The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Captain recalls Ground Zero
Perry Joint Fire District sent 4 men to help on 9/11
Tim Sitz’s day started with routine checks in the early morning in Perry. By sunset he was in New York City in a Perry Joint Fire District ambulance heading toward Ground Zero.
“The biggest thing was you could see the plume — or the header — from many, many miles away when we were driving through,” Sitz recalled about Sept. 11, 2001.
Sitz was a probationary firefighter with Perry at the time. He had eight years of experience as a firefighter, but had only joined the Perry Joint Fire District about four months earlier. He had also served four years in the Army and had been deployed during Desert Storm.
He was at the department’s Station 2 on the morning of the attack. A captain came out and told the crew members that one of the Twin Towers looked like it had been hit by a plane and there was a fire.
“After the second plane hit the tower and the Pentagon was hit, (the department) started looking for volunteers, so I volunteered through my lieutenant who was on duty at that time and then when the towers collapsed, the chief at the time and the captain at that time made the decision of what guys to go,” Sitz said.
Twenty years later, Sitz, who is now a captain with the department, is still unsure how the selection process was made. He was one of four from the department chosen to head to New York. The others were Bob Fitzgerald, Steve Baum and Perry Township Trustee Phil Haskell.
Once in the city, there were police roadblocks everywhere.
“So that was kind of surreal,” he said. “No matter where you went to, when we came across any of the bridges, it was road blocked. Certain intersections, major intersections, were roadblocked. (Police) would just lift the barriers and flag us in.”
Sitz remembers there was very little traffic, “especially when we got into Manhattan there was only emergency vehicle traffic.” He doesn’t recall seeing any civilian vehicles.
“We were told by one of the cops at a roadblock to go down Broadway,” Sitz said. “So we went down Broadway, we got to Vesey Street and there was a spot that we could find to park. We parked there and then we just joined up with a line of firefighters that were heading down because it was one block away from Church Street.”
Some of the firefighters were from New Jersey; some of them were from Maryland.
“We joined forces with them and started walking into the pile,” Sitz said.
“For the most part what we did was jump into bucket brigade lines,” he added. “They had five-gallon buckets or mop buckets — anything with a handle — and we would dig and fill up buckets and move buckets up and down the line. We were trying to dump most of the debris on the other side of Church Street.”
The members of the Perry department worked through the night well into the next day. Sitz said the decision was made around 4 or 5 p.m. on Sept. 12 to come home.
“We’d go back to our ambulance and take breaks,” he said. “That’s what we considered our rally point.”
Sitz said he left the pile around 4 a.m., went back to the ambulance, got something to drink and a candy bar to eat. He got 20-30 minutes of sleep, got back up and went back to work on the pile.
What Sitz remembers most is “just the complete and utter devastation.”
“I always say it reminded me of World War II during the London blitz,” he said.
He said they came across hundreds of shoes, telephone parts, briefcases and countless pieces of paper.
“Then of course, the dust,” he said.
At night, there was a minimal amount of light. When the sun came up, the images were shocking.
“Between Building 4 and 5 they had these, god, they had to be 30-foot long beams that were almost just suspended in air defying gravity,” he said.
The thought of survivors was always on their minds.
“Later on in the night,
What Sitz remembers most is “just the complete and utter devastation.” “I always say it reminded me of World War II during the London blitz,” he said.
several hours after we got there, one of the Port Authority (officers) was dug out and he had reported that his partner was still alive,” Sitz said. “So we were on that chain that was moving buckets to dig this port authority officer out.”
There were 20 survivors in all. The Port Authority officer and his partner were among them.
It was around 3 a.m. on Sept. 13 when the four men returned to Perry. At that point, all Sitz wanted was a hot shower and to go to bed. He was impressed with the firefighters at the station. They swept the dust off the ambulance and kept it. It now sits in an urn that’s part of a 9/11 memorial display in Perry’s Fire Station 1.
“I thought that was pretty forward thinking of them.”