Posted on 09/15/2001 9:18:31 AM PDT by July 4th
Firefighters who arrived first survive to count the fallen
New York - To an outsider, the cryptic words lack urgency: "The signal 5-5-5-5 has been transmitted. Stand by for a department message."
Joe Murphy, Bobby Travis, Vinny Hogan and Rick Saracelli know better. The New York firefighters watch the message scroll across their computer screen Thursday evening at their engine house, three blocks from the World Trade Center wreckage. They say nothing, but their apprehension is apparent.
For as long as anyone can remember, those numbers have meant one thing to a firefighter in New York: One of their own has fallen. Although few remember why, the tradition originated in the days when bells were used to impart the message; they were rung five times.
A few minutes later, the expected announcement. The only mystery is which firefighter - or piece of him - has been pulled out of the mountain of rubble this time:
"It is with regret that the department announces the death of Captain Daniel J. Brethel of Ladder Company 24, which occurred on September 11, 2001, as a result of injuries sustained while operating at BOX 55-8087."
Box 55-8087 is the department's code for the original disaster call.
9:30 p.m. Although members of Engine 7, Company 1, have just been informed that another fallen comrade has been found dead, although they are suspended in a time warp of exhaustion and grief, these men remain the luckiest group of firefighters in Manhattan.
The first company to reach the scene after the first jet crashed into Tower One of the World Trade Center, the men of Engine 7 had reached the 30th floor when they were told to evacuate because a second jet had hit Tower Two. They made it out by minutes.
The first tower imploded around them, kicking up a monsoon of dust that turned the morning sky as black as midnight. Cowering underneath rigs, bodies dropping around them, they walked away physically unscathed, to a man. Even though they were the first responders, this firehouse just around the corner from "ground zero" was the only one in Manhattan not to suffer a single casualty.
To add to the sense of good fortune amid this tragedy, none of the commanders who had rotated through the firehouse in the last five years or so - when the department first started rotating commanders from one house to the next - perished either. One was on the original missing list; he later turned up alive.
To appreciate the extraordinary odds of this level of survival, consider that the 11,000-member New York City Fire Department is believed to have lost more than 300 of its firefighters. The chief is presumed dead. The deputy commissioner as well. About 20 of the 300 battalion chiefs. Even the chaplain is gone, his body carried to a nearby church and laid on the altar by firefighters.
Firefighting is by tradition an occupation passed down generations. So now brothers are searching for the bodies of brothers, fathers are searching for the bodies of sons, sons are searching for the bodies of fathers.
"Three months ago, on Father's Day, we lost three firefighters at once," says Saracelli, a bleary-eyed, mustachioed lieutenant with an eerily collected tone that seems to mask a deeper fury. "When that happened, I said it would be the worst thing I would ever see in my career. Now we're upward of 300 or more. It really starts setting in when you start seeing it confirmed. The difference is, with three guys it's comprehensible. This is incomprehensible, the grief."
It's a tradition for New York firefighters to purchase memorial T-shirts whenever a firefighter dies in the line of duty. Do they purchase 300 T-shirts now? How can they possibly fathom burying 300 of their own?
Firefighter Neil Ottrando, drinking out of a glass memorializing another long-ago fallen comrade as he sits nearby in the firehouse, considers this: "When one guy at a time dies, everyone buys a shirt for $10, and it goes to the family. This would cost a lot of money; there are too many names, so many names."
The trauma suffered by the men of this department is coming at them with accumulated force. That's why there are few tears this evening. Sometimes the men even tell jokes or speak in a surprisingly detached manner or casually pore through the newspaper. But inevitably, the conversation circles back toward death. And who is missing.
The men are waiting for the moment they will crack.
They know it will happen. It just can't happen now, because a mountain of rubble is around the corner, and there might be survivors waiting for rescue inside. They can't crack because they are trudging out of the firehouse in waves, digging for six hours straight or more, sometimes with their hands, returning briefly to sleep a few moments, or eat or vent, then trudging back out to dig again. They can do no less, they say. They were spared, after all.
