The next morning, after Dr. Ky plucked more debris from my eyes, I returned to the firehouse.
After learning of our losses, New Yorkers had started showing up at firehouses with donations: cookies, cakes, towels, bottled water. A little boy came to the firehouse with three dollars of his own money to donate. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with so many donations, but it was heartening to see people who wanted to help, to do something from their hearts. The previous night, they had lined the streets in lower Manhattan and clapped as firefighters returned from the Pile to their quarters.
I was going from the apparatus floor to the battalion office when I ran into Captain Tardio on the stairs, who told me that he had seen Kevin in the North Tower.
Engine 7 had made it up to the 30th floor when Tardio had encountered a battalion chief who told everyone to evacuate. They started descending the C stairs. On the 9th floor, they ran into Kevin and members of Engine 33.
My brother and Engine 33 had reached the 32nd floor; after hearing the evacuation order, they’d turned immediately and started down the B stairs. Kevin stopped his team on the 9th floor and told his unit to redirect firefighters from the C stairs to the B stairs, a safer route leading directly out of the building. Captain Tardio encountered Kevin on his way down and made the shift to the B stairs.
“Your brother saved my life. He saved a lot of lives,” Tardio said. It was a special moment, and his story of meeting Kevin meant so much to me.
I walked to the Pile picturing that event in my mind. Kevin and the firefighters of Engine 33 had slowed their retreat to direct others to the B stairs, the safest and fastest exit. I wondered how long he had lingered on the 9th floor, knowing that anyone who continued down the C stairwell could get trapped by falling debris or slowed by a more cumbersome way out via the mezzanine. Captain Tardio and many others had made it out. Kevin had given his life to save others.
Our rescue operation ran twenty-four hours a day. Time was of the essence. Studies of earthquake rescues indicated people had survived up to fourteen days in collapses of buildings. We decided to add four days to make sure. After eighteen days of search and rescue, we would move officially into recovery operations.
Firefighters and other rescuers dug and listened for sounds, hoping for a miracle. People went down into the subway tunnels, into the stores in the underground concourses, into many crevices.
Chief Nigro had appointed Frank Cruthers WTC incident commander, with Hayden as his deputy commander. Operations chiefs rotated for each of the four sectors at Ground Zero. I recall it felt like Division 15 Deputy Chief Charlie Blaich and I flipped a coin to determine who would do what role. Blaich became logistics chief and I the planning chief based on who would work best in each function.
The assignment gave me much-needed focus. As planning chief, writing operational plans allocating resources and documenting the recovery process became a major area of my responsibility. To build a command structure my first task was to provide information about the collapse area.
A picture is more easily comprehended than a page full of words. I contacted the FDNY’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) office, called the Phoenix Unit. Captain Justin Werner pulled maps showing city streets and the sixteen-acre site with building footprints of the WTC, then overlaid those with a 75-by-75-foot grid. We divided the area map into four sectors, or divisions, with each four-acre section under the supervision of a deputy chief.
Officers and firefighters were given these paper maps and instructed to mark where they found human remains or equipment on the grid. This system also allowed us to keep track of who was working where, enhancing searchers’ safety. All that information had to be logged in at the end of the day by a supervisor.
This time-consuming process slowed us down. But it was vital to know where people and evidence were found, not only for the FDNY in reviewing our tactics, but also for law enforcement for their investigation, engineers determining how the buildings fell, medical examiners trying to identify victims, and families who wanted to know where their loved ones were found.
But the information we were getting was disheartening as, day after day, we found no survivors.
The world was watching events at Ground Zero. Though I had no time to view TV, Ginny told me extraordinary pictures were being broadcast of the eerie rubble pile and our desperate efforts to find survivors. People all over the country, all over the world were thinking about us.
President Bush announced he would come to Ground Zero at the end of the week. He had flown over the site but wanted to visit in person for that important national ritual: the presidential walk through the disaster area. The commander in chief wanted to show his support for the victims and signal his determination to hold those responsible accountable.
