This beautiful summer morning, so filled with bright sunshine, turned pitch black from the dust. In total darkness I bargained with God to see my family again. Then there was complete silence. It was like that muffled quiet after a first snowfall. For a couple of seconds, I wondered if I was still alive.
After a few moments, I stood up, covered head to toe in gray dust. I couldn’t catch a breath of air without coughing. My eyes burned. I spat to clear my throat.
“Are you okay?” I asked Jules.
Jules struggled to his feet, realizing for the first time I was the one who had been on top of him. Except for scrapes and bruises, he was uninjured but also coated in gray gunk. His camera was apparently intact. He brushed debris from the lens and realized he was still filming.
“Okay,” Jules said.
Suddenly, we heard a staccato pop pop pop from across the street—the unmistakable sound of gunfire.
“Get down! Get down!” I yelled to Jules. Again, we ducked behind a vehicle. I was afraid not only for myself, but for Jules. We had barely survived and now someone was shooting at us? Were there terrorists on the streets with guns?
A few moments passed. We again got to our feet. To our relief, we realized a police officer had shot out a plate-glass window in the office building across the street, trying to get inside to escape the suffocating dust.
“Okay, let’s go now,” I said.
Jules and I found a small coffee shop on Vesey Street where employees were handing out water bottles to firefighters, police, and anyone who needed it. Everyone was dazed; some were injured. I drank but had trouble clearing my throat.
The wind picked up and started to clear the air. Back out on the street, I looked toward the World Trade Center and saw a surreal mountain of destruction: twisted steel beams, pulverized concrete, smashed glass, and huge pockets of flame, all covered by a murky haze of smoke and dust.
For the first time, I realized that both towers had completely collapsed. The buildings were not hiding behind the smoke. They no longer existed. Though it was the second skyscraper to be hit, the South Tower had disintegrated first in fifty-six minutes, followed twenty-nine minutes later by the North Tower’s collapse. As each Twin Tower pancaked from the top down, they destroyed everything beneath them, including the Marriott Hotel and surrounding buildings. Most of the sixteen-acre complex had been utterly demolished.
My mind reeled in disbelief. I tried to take it all in but could not. I had landed in a war zone. With fires burning everywhere, it looked like the whole world was on fire. The nightmare had unfolded in just 102 minutes, from the airplane hitting the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. to its collapse at 10:28 a.m.
Questions flooded my thoughts. How many people had we lost? I had sent a couple of hundred firefighters up those staircases. Had any of them survived? Where were my brother and Engine 33? Where were Engine 7 and Ladder 1? What about all the other units I’d ordered to evacuate?
Jules and I walked toward the burning piles of debris. Dozens of rigs had been destroyed. Dazed, injured people coated in powder staggered around like apparitions. First responders were on their knees, sifting through rubble. It looked, as Jules put it, like the “gateway to hell.”
Jules was desperate to know what had happened to his brother. He believed Gédéon had gone up in the North Tower with Tony. They usually rode in Engine 7 together. It made sense that they’d come with us to the odor of gas call, though I didn’t recall seeing either of them in the lobby. But I had been extraordinarily busy.
“I’ve got to find my brother,” Jules said. “If you don’t mind, I’m going home.” Weary, coughing, crying, he began to walk back to the firehouse, asking every firefighter he saw, “Have you seen anyone from Engine 7 or Ladder 1?”
I knew Gédéon also would be worried about Jules. I thought of Kevin and the other firefighters I had told to go up stairwells—especially those from my firehouse—and then ordered to evacuate. Had they heard me? Where were Captain Tardio, Lieutenant Walsh, and their firefighters? They’d been among the first to go up inside the tower.
Heartsick, I pictured my brother’s calm face as he headed toward his assignment. I fought to gain control of my fear and anxiety, to figure out what to do. Nothing I had ever experienced gave me any guidance. I had never felt so helpless.
I tried to call Kevin by radio, “Battalion 1 to Engine 33,” and heard no answer. Radio traffic was cluttered, so it would not be unusual for him not to answer me. I assumed he would show up, and there was a lot to do.
After hearing my order to evacuate, the Duane Street firefighters had hit the lobby of the North Tower with minutes to spare.
