Five Floors Up, page 22
When a Mayday is issued, all other radio communication ceases. The sound of the silence of a hundred firefighters pulsed in Brian’s brain. He opened a communication to the chief out front and told him the helmet was his.
“One-twenty OV, report to the incident commander immediately,” the chief responded.
The incident commander that day was Chief Thomas Galvin. Three weeks earlier, Chief Galvin had been the commander at a fire on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn that killed two firefighters. Believing an elderly woman was trapped inside, a report that turned out to be erroneous, two fire companies climbed to the second story of a burning building. As they did, the stairway beneath them collapsed, dropping them into a first-floor inferno. A lieutenant named James Blackmore died at the scene. Captain Scott LaPiedra held on for four weeks in unfathomable pain at the Cornell Burn Center before he died. Twelve others firefighters were injured, including Timmy Stackpole, who’d been trapped under burning embers. Firefighters dug for thirty-five minutes before they found him. By then, however, his legs had suffered catastrophic burns. He was put on a respirator in his first week in the hospital, and would spend sixty-six days in the burn unit. Stackpole’s recovery and eventual return to his firehouse was nothing short of miraculous. He had multiple operations and three long years of rehabilitation. Chief Feehan spent hours in the hospital with him, and when he returned to the front lines he did so against Bill’s advice. Chief Feehan even suggested that he come to headquarters and work for him. But Timmy would have none of it. He returned to duty in March 2001.
Later, it was determined that a homeless squatter had set the Atlantic Avenue fire on purpose.
Chief Galvin waited at the command post with Brian’s helmet in his hand. By then, radio communications had resumed. Around them were the sounds of a hundred firemen and dozens of rigs in full firefight posture. For Brian, however, it was as though he and the chief were the only people in the entire world.
He looked the chief right in the eye.
“No excuses,” he said.
For his part, Chief Galvin, who would later become a four-star chief and an incident commander on 9/11, knew Brian was an active firefighter with good fire sense. He handed him his helmet without saying a word.
By the summer of 2001, Brian was still on the list for appointment to lieutenant. Because of the limited number of positions and slow turnover, such a wait was not unusual. But for Brian it seemed interminable. Not even having a first deputy commissioner as a father-in-law could hasten the process for him. One day, Bill asked Brian where he hoped be assigned once he was made lieutenant. Though he couldn’t help improve his son-in-law’s position on the appointment list, First Deputy Commissioner Feehan could certainly have some influence over where he would be sent. Brian had given the possibility plenty of thought. He knew he didn’t want to be sent to a middle-class neighborhood in Queens like Hollis, Jamaica, or Springfield Gardens. Going from Brownsville to a single-family-dwelling neighborhood would be like going from a NASCAR race to a riding lawn mower. One day, when he mentioned to Tara that he wanted to go to Harlem, his wife played the devil’s advocate.
“You sure?” she said. “It’s a pretty long trip.” In fact, it would double her husband’s commute. But Brian was adamant.
“It’s where your father was a captain, and where my father was lieutenant,” he said. “That’s where they met, and where I want to work.”
Later, Bill would tell his son Billy that he was never prouder of Brian than when he heard where he wanted to be assigned.
By then, however, the writing was on the wall for Bill. The next mayoral election was only months away, and a new mayor undoubtedly would install a new commissioner and first dep. By then, Bill had outlasted nearly everyone with whom he’d come on the job. Even his coterie of disciples had begun to leave. Henry McDonald retired in 2001. Mike Regan left to take a job in City Hall. Even Cookie the Rookie had moved on to the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
In an interview he gave in April 2001, Chief Feehan told of a conversation he’d had with one of his heroes on the job, a borough commander named Matty Farrell. He asked Chief Farrell how he would know when it was time for him to retire. Farrell told him he would wake up one morning and just know.
“It does not require an extraordinary intellect to understand that no matter who we are we are all bound by the same laws of nature,” Bill once wrote. “Time, for all of us, marches forward. And nowhere does time pass more quickly than in this department. Nowhere.