On the afternoon of Friday, September 14—which had been declared a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance—President Bush arrived at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. Accompanied by New York Governor George Pataki and Mayor Giuliani, he observed the tip of Manhattan by helicopter, along with thirty-seven members of Congress in Marine helicopters. The choppers landed and a long convoy of limos wound its way to the WTC site.
President Bush, accompanied by Pataki, Giuliani, Fire Commissioner Von Essen, and other VIPs, emerged from the vehicles and picked their way across the site. People who had for days been doing backbreaking work, physically lifting chunks of concrete and passing buckets of debris, stopped what they were doing. They looked skeptical, angry, and tired.
Bareheaded, wearing a windbreaker, Bush climbed onto a burned-out fire truck. Someone handed him a bullhorn. He looked around the crowd, at the devastation in all directions. He draped his arm around Bob Beckwith, a retired firefighter in street clothes and FDNY helmet, who had volunteered to search. I was standing thirty feet away.
“Thank you all,” President Bush said. “I want you all to know . . .”
“We can’t hear you,” someone yelled.
“It can’t go any louder,” Bush said. He raised his voice. “I want you all to know that America today—America today is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut, and we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.”
“We can’t hear you!” we shouted.
“I can hear you!” Bush shouted. “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
The crowd roared. It was what everyone on the Pile needed to hear.
“The nation sends its love and compassion,” he said, “to everybody who is here. Thank you for your hard work.” President Bush said, “Thank you for making the nation proud, and may God bless America.”
Speaking from the heart, President Bush gave us a sense that we’d get through this.
Then President Bush began walking through the crowd of first responders, which I’m sure drove the Secret Service agents crazy. It made me nervous. The rubble pile was still very dangerous.
The president came over to me. To my right stood Captain Tardio, and on my left, Father Brian Jordan, a childhood friend and Franciscan priest.
The president put both of his hands on my shoulders.
“Mr. President, we can’t find my brother,” I said, almost choking on the words. “He’s a fire lieutenant.”
“God will provide,” he said, looking at me with deep empathy. He had no political agenda; he really felt my pain.
Bush turned to Captain Tardio, whose grim face looked to him for answers.
“Mr. President, you need to do something about this,” Tardio said. Bush leaned over and whispered in his ear, loud enough for me to hear, “We will get them.”
He moved on to other people, touching shoulders, shaking hands, looking deeply into faces, obviously very moved. His presidency had been dramatically changed by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and what he saw at Ground Zero. I wondered what was going through his mind. Would we really get the people responsible, and how?
As I grappled with the magnitude and horror of what had happened, I felt overwhelmed. Not just that my brother had been killed, but that so many had died, so much had been destroyed, at the hands of violent extremists. Studying psychology in college and counseling in grad school, I had learned that, for crime victims, losing control is often as devastating as the trauma of the offense. I knew I needed to take back that control, to establish a personal strategy to move forward. I turned my focus to my new job as the Incident Command’s planning chief.
Finding survivors was still our main goal. But who was in charge of the recovery effort? According to the City of New York’s executive orders, in cases of fires and building collapse, the FDNY is the lead agency in charge.
While the FDNY was officially in charge of the collapse operations, we had to coordinate the efforts of multiple agencies like the NYPD, the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD), the FBI, FEMA, and other city, state, and federal agencies that began arriving in New York to help. It was an enormous challenge.
By early in the second week, we concluded that our Incident Command Post at Ten House on Liberty Street was much too close to the search scene. The operations were getting too big. Our primary mission was searching for survivors, but the command staff along with the chiefs of operations, planning, logistics, and safety needed some distance to focus on the big picture. We were building a system to coordinate our efforts.
Ten House became the Operations Command Post. On September 17, we moved the incident post six blocks to Battalion 1 quarters on Duane Street. What was now called the WTC Incident Command took over one side of our three-story firehouse.
Vehicles were removed from the apparatus floor, which became the meeting room; we built a plywood floor over the concrete that was easier to walk on and put staff offices on the second and third floors. Cushman electric carts ferried us back and forth to the Pile.
