Firehouse (10 page)

Gradually the air cleared, and Otten made it to the stairwell again. He was once again surrounded by people moving with purpose, and with no one openly panicking. It was hard to judge time in that environment, Otten thought, but he believed that he made it down from the forty-fourth floor to the ground level in about five minutes. As he reached the lower floors, he had one last image, of descending with the others and the firemen coming in, single file alongside them, heading in the opposite direction, up into the tower. He looked to see if he could find his brother-in-law, but he could not.

As they reached the lobby, there were men who were obviously very much in charge, risking their own lives while giving directions, telling them where to go, telling them to
Hurry up, move along, keep going, and don't look up!
Of course, Otten remembered, they all looked up and saw the apocalyptic sight—the tower burning, the debris falling, a terrible vision from an unimaginable nightmare. He and two friends from his office made it out, and started zigzagging away from the building: a block north, a block east, a block north, a block east, until they were safe. They tried calling loved ones on their cell phones, but all the circuits were blocked. It was not until they finally reached an office building about twenty blocks away from the World Trade Center, where they were able to use phones with landlines, that they were able to reach their families and tell them that they were all right. Around 11:00, Marion heard that her brother had gotten out safely.

Later, as he replayed in his mind what had happened, Michael Otten decided that his had been a terribly close call and that he had been saved by Yuji Goya, his managing director, who lost his own life saving others, by the young man with the unwieldy backpack, and, he believed, by his brother-in-law Michael Otten and men like him who had given their lives for utter strangers.

The five men from 40/35 who had gone to Ocean City, Maryland, for a golfing holiday had passed an ebullient Monday evening, some of them imbibing enthusiastically at a local bar. They had slept a little late the next morning, but then Mike Kotula got a call on his cell phone from his son, who said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. At first they thought it was a small plane that had strayed into the tower, but then they watched the story unfold on television, and they knew immediately how bad it was. So they piled into the car and raced back to New York. It was the fastest ride he had ever taken, Kotula remembered later, and the slowest as well. It was deathly silent inside the car—not a word was spoken the entire way back. They drove at about 100 miles per hour, and they listened to the news on the car radio, trying to imagine what their pals were going through, trying to convince themselves that the 40/35 rigs had gotten down to the site late enough so that the men were outside, helping to rescue people. That was the key word:
outside
. But they also knew their hope was not anchored in any real information, and the news on the radio was becoming grimmer and grimmer. By the time they got to New Jersey, the radio broadcaster was announcing the collapse of the south tower.

From every corner of the city and its surrounding communities the men from 40/35 who had not been on duty that morning were making their way to the firehouse and to Ground Zero, as it was already being called. It wasn't easy to travel in the city by this point—public transportation was down and there were roadblocks everywhere—but somehow they got to the site, whatever it took. Terry Holden, the house's senior fireman, came in from suburban New York, driving off the highway at times to bypass traffic, using the grass shoulders along the Palisades Parkway. When he got to the firehouse, he found it in total chaos. Some officers were trying to assign the men to teams, but it was unusually disorderly because of the breakdown in communications at the upper level of the chain of command. (One of the things the senior firemen were privately very angry about was the outdated quality of firehouse communications gear—hardly up to speed. They believed that it had
never
been good enough, especially during high-rise fires, and that in the case of the World Trade Center, with the central nervous system knocked out, better communications equipment might have saved a large number of firefighters, particularly before the second collapse.)

The men assembling did not think they were moving quickly enough, and there was virtually a mutiny; some of the men were so restless and angry that they began to commandeer vehicles, anxious, if need be, to go down on their own. Others hitched rides. Some ran on foot, and one or two biked down. By the time most of them got there, Holden remembered, the two towers had collapsed, and it was essentially impossible to do any rescuing. They were pushed back by the firemen who had gotten there earlier, and who feared that more buildings might fall. It was no longer a question of how many men they might save, Holden later remembered thinking, but of not losing any more.

To the degree that they could, the rescue workers from 40/35 worked the edges of the ruins, shouting the names of their colleagues and stopping everyone they met to ask if they had heard or seen anything of the men from Engine 40 or Ladder 35. Sean Newman, one of the first of the 40/35 off-duty men to get there, at around 10:30, knew immediately that the news was going to be very bad. Everywhere he went, he asked other firemen if they had seen or heard anything about the men from his house. But no one knew anything. In time he found the rigs, but by then he was already so aware of the completeness of the tragedy that he could not bring himself to look alongside the officer's seat, where a list of the men who had gone on the run was kept—he did not want to see the names of his friends and colleagues who had been caught up in this terrible day and who he feared might all be dead. He did, however, see a giant shoe where the chauffeur of the truck had sat, and he knew that it meant that Jimmy Giberson had been driving, because in the house, only Giberson had feet that big. He knew as well that it meant that they had almost surely lost Jimmy.

Terry Holden had never seen anything like this wreckage before. Usually if there was a collapse, it was possible to dig through it to some of the pockets, known as voids, in which the firemen might have survived. But this chaos was so enormous; it was an avalanche of steel and concrete that had fallen straight down. The weight of the collapsed material was beyond Holden's comprehension. It was hard to look at this and think of anyone living through it. Firemen like to think that their will and their talents are great enough to fight back against the awesome force of even the worst fire. But no one could imagine challenging this collapse and rolling it back. There was not going to be much in the way of voids, Holden thought.

