(Editor’s note: This week, 7 News is noting the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks with a series of reports looking back on the events of the day. This is one part of that series.)
WATERTOWN, New York (WWNY) – When the planes crashed and the World Trade Center towers fell on 9/11, firefighters from around the country rushed to New York City to help.
Among them, a team of firefighters from the City of Watertown fire department.
Now retired, Battalion chiefs Pat Wiley and Ed Brown, and Captain Mike Corbett, sat down with a reporter the other day.
Wiley, Brown, Corbett and Captain Bill Best made the trip to Ground Zero, where the twin towers fell, three days after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
(Quick history lesson for anyone not familiar with 9/11: Islamist terrorists from the group al-Qaeda had commandeered four jetliners; two of them slammed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, another barreled into the west side of the Pentagon and a fourth – believed bound for the U.S. Capitol or White House – crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after the plane’s passengers fought the hijackers.)
As they approached New York City, “The other end of Manhattan was just a cloud,” Ed Brown recalled.
“It was like going into another world. It was surreal. There was dust in the air, there was smoke in the air,” said Pat Wiley. “Hundreds and hundreds of firefighters crawling up and down the pile. It literally took your breath away.”
It’s hard from a distance of 20 years to comprehend just how big the “pile,” the rubble left by the collapse of the north and south towers, was.
“The pile was, I’d say, eight to ten stories high,” Mike Corbett said. “And the beams were literaly sticking out of the ground, up towards the sky.”
Think of it this way: chaos and destruction, piled as high as the state office building in downtown Watertown.
“The building next to us had a – I don’t know how big it was – a hunk of i-beam sticking through the side of it that came out of the towers. It looked like a movie scene almost,” Ed said.
And in the pile, the remains of nearly 3,000 people, including 343 firefighters who lost their lives in New York City on 9/11.
Watertown’s firefighters did what they could during their weekend at Ground Zero – they helped with supplies for other first responders, and manned the bucket brigade, as firefighters lifted and moved rubble, one bucket at a time, passed hand to hand, firefighter to firefighter.
“We passed buckets of debris, pieces of metal, and concrete chunks down the line where it was placed in a pile for removal by trucks,” Mike Corbett wrote in a diary of the trip.
And firefighters from New York City searched, mostly in vain, for any signs of life.
“The New York Fire Department men were always there looking, praying and sometimes crying (some had realized their losses were final) for their fallen brothers,” Corbett wrote in his diary.
“Nobody would come out of there any longer,” Corbett recalled. “That was one of the things that was hard to accept – very hard.”
Mike and Ed have returned to Ground Zero in the years since 9/11. They each visited the shoe store where they caught a few hours sleep one night. After 20 years, the enormity, the sheer surprise of what happened, stays with the firefighters.
“The fact that these buildings actually came down. Nobody ever thought that would happen,” Ed said.
One other thing that stays with the men: the heroism of the firefighters who responded to 9/11.
“You watch TV footage. There’s thousands and thousands of people running down the street away from the building. And the firefighters are going up the street, they’re going up the stairs – and they died trying to help the people who were in that tower,” Pat said.
In his diary, Mike Corbett notes “Our ride back home was a little quieter. We were thinking of what we had just experienced.”
“I guess you could say we were proud to be down there, to offer what we could,” he told a reporter.
This Saturday, Corbett will remember 9/11 like this: he has a bell at his cottage. He’ll do what he does each year on September 11, ring it – ‘343 times, one for each firefighter lost’ Ed Brown said, and added – to make sure the point was made – “We don’t forget.”
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