Firefight Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11

THE TOWERS Tuesday, September 11, 2001, 8:50 A.M. There was one hell of a Fire up in New York. Nobody seemed to know what had happened, whether it was an accident or a terrorist attack or something else. But one thing was for surethe FDNY had a long day of work ahead. At Fire Station 4 in Arlington, Virginia, half a dozen FireFighters watched TV with a kind of professional envy as smoke poured from one of the towers at the World Trade Center. The television commentators were speculating about what had happened and what it meant. Some kind of airplane seemed to have smashed into the North Tower, in downtown Manhattan, just as the workday was getting started. But nobody knew what kind of plane. Or why it hit the building. The FireFighters, however, were more interested in what was happening inside the tower. There was very little on TV about that. They had a pretty good idea, though. Capt. Denis GrifFin was a burly 20-year veteran who had joined the Arlington County Fire Department back when canvas coats and hip-high rubber boots were the standard protective gear. He recalled some details of the 1945 crash of a B-25 bomber into the Empire State Building, which wrecked several oors and cut most of the building's elevator cables. This looked similar. With the elevators probably out, he Figured, the New York FireFighters would be walking up hundreds of stairs, with axes and other tools and hoses and air packsprobably 50 pounds of gear for each guywhile an avalanche of people coursed in the opposite direction. "Imagine getting all those people down the stairs," GrifFin bellowed, his usually calm voice roused with excitement. "Just think what it must be like humping all that gear up to the top of that building," added Bobby Beer, a salt-haired West Virginian who had been Fighting Fires as long as GrifFin. "Goddamn," GrifFin said, "that is gonna be one hell of a long walk." Arlington had a few high-rises, but nothing like New York. That's what made the New York City Fire Department so legendaryjust about any kind of Fire there was, the guys in New York had seen it. Now they were Fighting what was probably one of the toughest, highest Fires ever, and the crew at Station 4 foresaw all kinds of problems. Even if they could climb that high, water pressure in the tower had probably been cut to a trickle. How would the New York crews put out the Fire? Would they be able to carry up the heavy tools needed to extract victims who might be buried in rubble? And how would they get to people trapped above the Fire? Did they have helicopters that could do rescues from the roof? "Shit," somebody joked. "Those guys in New York get all the best Fires." A shrill chirping sound disrupted the armchair FireFighting. The room went silent as a series of staccato beeps got louder. It was a Fire call at an apartment building, and the dispatcher was summoning multiple units: Engine 109, Engine 101, Engine 105, Quint 104 . . . That was GrifFin's unit. He and his crew of three others rushed to the truck, jumped into their turnout gear, and started the engine. It was not shaping up as a good day to get dental work done. Vice Adm. Scott Fry, the director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, had orders to ship out soon for a new job as commander of the Navy Sixth Fleet in Naples, Italy. And he had to get to the dentist before he left. Just as Fry was about to leave his ofFice, his executive assistant called out, "Hey, you won&Creed, Patrick is the author of 'Firefight Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11', published 2008 under ISBN 9780891419051 and ISBN 0891419055.