“As a young firefighter, I smiled at the old-timers who spoke of how quickly their 20, 25, or 30 years had gone by, me wondering how such a long time could seem to anyone like ‘only yesterday.’”
But Bill also knew that his future with the FDNY would stretch further than his own career. Son John had taken the lieutenant’s test, and was waiting to be appointed. Brian Davan, too, had years and years of fire service ahead of him. Bill knew through his relationship with his dad that as long as John and Brian wore the uniform, part of his firefighter soul would stay very much alive. And it might even outlive son’s and son-in-law’s careers.
A couple of times a year, the chief would take his grandchildren to the Marine Unit on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. The department ran weekend harbor cruises for firefighters’ widows and children, but there was often room on the boat for others. The day would start with donuts in the boathouse, and then Sunday Mass, celebrated by Mychal Judge. Out in the harbor, Connor Davan remembers standing on the stern watching the water churn into a wake. The pilot would also let him have a few moments on the wheel. The photo that sat on Chief Feehan’s desk in MetroTech was taken on one of those trips. In the frame, a smiling Bill has an arm around Connor. In the background, rising above the churning harbor water, are the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Bill, of course, had no way of knowing the darkness that would befall him and those looming towers. Nor would he know that his grandson would also take the Feehan family’s well-worn path to the FDNY. And yet, perhaps as seen through the prism of what was to follow, the photo now seems to foretell Connor’s future.
As usual, Bill planned to spend the summer of 2001 in the bungalow in Breezy Point. As many firefighters with houses on the peninsula did, he would commute to his job from there. Early in the morning, he’d stop at “the breakfast place,” a diner in a small strip of stores that locals euphemistically refer to as “downtown Breezy.” There, he might run into another chief or the son in a firefighter family that he knew and spend a few minutes catching up on the local doings. In June 2001, the summer stretched out in front of him like the blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. That idyllic view, however, would be fleeting. The months ahead would bring the most tragic events in the history of any fire department.
The first of those events happened on Father’s Day. On Saturday, June 17, 2001, Tara and Brian were hosting a barbecue at their house in Belle Harbor. Liz was living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, at the time, and Bill drove the company Crown Vic to give her a lift to the party. On the way to Tara’s, they stopped at Coney Island to pick up tickets for the Cyclones, a minor-league team that played in a small stadium right next to the amusement park. Bill took his grandchildren to see the Cyclones, which are part of the New York Mets organization—the kids grew up in Flushing rooting for the Mets. Bill was a lifelong Yankee fan. After they picked up the tickets, Bill asked Liz if she wanted to get a couple of hot dogs at the famous Nathan’s on the Coney Island boardwalk.
“We’re going to a barbecue!” Liz protested.
“How many chances do you have to get an original Coney Island Nathan’s?” Bill answered with a shrug.
They were on the Cross Bay Bridge headed toward Tara’s when the Mayday came over the fire department scanner Bill had in the car. The fire was in a warehouse-sized hardware store in Queens. It had already gone to multiple alarms. By the time they got to Tara’s, firefighters were reported missing.
Chief Feehan dropped Liz off and raced toward Astoria. When he arrived, things were worse than he’d imagined.
For Harry Ford, Brian Fahey, and John Downing, it was a fire not unlike hundreds they’d fought before. All three were elite firefighters. In 1994, a photograph of Downing on the wing of an airliner that had aborted takeoff at LaGuardia Airport and slid into Flushing Bay ran on the front page of the New York Daily News. Both Fahey and Ford worked at Rescue 4, William Patrick Feehan’s old squad. Ford played for the FDNY’s football team and had calves the size of oak stumps. He once carried a baby from a building fire in a scene that looked as though it was shot on a movie studio’s backlot. Fahey was so good at what he did, he taught his techniques at the fire academy.
The blaze had been started by two young teenagers who were spraying graffiti on the back of the General Supply Company hardware store on Astoria Boulevard. Inadvertently, the kids had knocked over a can of gasoline, which streamed into the store’s basement and was ignited by a pilot light on a boiler. The first firefighters on scene saw that the flames in the basement were blue and green, an indication that some kind of accelerant was burning. Not a good sign. The incident commander was about to call for a second alarm when his world, literally, turned upside down.
