. And no shoes. When she stepped onto the abandoned pier in Jersey City, the Merrill Lynch director was numb, but not with cold. Although her clothes were soaked through with Hudson River water, here on the Jersey side the sun shone bright, warm, and unobscured. “I was thinking about shoes,” recalled Lacey, “about having to take a fairly long walk without them.” Her Hoboken apartment stood about two miles to the north, but Lacey planned to make a stop along the way. “We’ll stop at Modell’s and get sneakers,” she told Tammy Wiggs. Although Lacey, having finally dropped her bag in the river, was without a wallet, she couldn’t imagine the store clerks, seeing her wet and gray, would turn her away. “They’ll give us shoes just to get to Hoboken and I’ll come back and pay for them later,” she figured.

As the two women walked through the streets, Wiggs barefoot and Lacey in shredded stockings, people couldn’t help but notice them. For the most part they were “gracious, not gawking,” Lacey remembered, though she did overhear a few whispers: ‘Oh my God. They were down there.’

Dozens of passersby offered their help: ‘Do you need water? I have shoes. I can give them to you. We’ll go upstairs. We’ll get it for you. We’ll be right down.’ But, spurred on by the promise of a shower, Wiggs and Lacey refused the overtures and kept walking.

Twenty minutes into their journey, they reached Modell’s only to find it shuttered behind metal security screens. “That’s when it hit me,” Lacey explained. It’s 10:30 in the morning; Modell’s isn’t open. Consumed by shock, panic, and the instinct to flee, her mind had circumscribed the morning’s events as some “uniquely New York thing.” She’d somehow imagined that once she got across the river “people were going to be having lunch and selling shoes.” Realizing that the store had sent home its employees on a Tuesday morning somehow cemented for Lacey the gravity of the World Trade Center attacks. There was nothing to do but continue on.

The superintendent of her building on Hudson Street in Hoboken unlocked the door to her sixth floor apartment. As she pulled together some clothes for her young colleague to borrow, Lacey asked herself which would be the least offensive, cleanest looking pair of panties she could loan, then chose a pair of purple Calvin Kleins.

“I never thought I’d wear someone else’s underwear,” said Wiggs.

“I never thought I would offer them,” Lacey replied. “But they’re there if you want ’em.”

A black ring marked the tub after they each finished showering. No matter how many times Lacey blew her nose, what came out was gray.

Wiggs felt like she had “little glass shards” in her eyes. She had no lens solution available, yet was so desperate to wear her contacts so she could see that she swished the lenses around in her mouth in an effort to clean them.

When Lacey’s family came by the apartment, Wiggs hid in a back room. She declined Lacey’s offer to join them when they went out to eat at a local restaurant. Instead she used Lacey’s landline to call everyone she knew, and finally connected with a friend who offered to drive her to her parents’ home in Baltimore.

Also walking barefoot through Jersey City was Florence Fox, still carrying four-year-old Kitten, who peppered her nanny with questions. “Where are we going? When are we going to get there?” Fox enlisted her help with the search. “We have to look,” she told her charge. “Kitten, can you see anything? Can you see something that looks like a hotel?” The little girl had grown calmer but Fox could tell she was still scared by the way that she clung. That fear would end up affecting the child for years to come. “I was talking to her just to make sure she was okay.”

They eventually found a hotel. The lobby was mobbed with people trying to book rooms, but none of the others were covered in dust. Fox strode to the front of the line. “Maybe it was arrogant, but I really didn’t care.” “Can I get a room?” she asked. “They must have thought I was crazy.” The clerk was sympathetic but couldn’t help. Every single room was booked. Throughout the area, people left stranded by the closures of the region’s three major airports were hauling their luggage through the streets—some hitchhiking, some pushing commandeered airport luggage carts—on the hunt for buses, rental cars, and hotel rooms.

