A Decade of Hope Read Free Page B

declared under control. We would get daily aerial infrared photos from the [federal] government showing where fires were still burning under the pile, so we could see what was getting better and what was changing.
    At times I thought it was beyond our capabilities as a fire department to rebuild ourselves and accomplish our work at the Trade Center. Who does something like this? How could we? Maybe we needed the army to come in. But we have a lot of talent in the Fire Department, and a lot of people put together a system that worked. And we did it rather rapidly and on the run. Technically, it was a Fire Department–managed operation, but a lot of agencies were involved. We did use the federal resources, and logistical-support people who were used to running massive forest fires helped. FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] teams came in from all over the country. The design and construction bureau, the city department that supervises construction, had a big role also, as did the Police Department, and the Port Authority, which owned and ran the property. But the Fire Department maintained control of the situation throughout. Some people didn’t want to believe that we were in charge—some, I think, were quite offended by that—but it was a Fire Department operation until June of 2002, when it was handed over to the Port Authority.
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    Certainly one of the lessons of this entire experience was my own inadequacies. You do the best you can, but if you think you’re up to the task of something like 9/11 and the aftermath, you’re fooling yourself. You think you can brush aside the pain of the death of these people by gallows humor, or by saying, We’re firefighters, we’re gonna be tough. And that doesn’t work. I was not up to the task of everything that challenged us. There were times when I was terrible at home. We all had frustration, and whom do you take your frustration out on? Usually the people closest to you, because, in your mind, they don’t understand what you’re doing. They don’t appreciate what’s going on, so you shout at them and get angry with them. Looking back, there were certainly incidents like that that I’m not proud of.
    Maybe it took me some time to realize the proper sequence of the events of importance to prioritize what we were doing. Supporting the firefighters who survived and were still around needed to be attended to. We were all worried about the next attack, as we weren’t all convinced that this particular operation was over. Maybe something else was coming? Other buildings? The Empire State Building? Transportation hubs? We thought about these things every day, at least until the end of 2001. And the families of those who died . . . Everyone had different needs. Everyone had different expectations of what we would or could do for them. What we should do for them. Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani, I thought, was great with us, with the families. I think eventually we did a good job with them.
    Thankfully there were so many people within the department who were talented, and who made up for my own inadequacies, because I couldn’t be at the WTC site every minute of every day. I couldn’t be at every one of the 343 funerals. I couldn’t be at every interagency meeting that was held. There was a limit to what I could physically do, mentally do. Members of our department helped out, with funerals, especially. People did a great job making me look like I did a good job, I think. I owe a lot to them. The further it gets from those days, the more I realize that if I hadn’t had a lot of people to lean on in this department, I would have been completely shot day one. I would just have had to walk away from it. Crawl up, roll up into a ball, and be totally useless, because it was an overwhelming task for anyone to do without that caliber of help. But I had it.
    I never got used to the funerals; I don’t think anyone did. There