Posted on 09/11/2026 6:37:45 PM PDT by Red Badger
At 10:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Coast Guard lieutenant named Mike Day keyed a radio in New York Harbor and said the only sentence that mattered.
“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”
The boats were already coming.
The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subways were dead. South of the towers, hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere left to walk. Some jumped into the Hudson. Some stood on seawalls that were never meant to be docks and waited for anything that floated.
Dunkirk took nine days to pull 338,226 Allied soldiers off a beach in 1940.
On 9/11, roughly 800 mariners on about 150 vessels moved as many as 500,000 civilians off Manhattan in about nine hours. Ferries. Tugs. Dinner boats. Pilot boats. Yachts. A retired fireboat. Rubber dinghies that held two people. The largest water evacuation in history.
NY Waterway did not wait for the official call. After the second plane hit, the whole fleet moved. Captain Rick Thornton nosed his ferry against a seawall that was not a slip and started taking people off. Some of them he pulled out of the river. His company alone carried about 158,000 people to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Queens.
On a normal Tuesday they carried 34,000.
The Staten Island Ferry moved more than 50,000 people and came back the other way with water, bandages, and men who still had work to do in the dust.
The old fireboat John J. Harvey, already retired, tied up near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, took civilians off the seawall, then pumped water when the hydrants downtown died.
Lt. Day later admitted what the day required. “I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”
In raw numbers it was bigger than Dunkirk. No boat went down. By nightfall the southern tip of Manhattan had been emptied by people who were not on anyone’s list of heroes when the morning started.
They were tug captains. Ferry deckhands. Pilots. A lieutenant with a microphone. Ordinary boats answering one sentence.
All available boats.
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This is a piece of the story I’d never heard about. Thanks for sharing.
My Lord that piece has me emotional!
Thank you for sharing this wonderful reminder that good Americans will readily step into the gap in the time of great need.
Me too Ender. I’ve never heard about boat evacuations.
Thanks, Red, for posting.
Twenty-five years later and new information is still coming out. That morning is burned into my memory.
In Texas, getting ready for work that day, we saw the first plane hit over breakfast. The news said it might have been a small plane that hit the tower. I had no cell phone but my pager starting going off halfway to work at Ft. Sam. I pulled over to the first phone booth to answer the page. Yes, there were still phone booths back then. “Get to the base now!”
Told to get to the base as fast as I could.
What an awful day.
We weren't supposed to use internet/work computers for non-work stuff, but that rule went out the window that day. Those of us not following the news online gathered in the cafeteria to watch CNN on the TVs. I saw a news report speculating that as many as 50,000 people could be injured, and I sent an email to HR: Could we get the Red Cross bloodmobile that visited our factory scheduled to come ASAP? It was a small thing but the only way I could think to do something meaningful on a day when everyone wanted to respond in some way. I guess HR agreed, because we had the bloodmobile soon after.
A brief documentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDOrzF7B2Kg
NYC boat captains are a different breed, as also shown by the response to flight 1549.
Thank you!!!
Amazing heroism.
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