I knew we needed a written operations plan with marching orders, so everyone would know what everyone else was doing at Ground Zero, but I was busy handling day-to-day crises. Then twenty-seven people arrived from Arizona: the Southwest Area Incident Management Team (IMT) of the U.S. Forest Service. Called in by FEMA, the team had extensive experience managing responses to wildfires in western states. One morning in the middle of the second week, their planning chief met me in front of the Duane Street firehouse.
“I’m from the Forestry Service,” he said. “We have an Incident Management Team.”
You’re from Forestry? I thought. The WTC has one surviving tree. How can you help?
I’m sure my skepticism was obvious. How could managing wildfires translate to an urban disaster?
I must have looked overwhelmed and exhausted. He looked at me with compassion.
“Chief,” he said softly, “I know how hard you have been working and it looks like you can use some help. I can help you put together an Incident Action Plan and manage all the other planning functions. We’re not going to take over anything.”
His empathy and my exhaustion overcame my doubt. I brought him upstairs to meet Chiefs Cruthers and Hayden.
“I’m putting the IMT on the third floor,” I said. Nobody blinked an eye. “Okay, Joe,” Cruthers said. Hayden nodded. “Whatever you need to do, Joe.”
The Southwest IMT was quickly put to work. By September 23, with their help, I wrote our first Incident Action Plan (IAP), which provided interagency coordination for this historic event. Imposing structure through my planning job helped me feel as if I was regaining control.
Every morning around 7:30 a.m. at the Duane Street firehouse, we held an interagency meeting with as many as a hundred people from numerous agencies with operational tasks at or around Ground Zero. Eventually, we had so many people involved we had to issue identification cards to manage access to the Pile.
During each shift, FDNY had hundreds of firefighters on site, in addition to NYPD and PAPD officers and Urban Search and Rescue teams. The National Guard installed a chain-link fence around the sixteen-acre rubble field and worked with law enforcement on security. The military was still flying over the airspace. The FBI was performing its investigation. The city medical examiner set up a temporary morgue. Four major construction companies worked on dismantling the skeleton of the WTC and debris removal. The EPA and the New York Department of Environmental Protection took air samples.
Before each morning meeting, the Southwest IMT (later relieved by similar teams from Alaska) worked with me to develop an agenda. During those meetings, agency representatives had to answer three questions: What did you accomplish in the last twenty-four hours? What are you doing today? What do you plan to do seventy-two hours out?
Each day, agencies received a new site map that listed operations in each sector and various logistical facilities, and that pointed out dangerous areas.
Unexpected issues arose. For example, the DEP required that every dump truck carting debris to a landfill in Staten Island, where it was sifted through, had to be washed down in order to prevent contaminants from leaving Ground Zero. This wasn’t something the FDNY had ever had to handle before on such a large scale, but we figured it out. The New York Sanitation Department was brought in to handle that.
We also had to deal with some unexpected incidents. Below the WTC complex was a huge underground complex of shops, vaults, and concourses. In mid-October, a security team spotted scorch marks on a basement doorway below WTC-4 that hadn’t been there a few hours earlier, as if someone had tried to break in. Behind the door was a mountain not of rubble, but nearly a thousand tons of gold and silver, worth an estimated $200 million, being held in a vault in the custodial care of the Bank of Nova Scotia. It was hard to believe that someone was trying to pull off an Ocean’s Eleven–type heist. A team of thirty firefighters and police officers was mobilized to remove the precious metals.
Those were only a few of the situations that cropped up, and all of the situations created coordination challenges. Almost every time something new occurred, we needed to make sure everyone working on the Pile knew about it, even if they weren’t directly involved. We had lost too many people in the attacks, and the last thing we needed was to lose someone else because of a lack of communication. For all our good intentions, a siloed approach had been the norm until I brought in the IMT, but now we were sharing as much information as we could.
While we coordinated efforts at Ground Zero, the Office of Emergency Management oversaw state, federal, international, and private-sector support based out of a building that ran the length of Pier 92 a few miles away. From them, I was able to order daily flyover photographs and LIDAR (light detection and ranging) pictures, three-dimensional images showing the changing elevation of the Pile.
