By Luis Perez
Newsday (New York)
Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
After losing more firefighters on Sept. 11 than any other station, Hazmat 1 and Squad 288 in Queens continue to deal with the tragedy while preparing to handle the next act of terrorism. Most of the veterans at the firehouse have left since the attacks, leaving newer recruits to train to be part of the most specialized firefighting unit in the FDNY.
A plastic soda bottle oozing with volatile household chemicals is thrown against a brick wall in Jamaica. But the Molotov cocktail doesn’t blow up.
In minutes, firefighters of Hazmat 1 - trained to defuse dirty bombs and clean up toxic chemicals - arrive at 89th Avenue and the Van Wyck Expressway, responding to an incident that is more teenage prank than Orange Alert.
A firefighter punctures the container with a penknife, another dumps ash on the bubbling liquid. That fast, the threat is over.
The most specialized firefighters of the FDNY pull into a red brick station house in Maspeth, Queens, that is home to Hazmat 1 and Squad 288, another specialized anti-terrorism unit. Outside is a billboard-sized memorial dedicated to the 19 men from the house killed on Sept. 11, 2001 - the most from any firehouse in the city.
Dealing with past and future
For the 69 firefighters who work here, it’s a balancing act: being the city’s first response team for the next big terrorist or chemical disaster as they live with the excruciating weight of 9/11.
“You definitely think about it,” said Hazmat 1 firefighter Michael Herold, 43, of Levittown, catching his breath after responding to a call one recent Thursday.
“I wouldn’t call it pressure,” adds Seaun Boland, 48, of upstate Newburgh. “It’s always on your mind. Are we thinking about an attack? I am. I personally feel it’s absolutely going to happen. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet.”
Only two of the 39 men who were assigned to Hazmat 1 on Sept. 11, 2001, remain working there today - veterans Phil McCardle and Joe Iovino.
“For a house to completely change over in five years,” said Lt. John Berna, 44, of Massapequa, a 17-year-veteran who leads Hazmat 1, “it’s completely unheard of.”
Loss of veterans
Most of the reasons relate directly to 9/11. Since fire department pensions are determined by hours worked and not years served, many who toiled for months in the recovery effort opted to retire during the past few years, according to union officials. Others have left because of lung ailments contracted during that time. Some simply couldn’t handle continuing to work as firefighters.
The names on metal plaques affixed to the marble memorial belong to 11 men from Hazmat 1 and 8 more from Squad 288.
“The guys that we lost were a lot of the senior members, and when you lose people like that, you lose the knowledge,” Berna said. “I have an immense amount of respect for the new people that came over from the various firehouses, because we threw an awful lot at them in here in a short period of time.”
Herold and Boland are both FDNY veterans, each with nearly 20 years on the job. Yet both are new to Hazmat 1. They volunteered for this work after Sept. 11, knowing the unit had taken a big hit.
“I came here with 16 years on the job and I feel like a brand-new probie,” said Herold, who was surprised at how much homework and reading was involved.
It’s firehouse tradition to assign mentors to new recruits.
“Before 9/11, when you came into Hazmat, you had guys who had 10 to 15 years here, teaching you,” Berna said. “Now they have to learn it, understand it, and pass it on.”
So Iovino and McCardle have done a lot of passing it on in the past five years.
They were there that day
Iovino was supposed to be off on Sept. 11, but when he heard the news, he rushed to the firehouse and jumped in a spare panel truck with a few other volunteers headed for lower Manhattan. By the time they arrived, the second tower had already collapsed.
Iovino says matter-of-factly that he knew all of the 94 men in the department’s special operations command who died that day.
“It’s always in the back of your mind,” Iovino, 53, said of all those men, all that loss. “For guys who were here before 9/11, it’s kind of like a part of you.”
His voice tightened up: “I feel it doesn’t affect me, but it probably does.”
Hazmat 1 remains the only FDNY company dedicated solely to handling hazardous materials, and its members need 500 extra hours of classroom training over two years and are constantly learning how to use cutting-edge equipment to tackle their jobs. Technically, it’s an elite crew, but within the department, even Hazmat members call it a geek squad of boring and tedious work.
Berna refers to what they do as “MacGyvering” - an instinctive soup of science and wits often not detailed in department manuals. A Hazmat 1 firefighter is expected to be as comfortable with the Periodic Table of Elements as with a roll of duct tape.