A small explosion came first, but the one that followed was so powerful it propelled a fireman right through the front window, and blew the incident commander and the chief of special operations from the sidewalk into the street. According to witnesses who talked to newspaper reporters, every imaginable household item, from shower curtain rods to vacuum cleaners, rained from the sky. The building’s side wall collapsed on Ford and Downing. The floor beneath Fahey had given way, sending him to the cellar and covering him in brick, wood, and other debris.
By the time Bill arrived, they’d found Harry Ford and John Downing under the bricks and had taken them to nearby Elmhurst Hospital. The rescue attempt for Fahey was ongoing. The last contact with him was a plea by a man running out of hope. “I’m trapped under the stairs,” he’d said. “Please come get me.”
At Tara’s, Bob Davan had a fire department scanner on, and the family was gathered around it listening to reports. Then Brian’s phone rang. As the expression on the young firefighter’s face fell, the gathering became silent. Brian didn’t have to say a word. In firefighter families like the Davans and Feehans, bad news is conveyed with a subtle shake of the head. Though only eight, even Connor realized that something was terribly wrong. Liz remembers holding the boy. As it happened, the news couldn’t have been much worse. Ford and Downing had died of blunt force trauma from the collapse. It took firefighters four hours to reach Fahey. By the time they did, he had run out of air.
Hours after the fire was out, Bill, wearing a navy blue windbreaker with FIRE N.Y.C. emblazed across the back, walked into the remains of the store. After a lifetime of fighting fire, he saw in the charred wood and smoldering rubble the events that had unfolded in the chaotic, horrible moments that stole three firefighters’ lives. Afterward, he went back to headquarters. There, on a whiteboard, he re-created the scene and began to dissect the response to find where the system had failed the three dead and fifty injured firefighters. Chief Feehan had the ability to look back at even the most devastating fire with the cold, focused eye of a research scientist. He found plenty of blame to go around. Investigators discovered that the owner of the hardware store had kept an illegal quantity of flammable liquids in the basement. But Bill was as angry with fire officers as with the owner. A routine inspection might have saved the lives of Fahey, Downing, and Ford. After the Father’s Day fire, building inspection safety systems and sharing information between city agencies became the chief’s crusade. The move to MetroTech, and new computers, had markedly increased the department’s ability to get building information to fire officers on the way to fires. But Bill wanted the fire department to be able to share with other city agencies. Eventually, the agencies did share data. The upgrades in the system, however, would not come until long after the attack on the World Trade Center.
Harry Ford left behind his wife, Denise, and three children. Brian Fahey’s wife was Mary and they had three sons, including three-year-old twins. Anne Downing, John’s wife, was from County Down, Ireland. They had two children; the younger was three at the time. The loss to the department was staggering. A few months after the Father’s Day fire, the names of Harry Ford, Brian Fahey, and John Downing were added to the list of heroes on the bronze plaque in headquarters, which the chief passed every day.
In an interview, he once said, “No matter what we do, no matter how well we train, no matter how good our equipment is, no matter how hard we try, no matter what, the time will come when we will lose another firefighter.”
It didn’t take long for time to prove him right. On August 28, 2001, a twenty-seven-year-old proby firefighter named Michael Gorumba would die of a heart attack during a fire in an auto repair shop on Staten Island.
Firefighter Gorumba’s would be the last line-of-duty death before 9/11.
SIXTEEN
The White Helmet
Bill was in Flushing that Tuesday morning and began his day at the crack of dawn at the North Shore Diner. He had eggs over easy with bacon and a cup of coffee for breakfast. He read the Daily News at the table. The night before in Denver, the Broncos handed the New York Giants a loss in the first Monday night game of the year. However, his beloved Yankees had pounded the Red Sox over the weekend. Led by the pitching of Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, they’d leaped to a thirteen-game lead in the American League East. In the front of the paper, there were news stories about the election primaries that day. The paper had endorsed Mike Bloomberg for mayor on the Republican side, and Peter Vallone on the Democratic. Mike Regan had signed on with Vallone’s campaign and was probably, Bill guessed, on his way to a polling place somewhere in Queens. The chief didn’t linger over the political stories, however. The thought of the impending mayoral election made him uneasy. Although he’d escaped possible endings before, he would need one worthy of Houdini to extend his career under a new administration. Once he finished breakfast, he paid the check, left the News on the counter, and headed to work.