They are noticing signs of post-traumatic stress: Travis drove through red lights on an infrequent visit home before belatedly realizing what he was doing; Saracelli awoke at 4 a.m. the morning before, dreaming that biological agents were infecting the air around the disaster site and it was too late.
9:35 p.m. Another message.
The only thing different this time is the name: Raymond R. York, of Engine Company 285.
Hogan picks up a missing firefighter list put out by the department. He flips through it. It's 121/2 pages long. Brethel was the sixth name on the list. York is a few pages down. Hogan didn't know either, but other names jump out as he scans the list.
"This is Lieutenant Timmy Stackpole . . . ," Hogan begins.
"Oh God . . . ," Saracelli interrupts. He already knows the story.
"He almost died three years ago in a collapse," Hogan begins again. "His ankles were practically burned off. It burned through his Achilles tendons. He was in a coma. Most men, they would be retired, but he came back. Now he's missing. Now imagine his wife. He was in and out of a coma, they didn't know if he would make it, and then he made it, and now she gets the call that he's missing."
Travis recognizes another name.
"This guy, Freddie, he cheated death seven years ago. He was in a fire, and his body was so hot that when they put ice on it, the ice melted. It turned into steam. But he made it that time."
The power goes out. The firehouse is being powered by electric generators. The men sit in darkness for a moment. The generator goes back on.
10:30 p.m. Despite the chaos, routine fire calls must be answered in Manhattan.
Murphy, Saracelli, Travis and Hogan are assigned to watch for such calls, which are few and far between because the phones are out and most residents were evacuated. The assignment gives them a small break from digging.
But another group of firefighters - Pat Zoda, Rich Knappi and others - pull on gear, grab shovels and head back out to the site. Their hair already matted with sweat, their eyes glazed, their clothing layered with the gray dust that is on everything, the men pile into a red truck and zoom off into the night.
Jamal Braithwaite elects to remain behind with the other men. Braithwaite didn't know how traumatized he was until he went on his first dig after the disaster. One of the several buildings nearing collapse around ground zero started to rattle.
"I had a flashback," said Braithwaite, who has a long, oozing scratch on his forearm from digging. "I couldn't take it. I stayed to try to get through it at first, but the building was swaying, and I just couldn't take it."
He has remained at the firehouse ever since; he doesn't want to go home but hasn't ventured farther than the sidewalk outside.
The firehouse, say the men, is a warm nest, an oasis of normalcy. They have so much donated food that they have started giving it away to reporters and others who straggle in - FBI agents, police officers, strangers who collapse on their sofas. They are nurtured by a woman known as "Mama Norma" who used to be a bartender across the street. She was evacuated from her apartment and showed up the first day of the tragedy and has stayed, cooking and consoling.
12:30 a.m. Friday begins with lightning flashes, followed by the disturbing roll of thunder. As if things weren't difficult enough, soon it will rain. Everyone's jumpy. No one sleeps. Outside, the sirens and racing emergency vehicles never end.
The scene around ground zero has long ago completely lost the feel of New York. It's as if everyone has been taken out of reality and tossed onto some lunar surface.
Lt. Henry Quevado arrives from Orlando, where he was at Disney World with his family when the news hit. He turned on the television and knew the men of Engine 7 would be among the first responders. He was sure the company suffered heavy casualties.
The phones wouldn't work, and it wasn't until he arrived at the station in person early Friday morning that he learned no one had died. He was physically shaking, he says, as he drove.
People also were trying to call Quevado as he drove back from Florida, not knowing he was on vacation. By the time he got to New York, 73 messages were on his voice mail from friends wondering if he was OK.
Now he is standing with Braithwaite and other comrades, awed that everyone survived, hugging those nearby. For Quevado, the emotions are fresh and the gratitude has not yet changed to grief.
"What a (expletive) day!" he says. "My (expletive) stomach is turning. Not knowing what happened to you, and trying to call you and call you, and the phone ringing and no one picking up. . . . ."
3 a.m. The group of men who left to dig return to the firehouse. Some have dark circles under their eyes. They stand in circles and congregate around the back table. They talk about death. None can sleep.