Lieutenant Walsh and Ladder 1 briefly regrouped in the deserted lobby, amazed at the devastation. But they still had no idea the South Tower had collapsed. They started to exit the building through the broken windows. As Walsh walked under the overhang, he could hear and see bodies hitting the glass, others hitting the ground. On the corner of the building was a pile of bodies where people had been landing in the same spot.
Someone in the middle of the street yelled, “Wait, wait,” throwing up his hands. Two people had jumped together. Olsen, who had rejoined the group, was too close and his bunker gear got spattered with blood. Walsh took a deep breath and ran about fifty yards to a pedestrian underpass, hoping nothing would hit him from above.
O’Neill was stunned to realize that Ladder 1’s truck had been demolished by concrete and steel, but still didn’t realize the South Tower had completely collapsed. He and Van Cleaf walked up West Street, followed by other members of their house. Someone came up to them to tell them they better move faster, that the North Tower was going to fall. The firefighters doubled their pace, difficult in bunker gear after their exhausting climb.
The group had made it about two blocks north on West Street when the terrible rumble began. The top of the North Tower came down, popping floor by floor as everyone below fled in panic, chased by the mushroom cloud of debris. O’Neill dropped his mask and took off, for the first time really and truly running flat-out for his life.
Lieutenant Walsh heard a tremendous roar and turned to look at the tower as it began to melt, starting high at the crash zone, “like a sandcastle in a rainstorm.” Walsh dropped all his tools, shed his mask and helmet, and ran north, trying to outrace the roaring locomotive bearing down on him. He could hear steel beams hitting steel beams, “like an erector set breaking down.” As the hot gale of dust and debris knocked him to the ground, he knew he was dead.
Eleven seconds later, he opened his eyes to blackness. He was covered in ash and could see little pockets of fire around him. “I thought I was in hell or purgatory at that point.” Then Walsh realized he had survived.
After leaving the building, Olsen had sought refuge under a pedestrian walkway and run into Joey Angelini, a firefighter he knew from Rescue 1. They were facing each other when Olsen told him the building was “shivering and shaking” and he feared it was going to come down. No sooner did he get out the words than the building began to pancake. Both men took off running—Olsen ran north up toward Vesey Street, Joey went south toward Liberty Street. Olsen survived but his friend did not.
When Engine 7 firefighters exited the North Tower, Zoda thought the landscape around them looked “like the end of the world.” The Marriott Hotel next door had been cut in half, crushed by the South Tower, which they still didn’t realize had fallen.
Tardio told his firefighters to keep close and stay in front of him as they headed north on West Street. Then they heard the loud rumbling, looked up, and desperately tried to outrun the collapsing tower.
“It was like a landslide,” Zoda said. “I was running and watching this cloud of smoke chasing me up West Street. And I said, I can’t outrun this smoke.”
Tardio was frozen in amazement for a moment or two before he started running, still carrying his mask and gear. Exhausted from climbing and descending thirty floors, he was caught by the tsunami of hot air and grit. He threw himself to the ground and covered up. He expected to be incinerated by a fireball.
Then it stopped. In the pitch black, Tardio got up on his knees. “Felt my hands. I had them.” He took his first breath of air, like his face was “buried in sand.” He swallowed dust but was finally able to get his mask on and breathe.
Like me, firefighters who had managed to evacuate without serious injury started to move toward the vestiges of the World Trade Center they had barely escaped. Covered with dense gray dust, they looked like stone statues standing at the edge of the pile of twisted steel and crumbled concrete.
Their firefighter brothers were trapped beneath the twisted mayhem, maybe injured, dying. They started to pick their way across collapsed beams to search for survivors, only to retreat as material shifted beneath their feet, all too aware that voids might swallow them up.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” my handie-talkie radio suddenly squawked loud and clear. It was the tactical channel. “Ladder 6 to Command, we are trapped on the 4th floor in the B stairs. Mayday, mayday, mayday.”
With a rush of relief, I recognized the voice of Captain Jay Jonas, from Ladder 6, a firehouse in Chinatown. I had sent him and his unit up the B stairs early on. Jonas and at least a few others were alive. If they had lived, maybe Kevin had survived in a structural pocket and was awaiting rescue.
I had no idea how to find the B stairs of the North Tower in this vast mound of misshapen steel beams and concrete. One wrong step and I could be terribly injured.