Safety Chief Ron Spadafora visited the Pile every day and held safety meetings each afternoon. Miraculously, we had very few injuries on the site. We provided everyone with a respiratory mask. But at the time, we were getting conflicting information from the EPA that the air was safe. We wouldn’t understand the significant environmental health hazards created by the toxic dust and fumes and its effect on first responders until years later.
Some of the most vital people working on the Pile were managers from four major construction companies who brought in ironworkers and cranes to safely dismantle and remove the steel skeletons and large chunks of concrete. At one point, we had twenty-seven cranes at the site.
Since there were no recognizable landmarks on the debris field—which changed daily as material was removed—rescuers relied on the map broken into 75-square-foot grids. Our assumption was that victims would be found together. In reality, some were located in the buildings’ footprints, others in the collapse zone, but overall they were found all throughout the complex.
In some cases, we were finding intact bodies. Some firefighters were well preserved because of their bunker gear. But more often, we found body parts, sometimes just equipment, or personal items. Human remains were taken first to the makeshift morgue at the World Financial Center, and later to the regular morgue at Bellevue Hospital.
Our paper method for recording where victims were found proved unwieldy and inexact. If human remains, equipment, or personal items were found, the searchers marked an X on the paper grid showing the location—at best a guess. The task of writing notes by hand then transferring that information to a database only complicated the recovery process.
However, the location of remains found at this enormous crime scene was crucial for medical examiners trying to identify victims and therefore help grieving families. I certainly had a personal interest in finding my brother and members of Engine 33.
On September 26, I held meetings to challenge thirty scientific experts to develop technological alternatives to help streamline the recovery process at the WTC.
After much discussion, we concluded that a handheld GPS device offered the best solution in terms of simplicity and functionality. But there was no device fitting our requirements on the market.
Working with two companies, Symbol Technologies and Links Point, we came up with the solution. The idea was to use a wireless device with a bar code scanner, and programmed with GPS applications, that could be uploaded to a database.
Symbol Technologies had already manufactured something similar that was used by the Red Cross to track blood supplies. Digging around existing inventory, they found a supply of rugged handheld gadgets that could withstand heat, dust, and manhandling by our searchers.
Software engineers with Links Point, based in Norwalk, Connecticut, began working around the clock to create a GPS attachment and software for the device. The two companies accomplished in three days what would normally take three months.
At first, we were worried the GPS component would not work well because of the canyon effect caused by the city’s skyscrapers. You need at least three satellites to ensure a good GPS reading. But the large space created by the buildings’ collapse opened up the skyline for the devices to connect to the satellites.
Proper use of the device required less than thirty minutes of training—another big plus, especially for people under extreme stress.
Once we were using the new devices, each recovered victim or item was identified by a numbered tag with a bar code. The firefighter scanned the item, then automatically recorded the date, time, and location of the evidence, usually within three meters. The firefighter could choose from a list of categories to describe the item: apparatus (division car, battalion car, engine, ladder, other); human remains (FDNY, law enforcement, civilian); gear/equipment; other. The database meshed the GPS latitude and longitude readings with our grid maps.
We started using our GPS Victim Tracking System on September 28. Two days later, I assigned a team of one officer and six firefighters from the hard-hit Ten House, armed with the devices, to begin patrolling the four quadrants of the site and record findings of victims and equipment. Everyone on the Pile knew to call the Ten House GPS unit to record the location of any recovered person or equipment. Ten House continued this role for the next thirty days; then another unit would assist them.
At the end of each tour, the GPS device was inserted in a synchronization cradle, which automatically uploaded the captured information to a database. Updated several times a day, the database gave us an accurate picture of where remains and equipment were being found. It was tough seeing the multiple red dots on a single map marking bodies, which covered the entire 16-acre rubble field.
This was the first use of this kind of GPS tracking in an urban setting. By the time the search ended months later, firefighters had recorded the location of 4,000 body parts, tagged each with a bar code, then passed that information and the remains to the medical examiner. The FDNY GIS team used this database to show on a map the recovery location of those victims—a tragic and graphic picture of a catastrophic event.