Eyes burning, skin itching, and barefoot, Fox had carried Kate through the streets only to end up at a hotel with no vacancies. As she begged, then argued with the desk clerk to no avail, a few hotel guests, in town on business, offered to take them in. They showed Fox to a room, then left the two alone to get cleaned up.

Fox washed Kate first. The girl was shaking. Instead of drawing her a bath, Fox stood Kate in the tub, letting the shower water run so she wouldn’t have to sit in the stew of toxins that rolled off her body. Once the little one was clean and wrapped in a towel, Fox prepared to bathe herself. “You can sit on the floor,” she told Kate, then climbed in and closed the shower curtain. Kate screamed.

“Don’t close the shower curtain!”

“I don’t want you to get wet.”

“I don’t care if I get wet,” the girl pleaded. Fox looked at the frightened child and saw that she was changed. She’s right, Fox thought. After what we’ve been through what is water? So she showered with the curtain open.

Once they were both clean, Fox distracted Kate with cartoons and picked up the phone. She still couldn’t retrieve her employer’s phone number. Instead she dialed her sister whom Fox knew could reach the girl’s mother.

Then the girl and her nanny curled up on the bed to wait. “I just remember feeling so scared. And feeling cold. And looking at Kitten and being so afraid for this child.” The people who’d taken them in brought food, but Fox doesn’t remember eating. She doesn’t remember exactly what happened next.

Although Kitten remained separated from her parents for nearly 12 hours during the frightening ordeal of fleeing her home, her bond with Fox, who loved the girl like the two were family, offered her safe haven throughout. While finding trust and comfort among perfect strangers was one of the hallmarks of the disaster, the solace of familial ties could not be underestimated.

Shortly after the first tower fell, beginning law student Gina LaPlaca had aligned her fate with the men who’d saved her from stumbling down the subway station stairs. But now, temporarily blind, eyes bandaged in a Manhattan hospital, she decided she needed to be with family. When somebody finally managed to reach her mother on the phone, the frantic and relieved woman arranged to have LaPlaca’s uncle, John Coyle, who worked near East Thirty-third Street, pick up her daughter in the hospital. The two men waited with LaPlaca until he arrived, and then it was time to say thank-yous, swap phone numbers, and issue heartfelt (yet ultimately unrealized) promises that they’d all keep in touch.

LaPlaca found great relief in being taken under her uncle’s wing. Coyle, who had helped raise LaPlaca after the death of her father, signed her out of the hospital and explained the facts of the situation: “Your neighborhood’s off limits. They’re not letting anyone in there. They’re evacuating everybody. You’re gonna go home with me to Staten Island.” With that he hooked his arm in hers and pointed them toward the Staten Island Ferry, three miles to the southwest.

But first they stopped at a street vendor to buy some large-framed “Jackie O” sunglasses. Not only was LaPlaca feeling self-conscious about her bandages, any hint of light that made it through the dressings irritated her injured eyes. For an hour the young woman was guided, unseeing, through her new city. She registered the shifts between neighborhoods by sounds and smells. Chinatown struck her as particularly loud and full of activity. Then, as the two proceeded farther downtown near the trade center, the streets went quiet. “You would hear sirens but there weren’t really cars on the street, or the usual activities there,” she recalled. Walking “as close to the water as we could,” they crossed Wall Street, and soon enough LaPlaca arrived back where she’d started—where she’d wandered blindly through the dust cloud that morning. The smell caught in her throat. Now that she was in the care of her uncle, the weight of the day began to sink in.

The ferry terminal hummed with people. All morning James Parese and his fellow Staten Island Ferry captains had continued making runs back and forth to Manhattan, delivering more than 50,000 civilians off the island. On return trips from Staten Island, they transported emergency workers and supplies. Parese, who had started his workday at 5 A.M., wouldn’t finish until 5 P.M.

