A Decade of Hope Read Free

operating.
    Thinking about it now, part of what was in my head was disbelief: How could this have happened? The first thought that entered my mind when the building was coming down was disbelief that I was going to be killed by the collapse of the World Trade Center. It just didn’t make any sense to me. Afterward, knowing that both of the towers were gone, I came to accept that it had happened, though it wasn’t really registering in the reality part of my head. It was hard, maybe impossible, to put everything together. Days later I read a lot of the official department interviews, and many people had the events out of sync. They might have remembered they were in a certain location, but we know that they couldn’t have been at that place at that time. The day happened in such a once-in-a-lifetime fashion.
    We have always fought fires in a certain way: You’ve seen this happen before; you’ve seen that happen before. We usually know what to expect. Small things sometimes do occur at a fire or an emergency that are unexpected, but for everyone in the Fire Department, this was completely off the page. So taking charge at that point, I tried to fall back on things that I knew, like sectoring the disaster area, for instance. There was so much going on that I realized that I had to assign my ranking people in charge of each area so we would have some semblance of being organized. The area that came to be called Ground Zero was sectioned into quarters, each led by a single chief. It was organized in our typical fashion: Captains, battalion chiefs, deputy chiefs, and other people worked together as trained companies, as teams, even if they had never met one another [before]. They hooked up with one another, and in some way, maybe common cause, followed the directions of the higher-ranking people, and it worked. Even the chief who was in that North Tower stairwell tried to continue to be a chief. Under the worst possible circumstances, we did form an organization that worked.
    We learned that morning about the Pentagon and about another plane that went down. There were many rumors that this was certainly bigger than just two planes. The first few times that warplanes flew overhead, hearing that sound of jet planes again certainly shook everybody up on the ground. For days I think people believed that we were going to be attacked again. Everyone was on edge.
    I sensed that our loss was almost incomprehensible. When we got back to the command post the information was incomplete. People weren’t really transmitting on the radio. I wasn’t hearing enough to know the full extent. Of course I knew we lost hundreds but had no idea how many. Did we lose everybody who was earlier seen? Almost everybody? Did we lose a thousand people? The numbers were just numbing, beyond what you could say, think, or anticipate.
    High-rise buildings on fire have never fallen down. How did this happen ? History shows there had been localized collapses in high-rises, and I think some of us expected that. But even the worst fires, at the end of the day there was still a building standing. This was the first time. In fact, as we found subsequently, even in controlled demolitions, no building had ever collapsed into itself as the Twin Towers did.
    Back at the command post I could actually see that some people, like Chief [Peter] Hayden and Chief [Joseph] Pfeifer, whom I knew had been in the building, were now safe, and that was a pocket of good news among the bad. People from the West Street command post had gone into the basement of the Financial Center and had come back out. Some of them had realized what was going on. But we were having a hard time and were only learning what had happened as we interacted at the command post and walked around the scene. But throughout that day I still had no idea how many people were missing, except that it was an incredibly high number. None of us knew.
    We were all familiar with the fact that