Chris Lynch, a chauffeur on the Engine who had worked the Monday night shift, had just missed going on the run. He had been relieved by Bruce Gary, who told him to go home early. Lynch, thirty-six, had wanted to make the 9:15 train from Penn Station to Farmingdale in Long Island, where he lived. The next train was not until 10:15, so he could save an hour by taking the early train. Lynch called his wife to tell her that Gary had relieved him, that he was going to make the early train, and to ask if she could meet him at the station. Just then, as Lynch was in the office talking to his wife, both Steve Mercado and Gary came over to tell him that he should call Battalion because they might be looking for someone to work at another house. He would be able to pick up some overtime that way. Lynch was coming off a fifteen-hour night shift (the day shifts are nine hours), and he had a twenty-four-hour shift coming up the next day. He had already worked a good deal of overtime in the preceding weeks, and so he decided not to call in to Battalion.

Instead he rushed over to Penn Station and made it in time to catch his train. Minutes prior to his boarding, the first plane hit the north tower, and as the train passed under the East River to Queens, the conductor made an announcement about it. He was somewhat casual, so the news did not seem so urgent to Lynch at first; he thought that a small plane had collided with the building by accident. Then very quickly the passengers began to pick up more bulletins, among them that a second plane had hit the other tower. Shortly before 10:00, a woman with a Walkman said that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. By then Lynch knew that it was a terrorist attack. He continued home to Farmingdale, changed and showered, and got ready to go back to work. For some reason, he did not think immediately of his own company going down there—“It didn't dawn on me. It should have, but it didn't,” he said later. With his wife uneasy and obviously frightened about the idea of his return, he quickly ate a sandwich, headed back to the city, and raced to the firehouse. The rigs were gone; what he found instead was complete chaos. So Lynch and a few others grabbed a Red Cross van and headed to Ground Zero.

At the site Lynch wandered through the rubble looking for his friends. Finally he ran into another member of the house and asked him, “Have you seen anything of our guys?” The answer was so stark that he would never forget it. “They're all dead,” the other fireman said. Lynch thought,
Are you crazy? That just can't be. Nothing like that's ever happened before. If it's bad, maybe we lose one or two men. So it can't be, things like that don't happen. You have to be wrong
. But then the other man's words began to sink in, and he began to wrestle with the terrible questions that would haunt so many of the men who had not been on the rigs that morning: Why did
I
survive? Why was
I
allowed to live?

That night when he finally got home, Chris Lynch was in his bathroom, a bathroom that Bruce Gary had been renovating for him—at no cost, of course—and there he saw written on the unfinished plywood wall Bruce's notes to himself: what he needed, what he wanted to do, measurements, and his cell phone number, just in case Chris needed to call him.

When Ray Pfeifer, one of the men from the Maryland golf outing, arrived at the World Trade Center site, among the first people he ran into was Thomas Von Essen, then New York's fire commissioner. Pfeifer asked him what he had heard, how bad it was. “About five hundred,” Von Essen answered, and it took a second for that to register, for Pfeifer to realize that Von Essen was way ahead of him in estimating casualties and that 500 meant 500 firemen presumed missing.

And so it began for Ray Pfeifer, his struggle with something new to him, trying to comprehend both the scope and the permanence of this tragedy, the idea that this was a nightmare he would never wake up from. It was never going away, and nothing was ever going to be the same for him. It was not a new chapter in the book of his life, it was more like a new book for his life.

Back at the firehouse, there was a darkening sense of what was happening, of how terrible it was, a tragedy beyond anyone's comprehension. By the early afternoon, there was talk that the department might have lost more than 300 men. Most of those gathering back at Sixty-sixth Street—many of them sent in from other houses—knew all too well from watching television and seeing both buildings pancake down that this collapse was likely to have been fatal to anyone under it. Gradually, there was a strong sense that the unthinkable had happened, that every man they had sent down from 40/35 might have died. Throughout the day, there were more and more reports, and the news was unrelentingly bad. Not only had their own men probably been lost, but also a number of other firemen with exceptionally close ties to the firehouse, men who still palled around with the 40/35 men: Larry Virgilio, who had worked there for years before going over to Squad 18 (a special unit committed to dealing with hazardous materials); Mike Boyle and David Arce, the boyhood friends who had become firemen together and, even after moving on to Engine 33, still played on the 40/35 softball team; and Larry Stack, a big strapping man of about six feet four inches who had served as a lieutenant at 40/35 in the early '80s, and had worked there as well as a covering captain when one of the house's regular officers was either sick or on vacation. Stack was widely regarded by the men as an almost perfect officer, balancing an instinctive sense of command with just the right amount of warmth, which he always seemed to summon at just the right time. Slowly it dawned on everyone that they were witnesses to, and part of, the worst day in firefighting history.

One of the genuine heroes who emerged at 40/35 that day was Mike Kotula, who had been among the men playing golf in Maryland. On his return, Kotula had joined the others from the house in the search for their buddies at Ground Zero, and he saw at once how hopeless it all was. Trying to find anything under that grotesque mountain of rubble had been more than he could bear. So it was that when he got back to the firehouse around midnight on Tuesday, he had begun almost purely by instinct to man the phone, taking the incoming calls from the wives and families and closest friends. He had done it in part because he could not bear to go back down to Ground Zero, but he had also done it because he believed that someone who knew and loved all these men and their families should be on the phone—this was not a job for a stranger.

His new task was in those heartbreaking hours and days very important, and he stayed on the phone, almost without a break, through Saturday night. Early on, he had taken a brief break to eat while one of his colleagues manned the phone. Just then, the daughter of one of the missing men called in for her hourly update, and she was upset that Mike was not there to field her call. With that, he did not leave the phone until Sunday morning. Other men brought him food and coffee, and he worked through the night, for the vigil never ended, nor did the incoming calls. Somehow it was decided, without ever being decided, that Kotula was very good at this, and therefore he should stay on phone duty as long as he could handle it. Kotula was aware that in the very first hours after the attack, some newcomers to the house had handled the phone and had, because of their own inadequate sources, passed on erroneous information—including the wrong departure times for the rigs, which had given families perhaps too much hope early in the crisis.