A Decade of Hope Read Free Page A

people can survive in pockets after collapses for days and days and, in a few rare cases, as long as thirteen days. We did think there would be more people alive, injured, especially since there were many underground levels. As it turned out, there were very, very few.
    I thought that the people whose transmissions on the radio came through from that North Tower stairwell were confused, and that they were actually in a different building. I didn’t believe anyone could be alive in that pile of rubble—not there, in that position. If they had said we were on Promenade B or one of those levels downstairs, it would have sounded more rational but for thirteen of them to survive in that stairwell, it’s still a miracle.
    As we made our way around the building again and started to do our searches, however, it was becoming quickly apparent that there weren’t going to be survivors here. We called it a rescue operation for a few weeks, but after the first few days it was getting harder to believe that. We never lost consideration for the hope within families, however. Some of them wanted to believe that, like in earthquakes, we’d pull someone out ten days later, so we certainly acted as though we were going to pull people out, and we worked as hard and as fast as we could to find people to pull out. But it was becoming more and more apparent that it just wasn’t going to happen. And it didn’t.
    We were assured through our mutual aid agreements that various fire departments would assist us in covering many other parts of the city. They came in from all over Long Island and Westchester County and staffed some of our firehouses that day and that night. At the scene we had adequate people. At major fires, Pete Ganci used to say, “We have 210 engines, so keep sending me engines until I tell you to stop.” We had an enormous resource of fire companies here in New York that was unavailable to anyone else in the country. So despite our terrible losses, we still had a huge number of people to do this task downtown. While I never felt that we didn’t have adequate staffing there, it was difficult to stabilize the situation, because the whole perimeter was on fire, and so much damage had been done to the water mains: 90 West Street, a huge building, was on fire on the south side; on the north we had 7 World Trade Center completely in flames. Either of these would have been the fire of the year for us, but we were also trying to stabilize many, many smaller fires.
    We had no chance of committing enough people to put out the fires burning uncontrollably at 7 World Trade Center, so we decided that we would stop operating there because of the danger of the collapse of that building. We pulled everyone to a safe distance, which proved to be a good move, because all forty-seven stories of the building came down around five o’clock. The fact that everyone was out of the way, and no one else was hurt, was a small consolation at the end of the day.
    We knew that 7 World Trade Center had a large diesel-fuel tank. It had been a controversy to allow diesel fuel in that building, which was meant to be used for the city’s Office of Emergency Management and to power emergency generators for the stock-trading operations that went on in that building. So we knew that there was fuel in there to add to the problem, and once that building came down we could recommit everyone to what we were doing.
    At some point late that afternoon the fire commissioner, Tom Von Essen, came back to the scene, and he said, “You’re now the chief of department.” Officially I was promoted on Sunday morning, and following that we had a big promotion ceremony to replace all the officers we had lost. So there were promotions in every rank that day. It was held outside of headquarters on Sunday morning.
    Â 
    The fires continued to burn for months in that pile, intensely. I’m not sure when and at what point they were