Coyle weaved LaPlaca through the crowd to a spot to wait where they would be visible. In addition to a ferry, the two were waiting for LaPlaca’s friend and houseguest who had undergone her own trials that day, wandering the Manhattan streets in ill-suited footwear and relying on the kindness of strangers. Through communicating with the friend’s mother, LaPlaca’s mother had coordinated the friends’ reunion so that both young women would have a safe place to stay on Staten Island.

“There’s a blond girl waving,” said Coyle. “Is that her?”

The two friends embraced. “Thank God you’re all right. What happened?”

“Oh my God. What happened to you?”

When they boarded the ferry, Coyle, “a creature of habit,” shot straight for the same seats that he chose every day on his commute. All around LaPlaca heard the “whispered, small conversations” of shocked fellow passengers. Not until she was safe at the West Brighton, home of her uncle did LaPlaca notice her battered feet, all blistered and torn from her heeled sandals.

Wet as Chris Reetz, Chris Ryan, and Ryan’s girlfriend were after the decontamination hose-down that greeted them in Hoboken, walking home made the most sense. But they all planned to meet up a little later. Reetz knew he needed some sort of support system—someone to rely on and someone with whom he could process all that had happened. “Chris,” he explained, “was the closest thing I had to family.”

McSwiggans Pub had become “a home away from home” for Ryan and his girlfriend. “We knew every bartender. We’d been to the owner’s house. We knew his kids.” So that was where the three went and waited for their fellow regulars to file in. “It was a weird kind of feeling in that bar,” explained Ryan, an “uncomfortable happiness” about everyone who’d survived that revealed itself through nervous laughter. He recalled wanting to lighten the mood and then realizing that was not the right thing. “This was not a time to be funny. It’s like telling a joke at a wake or something, and in many ways it was. I mean, holy shit. Everybody in there knew somebody who was dead or could have been dead. Or they didn’t know yet if they were dead.” And so the trio stayed late, sitting, and drinking, watching the television, and waiting for their friends to appear. Once they’d found this “stable place,” they didn’t want to go home.

For Rich Varela, home came as an afterthought. While Lacey reunited with family, Wiggs drummed up a way out of town, Fox secured a hotel room, LaPlaca headed for Staten Island, and Reetz and Ryan sought comfort in their neighborhood bar, Varela had remained at the post he’d been assigned by firefighters on the John D. McKean, which was actively pumping water to land-based engine companies. Varela doesn’t recall what the McKean crew had asked him to do, exactly, but at the time he understood that his duty was to stay put. Before long it seemed like he was the only one left aboard. What am I doing here? he wondered, noting that while he stood wearing just a life vest everyone around him wore breathing apparatuses and protective gear. Still he didn’t leave—not until a firefighter (maybe Tom Sullivan, maybe someone else) came back and asked, ‘Why are you still here?’ While the McKean crew would remain on station for days, the telecommunications specialist who’d volunteered his assistance was now free to go.

Relieved of duty, Varela immediately thought, How the hell do I get out of here? For the second time that day, he needed help getting off Manhattan Island. He walked north toward North Cove and stepped out atop the southern breakwater to scope out his options. Then a small, maybe 30-foot, aluminum boat pulled up, and a man called out over a loudspeaker.

“Hey, buddy. You all right? You need a lift?”

“Yeah.”

“Where do you gotta go?”

“Jersey.”

The guy nosed the boat in close enough that Varela could jump on.

Across the river, Varela stepped off the boat in the shadow of the Colgate Clock (the iconic 50-foot diameter octagonal clockface that had been overlooking the Hudson since 1924, when it stood atop the now-razed Colgate-Palmolive factory) and was greeted by triage center medics. They looked him over, gave him wet cloths to wipe himself off, and then directed him to the free buses that would deliver him to Newark Penn Station. Not until he settled into a seat on a New Jersey Transit Raritan line commuter railcar, at somewhere around three o’clock in the afternoon, did Varela process what he must look like wearing a life vest on the train. Neither the shock nor the generous purpose for which he’d sacrificed his shirt muted his embarrassment.

