In a new book, New York’s former fire commissioner describes a department ”in complete disarray” on September 11, with many top officials missing and its people at the World Trade Center knowing less than television viewers.
”Throughout my 31-year career, I had gotten used to the idea that my enemy, fire, was tenacious and impossible to kill, but could be beaten. But this, this was something new,” Thomas Von Essen writes in ”Strong of Heart,” which is due in bookstores next month.
The book is the most extensive account of the attack so far from a top city official. It covers Von Essen’s career but begins with an account of how the department dealt with the attacks that killed 343 firefighters.
Even hours after the twin towers collapsed, killing 2 800, the situation remained chaotic with department radios and cell phones all but useless.
”Information was so poor that I frequently lost my temper … Hours were passing by and information was still sketchy and it was all so damn frustrating,” Von Essen writes.
Von Essen was in a car on Manhattan’s East River Drive, about two miles from the trade center, when he and his driver, firefighter John McLaughlin, first saw smoke over the sky. ”Is that a cloud?” Von Essen asked.
”No,” replied McLaughlin. ”That’s a job.”
At the scene, he recalls seeing ”bodies and body parts” on the sidewalks. ”All around me, people trapped up there by the fire were already jumping, or falling, to the pavement.”
He found senior officials including Chief of Department Peter Ganci, First Deputy Commissioner Bill Feehan, Battalion Chief Ray Downey and a department chaplain, the Rev. Mychal Judge, already on the job in the lobby of one of the towers.
”But all of us in that lobby knew less about what was happening than the people watching the fire on TV around the world,” Von Essen writes.
He remembers Downey, a nationally known expert on structures, telling him: ”You know, these buildings can collapse.”
Within the hour, both 110-story towers had fallen. Downey and the other three were later found dead.
Von Essen, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and other senior officials set up a new command centre at the city’s police academy. At a news conference there, Von Essen for the first time estimated his department’s losses at ”over 300 people that we can’t account for.”’
He says that when a reporter asked how that made him feel, he ”wanted to rip her throat out.”
The mayor, he said, put his hand on his shoulder, ”gripping it hard, as if to restrain me from leaping forward.” – Sapa-AP