As usual, Chief was one of the first into headquarters that morning. Soon after he arrived, Deputy Commissioner Fitzpatrick and Tom McDonald, Henry’s brother and the assistant commissioner of fleet and tech, had a regularly scheduled 6 a.m. Tuesday meeting. Under a new fleet modernization program, the department was adding an unprecedented number of new trucks, ambulances, and support vehicles. In one of his last initiatives, Chief Feehan fought hard to get specialty squads, a sort of all-purpose fire response team trained in hazardous material and chemical operations, into service. In addition, construction workers had begun laying the foundation for the $50 million expansion of the Randalls Island training facilities, and the department was in the process of upgrading facilities at Fort Totten in Queens, a U.S. Army post that dated back to the Civil War, for additional classroom space for recruits. Originally the department was going to move the entire fire academy to “the Fort” in Queens. Giuliani had released the money, and the deal was all but done. When architects first unveiled their plans to the FDNY, however, the drawings included a shaded round disc that sat in between buildings that housed high-end condos and the Long Island Sound. When Fitzpatrick saw the blueprint, he asked what the disc signified. Architects told him it was a soaring water tower for the facility. The deputy commissioner shook his head. Blocking upscale residents’ view of a harbor in New York City would cause a blowback of epic proportions and a New York Post story in an instant. The chiefs went back to the mayor and persuaded him to repurpose the funds for a complete renovation to the Randalls Island facility instead, and upgrade Fort Totten for expanded EMS and firefighter classroom training.
But what Bill was looking forward to that day had nothing to do with upgrading facilities or adding trucks to the fleet. Henry was meeting him at headquarters and they were going out for lunch. Bill, sitting at his desk, was looking forward to hearing about his former chief executive officer’s hunting trips and retirement. But then he heard Ray Goldbach calling his name from down the hall.
Goldbach’s office abutted the commissioner’s and faced the downtown Manhattan skyline, including the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a sight at which he often marveled. That morning, the azure sky was especially appealing. Just as he was turning away from the view, he saw something out of the corner of his eye, an explosion on a high floor of the WTC’s north tower. In an instant, a plume of black smoke sprouted from the skyscraper. Goldbach ran into the hall and called for Chief Feehan. Fitzpatrick and McDonald joined them in Ray’s office. Like countless others, Goldbach at first thought it was a small plane that hit the tower. Fitzpatrick knew right off that wasn’t the case.
“Look at the size of the hole,” he said. “It was commercial.”
Specifically, it was a Boeing 767 traveling at 500 mph and carrying eighty-seven people and fifteen thousand gallons of high-octane jet fuel. The impact and explosion registered 0.9 on the Columbia University Lamont-Doherty seismograph twenty-two miles north of the city. According to one report, the windows in FDNY headquarters bowed when American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the north tower. It would have taken the airborne shock waves less than ten seconds to reach the MetroTech complex.
Goldbach’s phone rang while the group was still in his office. Dispatch had issued a 10-60, the battle alarm for major disasters.
For Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, the day began, now famously, with the report of a possible gas leak fourteen blocks north of the World Trade Center. As it happened, a young French filmmaker named Jules Naudet was riding along with Chief Pfeifer. Along with his brother Gédéon, Jules was shooting a documentary about probationary firefighter Tony Benetatos of Engine 7, Ladder 1. The original idea of the film was to capture the day-in, day-out, sometimes mundane experience of a rookie firefighter during their nine-month probationary period. The filmmakers also hoped to document the life and hierarchy within a firehouse. That morning Gédéon had shadowed the proby while his brother accompanied the battalion chief on the run.
