(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) – Cindy Lachenauer misses her husband every day.
“This one was a good marriage, really good,” she says, sitting in the home she shared with her husband of 30 years, David Lachenauer, talking to a reporter.
David Lachenauer was a second generation firefighter with the City of Watertown fire department. On the walls of their home, pictures of the biggest, worst fires he helped fight in Watertown, and a flag, neatly folded, from Ground Zero.
He was in New York City for training on September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and Lachenauer was part of the wave of firefighters who rushed to the scene.
“The instructor said ‘It’s an all call.’ He said get your gear, you’re going down,’” Cindy recalled the other day.
“They had no masks. They just sent them down the first day with nothing. They had their equipment, but there were no masks that day.”
What there was, was dust. Everywhere near Ground Zero, coating everything. You can see it in the pictures David got, pictures Cindy has saved. It’s what the first responders breathed.
“You’re walking thru’ maybe two inches, two to three inches of sheet rock, dust, I mean it was just layers of dust,” David Lachenauer told 7 News shortly after he returned from Ground Zero.
He worked for two days in and around Ground Zero, doing a variety of jobs. Cindy remembers him telling her how people would duck when planes flew overhead, not knowing if it was another attack; how gun boats patrolled the Hudson River; how for all the effort of all the emergency crews, survivors didn’t come out of the rubble.
By the time David Lachenauer returned from New York City, the enormity of the loss – including the loss of firefighters – had sunk in.
“The empty boots and helmets, as a fireman, you know that there was somebody in those boots and there was somebody in that helmet,” he told 7 News in 2001. “And that’s difficult.”
He talked, and then he didn’t.
“I know it affected him a lot. To the point that, he talked about it for a while, and then he stopped, and he never said much about it,” Cindy said.
“But I know at work – later on he became a battalion chief – his first goal was always to get his guys home to their families. That was the most important thing to him.”
David Lachenauer died March 23, 2018 of a cancer caused by the time he spent in and around Ground Zero.
“The cancer was a very nasty cancer, ok? And he went through a lot of pain,” she recalled. “His first thoughts though were to be back at work with all the people at work, the guys at work.”
Cindy makes the best of it.
“Those people on 9/11, didn’t get to say good-bye, didn’t know it was coming. They lost them that day. So I was lucky enough to get 17 more years.”
She wants people to know “he loved the fire service and he cared about all the people he worked with. And the fire service was his second family.”
At his request, his gravestone reads ‘Never forget: 343,’ the number of firefighters who died on 9/11.
And when the world commemorates the 20th anniversary of the attacks Saturday, Cindy will do what she does every day – have a word with her husband.
“What will I say to him? Just, I love you and miss you. There’s not much more you can say.”
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