By late afternoon, when crowds amassing along the shoreline began to dwindle, tugs, dinner boats, ferries, and other vessels shifted duties from delivering passengers off the island to ferrying emergency workers and others onto Manhattan as well as transporting goods. Throughout the evacuation and well into that first night people had sought to cross the river toward Manhattan as well as away. Some felt duty-bound because of their professions—firefighters, steel workers, doctors, nurses, journalists, and canine rescue squadrons among them. Others were desperate to find loved ones.

The Lincoln Harbor Yacht Club’s general manager, Gerard Rokosz, fielded pleas from a man worried about his pregnant wife, fireboat John D. McKean transported a father concerned for his son, and New York Waterway captains reported denying passage to reporters. Coast Guard Boatswain Carlos Perez and his crew shuttled police officers; Spirit Cruises Operations Director Greg Hanchrow ferried fire department personnel, police, and “a lot of suits”; and on Jerry Grandinetti’s first run back to Manhattan from Owl’s Head, Brooklyn, he delivered medical personnel to North Cove.

The rescue efforts, meanwhile, demanded supplies. And like the evacuation, Coast Guard Lieutenant Michael Day explained, the supply runs “just kind of happened.” The highly visible, 185-foot pilot boat waving a Coast Guard ensign provided a ready hub for rescue workers’ requests. When firefighters approached asking for drinking water, Day and his colleagues made calls to the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management. Civilians on the Jersey side cleared store shelves, piling bottles along the waterfront. When Day radioed requests to mariners to run the supplies across the river he was inundated with volunteers. Rescuers needed dust masks and eyewash, wrenches and diesel fuel, and acetylene for torches to cut steel. Day and his team made requests to New Jersey and mariners delivered whatever could be gathered to their aid.

It was dusk when Day first stepped off the pilot boat New York into the “eerie gray snow” of Ground Zero. The mixed crew of Coast Guard and Sandy Hook Pilots personnel had established a good working relationship with emergency officials in New Jersey, and now Day was walking around the site, hoping to locate someone from New York City’s Office of Emergency Management. “There were body parts everywhere,” he recalled. The sight of a foot still in its shoe transfixed him. He couldn’t take his eyes away. This is a war. A siege, he thought, eyeing the National Guardsmen patrolling the streets of Manhattan with M-16s.

Structural fires continued to rage around the World Trade Center site, orange glows penetrating the darkness left by power out ages. The air hung thick with debris, the hovering dust spotlighted in the beams of the few construction light boxes that had so far been erected, courtesy of Weeks Marine. When the wind kicked up it lofted charred papers, sending them fluttering through the air.

At last the message that nanny Florence Fox had sent through her sister reached Kitten’s family. The four-year-old’s mother was on her way. Silverton had been searching for her daughter since morning. As she sprinted from the townhouse to the nursery school and everywhere else she could think of to look, the towers came down around and on top of her, covering her with ashy gray soot. Only when firefighters warned her of a possible explosion and ordered her to board a boat did the distraught mother evacuate.

On the New Jersey side, Silverton ran into people she knew. She asked them if they’d seen Fox and Kitten. Little did she know she was closer now to her daughter than she’d been all day. Finally, at about eight o’clock that night, a call came through. Her daughter was safe, and not far away.

“I was expecting this almost fairytale reunion,” recalled Silverton. “Kate would run into my arms and I would pick her up and swing her around. And then hug Florence. We’d all hug. And instead I got off the elevator and they were coming down the hall. Florence was carrying Kate. I’m not sure if Kate even recognized me.” This was the first sign that Silverton, a psychologist, had of the post-traumatic stress disorder that would afflict the child in the days to come.

“We just cried and cried,” recalled Fox.

