AT THE SCENE OF 9/11 CARNAGE
It was a wish no one wanted to come true.
“In the summer of 2001, all of us in the Duane St. firehouse had been hoping for a real fire,” writes Chief Joseph Pfeifer.
They had been bored for months. “Smoke detectors going off in office buildings, a car fire or two, and a phone book aflame in a garbage can,” Pfeifer recalls. “Nothing exciting.”
Then, one cloudless morning in September while responding to a gas leak report, Pfeifer and his firefighters looked up to see a jet headed for the World Trade Center.
Soon they, and the rest of the FDNY, would have more fire than they could handle.
Pfeifer’s “Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11,” tells what came next. And it’s a story of bravery, loss and survival.
At 8:46 that morning, Pfeifer and the crews of Engine 7 and Ladder 1 were at the corner of Church and Lispenard.
They had just traced the gas leak to a smelly sewer when they saw a plane hit the North Tower.
“The aircraft slammed dead center into the building, the wings carving a huge gash through the upper floors of the 110-story skyscraper,” Pfeifer writes. “A massive fireball erupted, followed a second later by an earsplitting explosion.”
Immediately, Pfeifer ordered everyone to the scene. “Of one thing, I was certain – we were going to the biggest fire of our lifetime, the biggest fire since the FDNY was founded in 1865,” he writes.
He was sure of one other thing, too.
“I was in charge of the FDNY response for now.”
By 8:50, Pfeifer was in the North Tower lobby. Broken glass and shattered marble littered the floor. One bank of elevators had been destroyed by a fireball rushing down the shaft.
An evacuation order had already gone out over the North Tower’s PA system. Right now, though, none of the building’s 99 elevators was working. Hundreds, maybe thousands, were still upstairs.
Other firehouses were already responding. Pfeifer briefly saw his brother Kevin, a firefighter with Engine 33. But this was no time for conversation. NYPD helicopters circling the buildings’ roofs had already determined an airlift was impossible. The firefighters would have to trudge up those endless stairs and clear the towers, floor by floor.
Then a second plane hit the
South Tower.
“Our problems had just doubled,” Pfeifer writes. “In 17 minutes, we had two 110-story buildings struck by commercial airliners, leaving multistory gaping holes and triggering infernos.”
He was in the North Tower lobby when he heard crashes.
“The distinctive thud sounds were human bodies hitting the canopy. As the fire raged out of control, people had begun leaping from the upper floors. Each unnerving crash was a life extinguished — and also a grave threat to first responders.”
At 9:30, the first firefighter was killed, fatally struck by a jumper.
“Firefighters are coming to rescue you,” Pfeifer announced over the PA. “Please hold on.”
It was a belief Pfeifer clung to. “We had the bravest firefighters in the world,” he remembers thinking. “We’d get as many people as possible out; then we would fight the fire, floor by floor.”
Pfeifer watched as one firefighter after another climbed up the stairs. He watched as evacuee after evacuee came down. He glimpsed Father Mychal Judge, a beloved FDNY chaplain, saying a silent prayer.
Then there was a sound like a “monster locomotive,” and a blinding cloud of smoke and dust poured out of one of the elevators. Debris rained down. Reluctantly, Pfeifer ordered the firefighters to leave the North Tower and regroup outside.
On his way out, he nearly stumbled over Judge’s body. Firefighters tenderly carried him to a nearby church.
At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed. At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower followed.
“As each twin tower pancaked from the top down, they destroyed everything,” Pfeifer writes. “Most of the 16-acre complex had been utterly demolished. My mind reeled in disbelief. … I had landed in a war zone.”
And he was surrounded by thousands of casualties. Some firefighters started digging, hunting for survivors. After searching throughout the afternoon, they found only one body. A temporary morgue was set up.
Even as the smoke began to clear, people wandered about, dazed.
“Everyone’s asking me, ‘What happened, what happened?’” one firefighter recalled. “I said, ‘Hell is what happened.’ ”
That night Pfeifer drove home to Queens, numb and exhausted.
FDNY chief’s harrowing look back at attack on WTC & grim aftermath
When he woke up on Sept. 12, he could barely open his eyes. He went to a doctor who picked out 50 pieces of debris. Then Pfeifer drove back to the downtown mountain of destruction – The Pile.
This would be his routine for weeks.
At the site, search crews operated 24 hours a day. There had been reports of people surviving up to 14 days in collapsed buildings. The FDNY vowed to search for 18 days, to be sure. On the 19th day, they would officially move from search-and-rescue to recovery.
No one – particularly no firefighter – would be left unknown and unmourned.
Making it even more personal: Pfeifer’s brother was still unaccounted for.
There were occasional bright moments, when – miraculously – survivors were pulled from the rubble. There were bizarre ones, such as crews discovering scorch marks on the Bank of Nova Scotia’s underground vault. Someone had tried, unsuccessfully, to take advantage of the chaos and steal the $200 million in gold and silver inside.
The news, though, was relentlessly grim. The teams found many bodies and many more parts of bodies. They soon stopped finding survivors. But the work went on.
Then, in November, Mayor Rudy Giuliani “went off the deep end,” Pfeifer writes. “He told first responders to abandon recovery efforts and to go home.”
It was time, Giuliani declared, for New York to bulldoze the site and “get back to normal,” Pfeifer reports. Firefighters were outraged. Only when the relatives of missing civilians objected did Giuliani give in.
The mission would continue until May 30, 2002, after 108,342 truckloads of rubble had been removed and the bodies of as many victims as possible – including Kevin Pfeifer – recovered.
No one survived unscarred. Many who helped in the recovery efforts developed serious health problems. Some who had been on the site had horrible injuries. Others carried invisible wounds.
“Why am I alive and so many others are dead?” Pfeifer quotes one firefighter asking. “What am I supposed to do to deserve this?” queried another survivor.
Pfeifer found his own answers. He helped counsel firefighters suffering from PTSD. He helped make plans for how the city could best respond to the next terrorist attack.
Retiring from the department in 2018, he is now director for crisis leadership at Columbia University.
He went on because that’s what firefighters do.
“You do what God called you to do,” Father Judge told firefighters when dedicating a firehouse in the Bronx. “You show up. You put one foot in front of the other. You get on the rig and go out and you do the job, which is a mystery. … You have no idea what God is calling you to. But he needs you. He needs me. He needs all of us.”
And the following day — Sept. 11, 2001 — all of them answered that call.