Sometime before midnight on September 11, I walked through the FDNY command post looking for water to flush the ash and dust from my burning eyes. On my way back, a cluster of floodlights caught my attention. Beneath them, a group of chiefs and officers gathered around folding tables. Spread across those tables were yellow legal pads covered with names.
At the time, I didn’t think much about it. It looked like one more assignment among the hundreds unfolding around us. Only later did I understand what I had witnessed. Those yellow legal pads were the beginning of what would become the department’s official missing and deceased list.
Every few minutes someone hurried over with another piece of information. A firefighter had been seen at a staging area. Someone questioned information that had arrived only minutes earlier. The chiefs compared notes. A name was crossed out. Another was added. Others were moved as more information came in.
The attacks had occurred just before the morning change of tours. Firefighters reporting for duty responded alongside firefighters whose tours had already ended but turned around after hearing the news. Off-duty members drove directly into Manhattan from home. Companies became separated carrying out their assignments. Some members made it home hours later without anyone realizing they were safe. Others never made it home.
With the list, the department wasn’t just working to identify the dead and missing. It was trying to account for an entire fire department.
The reports never stopped coming. Chiefs, company officers, hospitals, firefighters and every other source imaginable fed information into the process. Every new piece of information changed the list. Every change brought the department one step closer to accounting for every one of its members.
Building a lifeline
Before dawn on September 12, I left the World Trade Center site and was sent to Fort Totten in Queens, where the FDNY was establishing its Family Call Center.
I was still wearing the bunker gear I had searched in the day before. I hadn’t slept, but I don’t remember feeling tired. Everything that had happened over the previous 24 hours still felt unreal.
Having been tasked with staffing the call center, I began reaching out to retired firefighters I knew personally. Many had helped families after previous line-of-duty deaths. They understood the department. They understood grief. More importantly, I trusted them to have the impossible conversations that were about to begin.
One by one they arrived, quietly taking seats around the room. A dozen office desks had been pushed into place, each with a beige telephone and a computer sitting on top. The computers weren’t connected to anything we could access, so they served little purpose that morning. In one corner a television remained tuned to the news. Beside it sat a copier and a fax machine — our critical link to headquarters.
No one spoke very much. We all understood why we were there.
As the room came together, I finally had a chance to call home. It was the first time I had spoken to my wife and children since leaving the morning before. They knew I was alive, but they hadn’t heard my voice. I did everything I could to hold back the tears. They didn’t. I told them I loved them and then hung up.
The smell of smoke still clung to my bunker pants and my hair. Every time I caught it, I was reminded of where I had just been and, despite everything I had seen, where I hoped to return. We still believed there were survivors beneath the rubble, and I wanted to be back alongside my fellow firefighters if they were found. But for now, this was where we were needed most.
We explained how the system would work. Families would call one central number, and the calls would automatically roll from phone to phone so no one received a busy signal. We developed a simple script. If someone’s loved one appeared on the current version of the list, we would tell them. If they didn’t, we would explain that they were not officially listed and ask them to call back in an hour while headquarters continued trying to account for every member.
When headquarters faxed us the first official version of the list, we made copies and placed one on every desk. The list I had seen begin on yellow legal pads only hours earlier was now the closest thing we had to the truth.
I called headquarters to let them know we were ready.
The calls begin
A few moments later, the call center number began scrolling across television screens. For a moment, the room was quiet. Then the phones lit up.
In an instant, the room became one of the grimmest places I have ever stood. Every retired firefighter was on the phone — a dozen agonizing conversations unfolding at once. Wives, parents, brothers, sisters and children were desperately searching for someone they loved. Under ordinary circumstances, FDNY officers and firefighters would have been sitting in those families’ living rooms delivering the worst news imaginable. September 11 had taken that away. The scale of the loss was too vast.
Every family who called us wanted the same thing: an answer. More than 24 hours had passed since the attacks, and they still hadn’t heard from their loved one. Without realizing it, their desperate calls were also helping us build the next version of the list.
We answered each family with the most current information we had. Then we started asking questions of our own: Had anyone heard from them? Had another firefighter contacted the family? Was there anything — anything at all — that headquarters might not already know?
As the day went on, the fax machine never seemed to rest. Another version of the list would arrive, then another, then another. Every time it did, we walked from desk to desk collecting the old copies, dropped them into the trash beside the copier, made fresh copies and started again. It was essential that everyone was working from the most current version. We couldn’t risk answering a family from an outdated list.
And this is how it went for hours. One call ended. Another was already waiting. Every call seemed to generate another one: a name, a telephone number, a company assignment, a question that needed answering or a family waiting for a return call. The computer monitors were soon covered with sticky notes capturing these details.
The retired firefighters answered one heartbreaking call after another. Between calls, they lowered their heads, wiped away tears, gathered themselves, and answered the next ring because another family was already waiting.
The weight of every name
After making sure the room was running the way it should, I finally walked into the bathroom to wash my face.
I took the list with me.
Standing there alone, I unfolded it and began reading the names. Page after page — 15, maybe 20 in all. Many were men I had known most of my life. Many I had worked beside. I knew their wives. I knew their children. Some names brought a face to mind. Others reminded me of a firehouse, a company or a story I’d heard over the years. Some were firefighters I barely knew. Others I didn’t know at all.
It didn’t matter. Every one of them was one of ours.
After reading the list, I stood there staring at myself in the mirror, doing everything I could to keep my composure. Until then I had kept myself moving, never allowing myself to think about what had happened. But now, for the first time since arriving at the Trade Center, I stopped long enough to face the reality of it all. The loss was too much to comprehend.
I returned to the World Trade Center site that afternoon, leaving the call center in the capable hands of the retired firefighters. The center continued operating for the next week as families searched for answers.
For the first couple of days, the list continued to change. New names were added. Others were removed. Information was corrected. Every revision brought the department one step closer to accounting for its own and another family one step closer to an answer.
Then it stopped. The final list contained 343 names.
In the days and weeks that followed, copies found their way into firehouses throughout New York City. Firefighters sat with them. They studied them. Every name carried a different memory depending on who was holding the pages.
No document was more important to the FDNY in the days after September 11 than the missing and deceased list. What began as names scribbled on yellow legal pads had come to carry the weight of an entire fire department.
I never saw it as a list of 343 names. I saw one firefighter. One family who loved him. One firehouse that missed him. One future that would never be lived.
343 times.