Hazmat 1’s expertise was called on during a Greenpoint, Brooklyn, warehouse blaze earlier this year that burned for three days, and again during the recent explosion of an Upper East Side town house that authorities said was detonated by a doctor in a divorce battle.
Tough road of training
It used to be that a firefighter would come to Hazmat 1 with 10 to 15 years of experience. Now they come with five, and train twice as fast, taking the textbooks home to memorize the intricacies of substances such as chlorine and Cobalt-60 that the federal government deems likely agents in the next terror attack.
Before Sept. 11, they were trained to respond to natural disasters and chemical combustions. Now, they must anticipate how chemicals might be used for terrorism, said Hazmat’s Chief-in-Charge Robert Ingram, who coordinates Hazmat operations department-wide.
“It’s not just understanding symbols and signs anymore, but it’s noticing the people around you, or other things that might be going on at an event,” said Ingram, a 25-year veteran of the FDNY who was promoted to replace Chief John “Jack” Fanning, who died with 18 of his men in the 9/11 attacks. “It’s not just a couple of sick people you’re dealing with, but something that may have been released in the air, and they may have to put on their protective suits more quickly.”
Ingram said that it has taken five years to replenish the Hazmat team back to the 2001 strength of 39 people. The emphasis in recent years has been to spread the Hazmat training to the entire FDNY force. Already, 3,500 firefighters of the FDNY’s 11,500 force have received job-specific Hazmat training.
One of the new men in Hazmat 1 is Carlos Ruiz, 31, a white collar worker from Astoria who was moved to become a public servant because of Sept. 11.
When he failed the police exam because he’s colorblind, Ruiz opted for the fire department, and made it. He was promoted to Hazmat 1 three years into his new career.
“It’s definitely challenging to come in here and learn this stuff, but I love it. It’s great,” Ruiz said.
At his former engine company, Ruiz carried the hose.
“I never had a fire where I had to experience a firefighter who had passed,” said the new Hazmat member, “or even a civilian.”
The firehouse sits on a hill that is among the highest ground in Western Queens. It affords a postcard view, over the Long Island Expressway, of where the Twin Towers used to be. To the side of the firehouse is a small public park with a memorial dedicated to “life so freely given.”
This is where widows came after the towers fell. This is where tourists came to pray with the firefighters, and a neighborhood woman dropped by every few days to offer loaves of freshly baked bread.
On the morning of 9/11, Berna was away from the house, watching TV at his home in Massapequa, his legs in braces after a severe injury he suffered during an Astoria hardware store blaze that killed three firefighters, one in front of him.
The infamous “Father’s Day Fire” was Berna’s own 9/11, he said. The injury kept him from being able to to rush to Manhattan as Iovino had that morning. Instead, Berna went to the firehouse to answer the phones.
Mostly, it was the wives calling: Have you seen him? Have you heard from him? Is he coming back?
“Deep down, you knew what was going on, but you didn’t want to tell them,” Berna said. “The whole 9/11 thing is in the back of everyone’s mind, but it’s nothing that we dwell on.”
On this Sept. 11, there will be a ceremony at the firehouse, as there is every year, and the families will return.
Five years later, even strangers continue to stop by this firehouse. A few days after the Molotov cocktail call, Marion Helleneck drove up to the hill in a gleaming white Cadillac with a palm-sized American flag on the dash.
She handed over an envelope with a check for $200, and said it was for their children’s fund. Her late husband, Helleneck explained, had been a fire warden on the 92nd floor of the South Tower. He retired a year before the attacks, and later died of natural causes at age 76.
“We lost a lot of friends,” Helleneck told the men of Hazmat 1. “I just wanted to say thanks. I just had it in my mind - all this time - to come by.”
Rebuilding the FDNY
Beyond the loss of 343 members on Sept. 11, hiring has had to keep pace with retirements. Loss of veterans also brought a slight drop in departmental experience.
Average years of FDNY services
Sept 10, 2001 Dec. 31, 2005
Battalion chiefs 26.42 24.89
Deputy chiefs 28.96 27.70
Captains 21.77 20.49
Lieutenants 18.51 16.35
Firefighters 10.50 8.23
Hires Retirees
2000 441 518
2001 719 531
2002 924 1,221
2003 1,238 669
2004 757 520
2005 740 510
SOURCE: FDNY