New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Fire chief: ‘I had lost my sense of security’
NEW HAVEN — Many Connecticut firefighters went to ground zero in New York in 2001, after the planes hit and the smoldering skyscrapers crumbled into rocks, pebbles and acrid dust.
They went to help search for survivors. When there were no survivors, they searched for bodies. Then, as things got even bleaker and the work got even more grim, they sifted through the smoking, steaming pile for weeks, looking for any remains.
But few rushed in from four minutes away and got there before some Fire Department of New York firefighters could arrive from Brooklyn, then learned as they served that they had lost good friends, colleagues and people — New York City firefighters — with whom they had done joint training.
New Haven Fire Chief John Alston Jr. did.
Alston is 60 now, and his life is different because of what happened that day. At the time, he was 40 and a Jersey City, N.J., firefighter assigned to the Heavy Rescue squad.
He still has the helmet he wore that day — currently being refurbished.
He has model firetrucks displayed on a shrine-like shelf in his office in Fire Headquarters on Grand Avenue, just below a poster of the twin towers. They’re Fire Department of New York trucks from companies that lost people in the collapses.
Alston can tell you which
friend he lost was associated with each company represented on each truck.
There’s Vernon Cherry, who drove a ladder truck.
“He could sing,” Alston said. There’s Lt. Peter Martin from Rescue 2 and Andy Fredericks — aka “Andy Nozzles” — from Squad 18, and FDNY Deputy Chief Ray Downey.
Alston also fondly recalled Jersey City fire dispatcher Joe Lovero, a fire buff who went to the towers that day. He ended up losing his life.
Like many people who were directly touched by Sept. 11, it changed Alston’s life, he said.
“For a short while, it changed how I viewed the world,” he said. “Where I would normally have faith in people, I didn’t.”
It also taught him “never take anything for granted,” he said. “... Live every day like it’s the most important day.”
Alston, who lived in Plainfield, N.J., at the time, found out about the first plane that hit the World Trade Center from a neighbor. He had just gotten rid of cable and had yet to install a satellite dish, so he had no TV at home.
The neighbor told him “that a plane had hit the World Trade Center,” he said during a recent interview in the office he’s had in New Haven’s Fire Headquarters since relocating to become New Haven’s chief in 2016. “It just sounded odd.”
He went across the street to briefly watch TV coverage at his neighbor’s.
Then he went to work.
Alston felt like he was in a movie as he headed to his Jersey City fire station.
But this was no movie.
About a quarter of the way to Jersey City, “you could see the towers” from the road, Alston said. “It looked like smokestacks.”
In those first minutes, before the buildings tumbled, there was confusion.
At first, the supervisor who was on told him not to go to his regular firehouse. Then he was told to go to his regular firehouse “while the on-duty guys went to the city,” he said.
“Then it changed” and he also was told to drive through the eerilyclosed Holland Tunnel into lower Manhattan.
Then he got to what was to become known as ground zero, which was very familiar to him.
“Because we trained with New York all the time, we knew where to go and what to do,” he said.
When he arrived, Alston could see that World Trade Center Tower 7 — the smaller, lesser known building that also collapsed along with the twin towers, still was on fire.
He initially was assigned to the corner of Vesey and Church streets, about three blocks from the fallen buildings.
He watched as Tower 7 went down.
“The fires were raging inside that building,” and “there were several other buildings that were on fire,” Alston said.
Early on, confusion reigned both
at the scene and in firehouses throughout New York.
“You didn’t know who was working and who wasn’t” because many firefighters whose shifts were ending jumped on the firetrucks heading to the scene along with those who were just coming in, Alston said.
Alston, like many of the proud, tough firefighters and cops who were at ground zero, has gone to and through therapy in the years since. He replays the memories etched into his consciousness when the anniversary rolls around, as well as in between.
“I remember seeing a police officer — and that look of horror on his face,” Alston said. “That made an impact on me.”
He guessed that he probably would have seen a similar look on his own face, had he been able to see it.
