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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jim Dwyer
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August 14 - August 23, 2023
When they emerged, however, they found they could not communicate the plan to the entire force because their own radios could not contact the dispatchers. Joseph Cahill, a paramedic, said the experience felt like being in an infantry unit that had been overrun. “We are scattered everywhere,” he said. “Nobody knew where anybody was. Nobody knew who was in charge.
In actual fact, of the fifty-eight firefighters who escaped the north tower and gave oral histories, only four said they knew that the south tower had fallen.
The inherent difficulty of using a small, hand-held radio in a high-rise setting was addressed by issuing new Command Post radios to chiefs, twenty-two-pound devices that a fire captain had designed using an old marine radio and a battery taken from his daughter’s Jet Ski. They were carried to the upper floors of a large building and were effective at establishing clear communications with commanders below.
The protocol of police and firefighters sharing one set of helicopters as response and reconnaissance aircraft was also resolved, and the two departments resumed training flights together.
Years after the disaster, New York was still working to install radios that would allow firefighters and police to talk to each other on the same frequency in special situations.
The next major disaster that New York responded to was not man-made and it was far away, in New Orleans, where 650 firefighters and police officers arrived in September 2005 to help bail out a city that had disappeared beneath flood waters. Some of the firefighters drove down in a pumper truck that the people of New Orleans and Louisiana had given to a Brooklyn firehouse in December 2001 to replace one destroyed on 9/11. The truck was called “The Spirit of Louisiana.” In the days after the towers collapsed, a group of New Orleans firefighters had traveled north to help out, cooking and
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Those in the command center had no time to think of who was not there: The cries for help were raining on them, unceasingly.
They met at Ground Zero—the girl from Atlanta, and the other sixteen-year-old, named Melody Salcedo. She explained who her father was: Esmerlin Salcedo. And she warned the other girl of learning too late the value of loving the people who cared for her.
Many of them had seen a lot of Harris in the years since the attacks, since the painfully slow walk down stairway B in the north tower’s final minutes, the pleading procession with Harris and her fallen arches that had left them in a precise place when the building fell, the only stub to survive as the tower dissolved around them.
For all their impact, the attacks were powerless to stop a future that swept forward with fresh moments of joy and achievement, as well as new encounters with panic and sadness and illness, like the heart condition that eventually felled her.
The family of Peter Alderman, the Bloomberg employee who could not escape a breakfast conference at Windows on the World, used funds they received under a federal compensation program to create a foundation that helps the victims of terrorism and mass violence cope emotionally with the trauma. The impulse to build something enduring—gardens, parks, literacy programs, cross-cultural learning opportunities, scholarships funded by golf outings and road races—was a common response by the surviving families.
They were part of a determined band of 9/11 family members whose gaze fell on everything from building codes that left the skyscrapers without enough stairways for emergency evacuations, to a system of national intelligence that seemed to have a hard time passing e-mail messages from one agency to another.
Over the next decade, two million members of the U.S. armed forces would be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2004, he was one of thirty New York City firefighters on active duty in the military, and he arrived in Iraq on November 2 of that year. Before the month was out, he and another soldier were killed by a roadside bomb. Firefighter Engeldrum was the first of fifteen emergency responders who survived 9/11 but died in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Sister Cynthia, a nonsmoker, developed asthma and lung disease after her work at the site. She died, at age fifty-four, in November 2006, from respiratory ailments.
Abe Zelmanowitz, had died while standing by his wheelchair-bound friend Ed Beyea, on the 27th floor of the north tower. Days before the attacks, Zelmanowitz had gone to a Sabbath lesson where the rabbi spoke about sacrificing oneself for the love of God. “You speak of the great historical heroes, like Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai,” Zelmanowitz asked the rabbi, “but how can a simple Jew like myself show his love of God?” He answered his own question on the morning of 9/11.
Backers defended them as well-meaning missions to export democratic principles to the Middle East and maintained that they had reduced American vulnerability to terrorism by transferring the theater of battle overseas. Opponents argued that the wars were killing people who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and were fueling violent anti-American sentiment.
It’s always painful to be at Ground Zero, but sailing past the location of the attacks while standing on the deck of my own boat, knowing that in contrast, bin Laden was hiding in a cave, made me feel something of a sense of triumph over terrorism.
Leaving the meeting, she picked up a souvenir: a paper napkin embossed with the presidential seal that had been under President Obama’s water bottle.
She flew from Newark aboard Continental Flight 3407; about five miles from the airport, the jet lost speed. An investigation would find that the overtired pilot did not use the right procedures to fly out of a stall. All forty-nine people on board were killed, as well as one person on the ground.
On April 4, 2011, as the tenth anniversary of the attacks approached without a single person accused of direct involvement having faced charges in any forum, the attorney general announced that the Justice Department was dropping plans for criminal trials. Mohammed, the highest ranking Al Qaeda figure in captivity, would be presented as an enemy combatant to a panel of military officers who would decide his fate. Guantánamo would remain open indefinitely.
“The American people did not choose this fight,” the president said. “It came to our shores and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.”
Sounds like Russia's war in Ukraine.
“Interesting,” he told the church about Harris and the firefighters, “how both groups accuse each other of saving the other. I think that’s the best part.”
And let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, Through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Anyone interested in the history of late twentieth–century New York City can turn to City in the Sky, a masterful account of the trade center’s rise and fall written by Jim and Eric. Ford and Eric helped create a framework for cataloging the research, and it has stood up well, thanks to a database designed by Tom Torok. It has been an essential and durable tool in piecing together a narrative from thousands of fragments of information.
Former Commissioner Thomas Von Essen provided his perspective, thoughtfully and candidly. At his initiative, the FDNY took oral histories from more than 500 firefighters. The city has refused to make those documents public, but we were able to review about 100 of them, and not surprisingly, they provide essential views of what happened that day.
The staff of Der Spiegel produced Inside 9/11, a useful reconstruction of the morning’s events.
And first and last, Cathy, Maura, and Catherine, not only give me my daily bread, but forgive me my fairly frequent trespasses.
NYPD Officer John Perry (above left) was turning in his retirement papers when the first plane struck. He asked for his badge back and ran to help.
Firefighter Tom Kelly of Ladder Company 15 ran an elevator in the south tower that carried the injured to safety. As a young man thirty years earlier, Kelly had been a steamfitter working on the World Trade Center. On his first date with his future wife, he sneaked her into the construction site, and they looked over Manhattan from forty floors up. (FIRE DEPARTMENT OF NEW YORK)