"We found nothing," Knappi sighs. "Just dirt and rocks. . . . It's extremely frustrating. In another hour, I'll go back down and look some more."
Ottrando explains: "They have only found 94 bodies and 90 body parts, and there are supposed to be 10,000 dead. No one can find anybody. I think a lot of bodies disintegrated."
He says that earlier in the day, a group of them found a rig.
"It was smashed," he says. "Fifty guys were standing around it, saying, 'Is that really a truck?' It was three feet high."
Many firefighters perished when they jumped under such rigs for cover. But the first firefighter to die on the outside of the towers, the men say, was flattened by a person who had jumped from the top.
Saracelli joins the table.
"This surpasses D-Day," he says. "My dad, he was a World War II vet. He used to sit around the table telling war stories. I wanted to do something like that; he's the reason I'm a firefighter. I thought this was the closest thing I could do to be like him and not see combat. But even though what we do is battle fires, I never told him much about it because what I was doing didn't compare. But now it does."
Just a few weeks ago, Saracelli says, he was riding his bicycle down the path near the World Trade Center and thinking how much the city had improved in that area, how beautiful it was at that spot.
"Now it's the ugliest thing I have ever seen."
8 a.m. Murphy, Saracelli, Travis and Hogan pile into a rig to head out for a routine call in the pounding rain. Normally, firetrucks with their sirens blaring and emergency lights whirring are shown great deference. But not in this place, where emergency vehicles crowd every block and just about all of them have their sirens blaring and emergency lights going.
Soldiers in camouflage uniforms eventually wave them through. Police officers wearing yellow slickers, slogging toward ground zero, eventually step aside.
It turns out the alarm in an evacuated apartment building had gone off, but there was no fire.
Murphy, chewing on a cigar, carefully maneuvers the rig around a corner, heading back toward ground zero, where Travis left a pair of extra shoes earlier in the evening while digging. He wants them back.
Murphy, Saracelli explains, is extremely careful with his rig. Firefighters have betting pools over who will damage new rigs first. Firefighters are also extremely attached to their uniforms, hence Travis' stubborn determination to retrieve his forgotten boots, which Saracelli is certain he will never find.
Murphy drives past a high school building serving as a staging area. A man walks outside with a search dog; soldiers cluster in the rain. Rescuers are everywhere.
"The dogs we are using now aren't trained to find dead bodies, they are trained to find living people," Murphy comments. "But all these dogs are finding is dead bodies. It makes the dogs depressed, so they have to bury a live person every now and then and let them find them so they snap out of it."
They approach numerous smashed and burned firetrucks that were dragged out of the debris.
"We've lost over 70 pieces of apparatus," Saracelli says.
Not far away, he points out the bike path, now covered with soggy litter and ash. Then, another flattened rig.
"Oh my God, look at that, Joe," Saracelli says. "What was that? Was that a pumper? It makes me sick."
They reach ground zero.
It's difficult to comprehend the enormity of the task being undertaken by men like these until the wreckage appears. Then it becomes clear. They won't have closure for months - not unless they give up, which they say they can't do. It's hard to imagine it will ever end.
Cranes tower over the rubble mountain. An ironworker burns through a steel beam somewhere on it. Sparks shoot up.
"It looks like a monster movie," Saracelli observes.
Large pieces from the towers have wedged in other buildings. Windows are blown out. Saracelli recovered the top of a person's head on the roof of one of those buildings. He thinks the person must have been in the airplane. Earlier that day, one of the tilting buildings around ground zero almost collapsed, spurring hundreds of rescuers to break into a mad dash.
Travis, an American flag stuck in his helmet, sets off looking for his boots. Five minutes later, he returns. Somehow, he has found them.
For a moment, it's enough to bring a smile to his face.
The mood fades quickly back to solemnity as Murphy maneuvers the rig toward the firehouse.
"I have been on this job more than 30 years, but after this is all done, there is nothing more I can do," Saracelli says. "I'm out. I'm moving to Colorado. I will never come back to Manhattan again. Never."
It's a stupid detail perhaps, but in this case, you can bet they deserve to.
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