‘I’m a man of faith, and I just kept telling myself, “My God is bigger than this — our God is bigger than this,” he said.
At that moment, a moment when buildings were still falling and firefighters were still hoping to recover living survivors, “no one’s cellphones were working,” Alston said.
But at one point, he checked his Sprint phone and found that it was working.
“I called my dad,” he said.
At that point, a broadcast reporter, Lisa Evans, saw him and asked if she could use his phone, Alston recalled.
“She called in her story on it,” he said.
Alston spent 18 uninterrupted
hours at ground zero during that first stretch, as police, firefighters and medical workers from all over the Northeast — and at least as far away as Chicago — descended to help in the search and recovery operation.
Then Jersey City Fire Chief Tom Kearney “called us back in” about 18 hours later, he said. “He wanted us home. He wanted us to talk to our families.”
Alston went home early that morning.
“I went to my church,” he said. Then he went to his house. His oldest son, John III — now 34 and assistant director of admissions at Clark Atlanta University — came home from school.
They hugged.
“I collapsed on him,” Alston said. In the days that followed, Alston was back at ground zero as it became clearer and clearer that they were looking for bodies — and remains — and not survivors.
What was it like?
“It was hand-to-hand, bucket ... sifting through.”
He, and hundreds of others, would retrieve a big pile of debris and sift through it — then do it over and over for days.
At that time, there also were many new residents of Jersey City — Manhattanites, who had evacuated either temporarily or for longer, and in some cases decided to move to New Jersey rather than go back to their old homes.
In some cases, “they were just walking to get out of New York.”
In the days and weeks that followed, “there were so many volunteers
who came. They set up blood banks. We had lots of support.”
But in the weeks, months and years that followed, there also were tough times even for a big, tough, career firefighter like Alston.
“What was demoralizing was, for me, I had lost my sense of security,” he said. “There were several times I didn’t want to get out of bed on the various anniversaries.”
On Sept. 11 and in the days, weeks and months that immediately followed, “we found out ... that America loved firefighters,” Alston said. But years later, those warm feelings seemed to have faded somewhat, he said.
Then there were the constant reminders of what had happened.
“Years later, I saw a bunch of refrigerated trailers outside Bellevue” Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States and one of the largest.
It was a strange feeling when he learned what was stored in the trailers.
“It was body parts,” he said. Alston recalled some tough times he went through in the years following the attacks.
“I became a pretty angry young man for awhile,” he said.
“I thank God I’ve gotten better,” he said, recalling that his wife, Cheryl, “saw me when I was in bed in a fetal position” at one point, and said, “We’ve got to get you help.”
He credits the therapy, in part, for helping him get through it — “but more so than the therapy, my pastor, J. Michael Sanders,” he said. The Rev. J. Michael Sanders, pastor of Fountain Baptist Church in Summit,
N.J., “was amazing,” Alston said.
Among other things, Sanders taught Alston not to worry about what he can’t control, he said.
At one point, it became beneficial for Alston to talk about what he had gone through, he said. In 2014, he was selected to speak to a group of Navy SEALs in Virginia Beach, Va.
While there for the assignment, he met a SEAL whose father had worked in the World Trade Center — and who was at work for the last time that day.
He had a conversation with the man. He wouldn’t say what they talked about, but said it helped.
Alston, like many who worked at ground zero in the months following the attacks, now is a member of the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund “because I don’t know what going to happen.”
In fact, several of his co-workers from that time have died of what are believed to be Sept. 11-related injuries — including former Deputy Chief Tim Kearney, brother of the Jersey City chief at that time, who died of cancer in 2020.
For years, Alston has been going to New York’s official Sept. 11 remembrance ceremony at ground zero — and he’ll be there again this year, he said.
Meanwhile, his youngest son, Malcolm, now 31, who was 11 at the time, has followed his father into firefighting. He now is a lieutenant in the Plainfield, N.J., Fire Department, Alston said.