Twenty-five years is a long time.
Some of us remember 9/11 vividly. Some barely remember because they were children. Some had not yet entered the fire service. And some of the firefighters serving our community today had not even been born. For them, September 11 is history. For me, it is a memory.
Called to Ground Zero
At 10 a.m. that morning, I was asleep at home. I was scheduled to work later that day when the phone rang, calling me in for special service because of the attacks.
By 11 a.m., I was assembling a team of EMTs and paramedics from Danbury Hospital, where I also worked as a paramedic. The hospital’s EMS director had asked me to lead the team, and my fire chief in Ridgefield authorized me to deploy to New York to treat and evacuate victims.
At noon, I was aboard a Black Hawk helicopter circling the southern tip of Manhattan, looking directly down at Ground Zero.
By 1 p.m., we were staged at the helipad, preparing to receive critically injured patients and move them by helicopter to hospitals outside the city.
We waited for patients who never came.
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At approximately 5 p.m., World Trade Center 7 collapsed. Our Port Authority contact told us that despite numerous attempts, they had lost communication with FDNY command. They wanted us to make contact first-hand.
We were put on a bus and driven through the smoke and ash to Ground Zero.
By 5:30 p.m., I was taking responsibility for a medical operation at One Liberty Plaza from a New Jersey paramedic.
When conditions change
My training gave me a foundation, but it could not have fully prepared me for what we found. We had arrived prepared for large numbers of injured survivors seeking help. What we found was large numbers of responders working as hard as they could, with no clear command structure, trying to save civilians and find their lost brothers and sisters. We had to accept the new reality in front of us, identify our role in making it better, and adapt and change to achieve our objectives. That lesson has stayed with me for 25 years.
I believe deeply in training. As fire chief, I have made a commitment to our firefighters that we will not expect them to do something for which we have not properly trained and equipped them. But there is an important second part of that commitment, because training cannot give us a script for every emergency. We train for what we expect to encounter. Then, when the alarm comes in, we have to deal with what is actually there.
Sometimes the house fire isn’t behaving the way we expected. Sometimes the rescue is more complicated than dispatch information suggested. Sometimes the patient’s condition doesn’t fit neatly into a single clear medical problem. And sometimes the scale of what we face is unimaginable. The principles are the same.
We have to recognize the conditions that exist, identify the problems in front of us, understand the resources we actually have, and be willing to change our objectives, strategies and tactics accordingly.
Training gives us the foundation. But ultimately, we have to prepare firefighters to think — and that was not a lesson I learned for the first time on September 11.
A lesson from Chris
Years earlier, I fought my very first structure fire with a fellow volunteer firefighter and paramedic named Christopher Blackwell. Chris and I later worked together as paramedics at Danbury Hospital and again when he served as a contract paramedic in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where I am now fire chief. We also trained together, and I later taught his son, Ryan.
But I was brand new then. I got off the apparatus, pulled the 1½-inch handline I had been trained to pull, and headed toward the front door to fight the fire the way I had been taught to fight a structure fire.
Chris looked at the building and told me to drop the line. He pulled a much larger line instead. The fire we had was not the fire I’d expected. Conditions had already dictated a change from an offensive interior attack to a defensive operation. I did what Chris told me to do that day. It took me longer to understand what he was teaching me.
Chris was also a firefighter with FDNY Rescue Company 3. He was killed when the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11. Chris’s photograph and a plaque honoring him remain in our firehouse today.
And that brings me back to those young firefighters who weren’t alive on 9/11. They can walk past Chris’s photograph. They can learn his name. But I cannot give them my memories of Chris or of 9/11. However, I don’t think that is what we should be trying to do.
Our responsibility is to give them the lessons contained in those memories. Chris taught something to a young firefighter years before 9/11. That young firefighter carried the lesson with him to Ground Zero. And today, as fire chief, I have a responsibility to pass it to the firefighters who come after me. I expect them to pass what they have learned to our next generation of firefighters.
That is how a fire department remembers.
I want the members of our firefighting community to understand why that matters. We are not preparing every fire department for another 9/11. We are preparing your firefighters for the next call. Not every call we go to is a big one, but our job is to make order from chaos, whatever the scale of that chaos may be. And our responsibility is to make sure the next generation is ready to do that.
There is one story from September 11 that, for me, captures that responsibility — a story I got to share with my son when we went together to the 911 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan three weeks ago.
FDNY Ladder Company 3 responded to the North Tower under the command of Captain Patrick “Paddy” Brown. Wearing full gear, they climbed through smoke and fire, helping civilians evacuate as they went. They reached the 35th floor, and I don’t believe for a minute that by that point they didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
At approximately 10 a.m., when I was first being notified of the attack, Captain Brown made the last known report from Ladder 3: “This is 3 Truck. We’re still heading up.” All 11 members of the company were killed.
What remembrance requires
Some of us remember that day vividly.
Some of us were not yet firefighters.
Some were too young to understand what was happening.
And some of the firefighters standing among us today had not yet been born.
We remember the firefighters of Ladder 3, Chris Blackwell and Rescue 3, the other responders who gave their lives that day, and the thousands of civilians who never came home.
We remember them by looking backward, and we honor them by teaching forward — by preparing the people who come next and by making sure that when their moment comes, whatever form it takes, that we’ve given them what they need to do what needs to be done.
So, to Chris, Captain Brown and all those we remember: Rest easy. Twenty-five years later, we’re ready to head up.