I decided to try going in below street level, through WTC-6, an eight-story building, the shortest structure in the complex. Known as Custom House, it stood on Vesey Street. I knew a lower passageway from there into the North Tower, where I could access the B stairs in the basement.
I didn’t know what I’d encounter, but I needed air. I’d left my SCBA in my vehicle, now crushed by tons of debris. I found another chief’s car on the street, damaged but accessible. I borrowed a Halligan tool from a firefighter, popped the trunk of the vehicle, and found an SCBA. The masks, carried by all firefighters, not only provide air, but also emit a high-pitched alarm when the user stops breathing or remains immobile for more than thirty-five seconds. Firefighters can trigger the alarm if they are trapped.
WTC-6 had been damaged, but not completely destroyed. I asked a firefighter to go into the building with me, but it quickly became clear the destruction was so extensive, it was impossible to get through the passageway to the B stairwell. The twisted steel beams and pockets of fire made it too dangerous. I yelled for Jonas, listened for SCBA alarms, but heard nothing. The rescue would have to come from the top.
Back on the surface, wherever I walked, I saw no desks, no chairs, no computers, no phones. Everything was pulverized. Shredded paper—millions of pages of reports, financial documents, the detritus from hundreds of offices that had occupied the skyscrapers for decades—was inches deep.
The FDNY had to regroup, reorient, and rebuild a command structure. But how?
The sixteen-acre rubble field was divided roughly into four distinct sectors, essentially squares, with chunks of buildings blocking movement from sector to sector. Fires raged in adjacent buildings, particularly WTC-7.
We were not willing to jeopardize firefighters to go into a building that had been evacuated, but we couldn’t let the fire jump the streets to other structures. However, the water main was broken.
Fresh firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, and doctors were arriving, eager to search for survivors, all asking, “How can I help?” People were digging ad hoc, a dangerous situation. We had fires raging throughout the complex and no water supply. We needed to reestablish command, but our upper ranks had been devastated, chiefs either missing or dead. The magnetic command board in the North Tower lobby—our only record of what units had been sent to which floors—had been destroyed.
Firefighters began organizing themselves from the bottom up instead of the top down, watching each other to make sure their buddies didn’t slip into a void. The dust on the steel beams was as slippery as baby powder.
Little by little, I heard chiefs reporting in on the radio. Deputy Chiefs Charlie Blaich and Tom Haring announced they were taking command of their geographical sectors.
Chief Hayden appeared out of nowhere. After carrying Father Judge, he had been on West Street looking for the ICP when the North Tower began to collapse. Too close to outrun it, he and Sal Cassano had crawled under different rigs parked on the street to escape the onslaught. The vehicles were damaged, but they survived. Cassano had injured his back and had been taken to the hospital for treatment.
Hayden surveyed the chaos. Nobody knew where Ganci was, or even if he was alive. People needed direction. Hayden had to impose order, but how? He climbed up on a burned-out rig in roughly the middle of the rubble. He asked everyone to stop whatever they were doing and look at him.
Dozens of firefighters obeyed, turning to watch Hayden, covered in gray dust, standing atop the crumpled fire truck. Then he asked us to do something unusual.
“Take off your helmets,” Chief Hayden said, “and we are going to have a moment of silence, because we lost a lot of people today.”
Our helmets bear our rank, unit number, and soot from every fire we have ever fought. Our helmets are our identity. Firefighters don’t take off their helmets for anybody. Hayden knew that. Nobody moved to comply.
“No, no, no,” Hayden said. “Take off your helmets because we lost a lot of people and we’ll have a moment of silence.”
So, wherever we were standing in the vast debris field, members of the FDNY took off our helmets and bowed our heads in silence, as did Chief Hayden.
With that simple, ordinary gesture, Hayden brought us together. At that moment, we felt solidarity with each other in our human frailty. Our vision of being superhero firefighters, the often felt but unspoken motivation that prompted many of us to join the FDNY, had ended. We were only ordinary people.
“Okay, put on your helmets,” Chief Hayden said, as he slapped his own helmet back on his head. He told everyone, whether on duty or off, to give officers their name, their unit, so they could keep track of them and their given assignments. “We have much work to do.”
In the quiet moment of silence, he established command.