Remembrance Day
Ed Wilmarth was a first responder on September 11, 2001, as part of the Broad Channel Volunteer Fire Department.
He was 20 years old at the time and recently shared his experience with The Wave.
We knew it was a plane crash but we thought it was a helicopter or a small plane. We were listening to FDNY radio on the way to Manhattan and started to get the bigger picture. It took us about 18 minutes to arrive in Manhattan because we drove 75 or 80 miles an hour and the Belt Parkway was completely shut down except for emergency vehicles. We got there before both buildings collapsed.When I got to the firehouse, there were two guys coming off the overnight shift. At first, we only heard that there was a three-alarm fire at the World Trade Center. We were told to respond with an ambulance, so the four of us, Bob Nussberger, Fred Grey, Chris Kalisak and I took off.
When we arrived, we didn’t know at the time that a second plane had crashed into the tower. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. There was a command post at Liberty Street, but nobody was sure what was happening. No one knew that it was a terrorist attack or about the Pentagon. All I kept thinking was that it was going to be a tough, tough, tough job to get the people out of the towers and extinguish the fire.
We arrived at Liberty and West Street and parked under a footbridge, which probably saved our lives because it was the only one that didn’t collapse. We were about 100 feet from Tower 2 when it collapsed. When it began, you hear this initial roar -- it makes an immense noise when it collapses – and then we looked up.
You’re in shock, and by then, you have only five or six seconds to run. You have nowhere to go, you really have no time.
I ended up diving underneath the back of our ambulance and grabbed on to one of the chassis, the frame underneath. As the building hit the ground, everything was moving. It was like those old videos from when they were testing the atomic bomb, a huge cloud that pushed with 300 mile-anhour winds. The ambulances toppled into each other like dominoes, then they were pushed down onto each other.
After the tower fell, you could see nothing, and there was dead silence. Before, you could see people everywhere, like 300 people standing around. After the building came down, I was able to clean my eyes and mouth and see a little bit. Five out of the 300 people were left. Most of them probably died. There was dead silence. No talking. No radio chatter.
There is a motion sensor on a firefighter’s pack that goes off after forty-five seconds if there is no motion, so that you can locate a firefighter who might be unconscious. When it goes off, it’s a loud chirping noise. Forty-five seconds after the tower came down you couldn’t see anything, but you could hear the chirping tone everywhere. The majority of it was coming from the rubble.
At that point, I had to clean my eyes and throat out because the dust was turning to concrete in my mouth. I induced vomiting to get it out of my throat and wiped my eyes. I could barely see.
I was not thinking at all. It wasn’t one of those out of body experiences. It was none of those things. I was in firefighter mode, and at that point, I was really worried about the other three guys.
There was another firefighter who was walking around with me and every step he was like: Ow! Ow! Ow! Everything at that point was white and he said he didn’t know why his feet hurt so much. He had been knocked clean out of his boots and he didn’t realize it. I gave him some sneakers that I had left in the truck.
At that point, our dispatcher told us to find the other guys and come back. That’s when the second tower fell. We knew it was coming because it made the same sound as before. We ran down to the docks and there was a boat. Everyone was being evacuated, including responders, we didn’t have a choice. They said everyone in lower Manhattan was being evacuated. I saw another one of my guys before I got on the boat. They took us to Liberty State Park in Jersey. The four of us met up again and we got back to Broad Channel at around 8 o’clock at night. I stayed on for 48 hours straight working in Rockaway after that.
We were no longer a small town fire department. It became a whole ‘nother fire department.
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