By three o’clock in the morning, Jerry Grandinetti had wound up less than 500 feet from where he’d started on the Excalibur that morning. All afternoon and evening Grandinetti had worked delivering evacuees off the island, transporting personnel around the harbor, and carrying supplies into North Cove. Many of the requests he’d answered came from the pilot boat, which was now tied up along the outside of the breakwater at the south end of North Cove. Grandinetti wound up tying the Excalibur to the inside of that same breakwater. Still aboard were the two NYPD Harbor Unit officers who’d been assigned to help him. But not for long. In the predawn hours, a sergeant boarded.

“How are you guys doing?” Grandinetti recalled the sergeant asking the officers.

“We’re good to go till daylight, Sarge.”

“No you’re not,” their superior replied. “You’re done.”

Relieved of their posts, the officers left, and Grandinetti was suddenly alone with his thoughts. “I didn’t know what to do then. I cracked a beer and sat in the wheelhouse. Then I decided, maybe I’d try to get upstairs to my apartment to close the windows and get my wife some clothes.” He knew the two of them wouldn’t be allowed home for a long while and this might be his best chance to collect some essentials.

With the power out, Grandinetti had no choice but to climb the stairs to the nineteenth floor by flashlight. Before he’d fled that morning he’d been hanging out a window with his camera. That window was still open when he returned, and now every object, every surface in his apartment was plastered with dust. He didn’t stay long before heading back downstairs and retreating to the boat—the best refuge he now had.

Grandinetti sat in the wheelhouse. What do we do now? Despite his exhaustion he couldn’t settle his mind. I can’t sleep, he thought. I can’t sleep looking at this red glow.

What the fuck just happened? From the helm of the go-fast boat that he had commandeered that morning, Spirit Cruises Operations Director Greg Hanchrow tried to wrap his head around the events of the day.

All afternoon the Spirit Cruises dinner boats had ferried passengers from Pier 61 to Lincoln Harbor. Hanchrow and the Spirit of New York crew had to adjust their makeshift gangway system as the tide shifted, but still they managed to offload passengers safely and comfortably, down a ramp and through a main-deck cargo door. But by seven or eight o’clock that night all three Spirit boats were docked back at Pier 61. What had started that morning as a mission to rescue company assets by pulling vessels out of Manhattan had turned into a rescue mission for people, and ended with the boats secured back in their berths. By now it was getting dark, and Hanchrow had decided he’d better bring back the boat that he’d appropriated to Petersen’s Boat Yard & Marina in Upper Nyack. Only a few lights shone at the trade center site where smoke continued rolling into the night sky.

Heading north up the Hudson River, his head swirling, Hanchrow looked over to his right at the West Side Highway. Suddenly it hit him. There were no cars. Instead a caravan of about 10 huge quarry earth-moving trucks with enormous tires lumbered south. This is 12 hours later and we’re already moving material, he thought.

His next thought was: I’m gonna have to figure out how to get down here tomorrow.

When at last Hanchrow arrived home, emotion overwhelmed him. “I was sad, crying. I was mad. I’m very upset.” He thought of his daughter. Here I am in my nice cozy home with my daughter we’ve had for three months who’s still speaking Bulgarian. Well, I’m glad I brought her to this country. Maybe she would have been better off over there. With “a fucking big glass of rum” in hand, Hanchrow decided to push off some of the hard questions until later. All these things are gonna have to be addressed at some point. But not now, he thought. There’s shit that’s gotta get done. He might not yet know exactly what needed doing, but he was determined to make his way back onto Manhattan Island the next morning to figure it out.

In hindsight, Hanchrow called his plans to return “pragmatic.” I’m not in any danger, he figured. No one’s shooting at me. There’s nothing imminent. Instead he felt a need “to go and be centered around the boats, around the pier, in the city saying, ‘Okay, what are we gonna do?’” Despite all the day’s uncertainties, Hanchrow was absolutely sure of one thing: “We need a time-out, and we need a huddle. . . . No one is going to tell us what to do so we have to tell us what to do.”