The Firefighters Who Climbed the Towers and the 343 Names the FDNY Still Reads

Let me ask you a question about stairs. When a building is on fire and a thousand people are pouring down the stairwell toward the street, which way do you go if your job is to put out the fire? You go up. You go up past every person who is going the other way, and you do it carrying heavy gear, and you do not ask whether anyone else is coming.

That is not a metaphor. It is the plain physical description of what hundreds of New York City firefighters did on the morning of September 11, 2001. Of the 2,977 people killed in the attacks, 343 were members of the Fire Department of the City of New York. Every year at remembrance ceremonies their names are read aloud. This post tries to say who they were, what they did, what went wrong around them and what the country owes the ones who came home sick.

The First Alarm

The alarm came within moments of American Airlines Flight 11 hitting the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, the first FDNY chief on the scene, was in the area on another call when the plane went over, and he saw it hit. He radioed in the alarm. The 9/11 Commission found that the FDNY response began within five seconds of the crash, with many of its senior chiefs and the Commissioner heading toward the site by 9:00 and a fifth alarm called soon after.

A command post was set up in the lobby of the North Tower, and companies began to climb. Their objective was straightforward: get above the fire, find the people who were trapped and get them down. The stairwells were narrow and crowded with people leaving, and the climb was slow. In the South Tower, after United 175 struck at 9:03, the same thing began again. You can read the full timing of the morning in September 11, 2001 Hour by Hour From the First Plane to the Last Rescue.

I want you to keep the arithmetic of courage in mind. The people who built the response knew the buildings were burning. They knew the impact zones were far above them. Few, if any, expected the buildings to fall. The Commission found that no police helicopter pilot predicted a collapse before the South Tower came down. When the order to go up was given, it was given by men who believed the job was a hard rescue and not a trap.

Father Mychal Judge

Among the first to die was the department's chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, a Franciscan friar. He had gone to the World Trade Center to minister to the firefighters and the injured, and he was in the lobby of the North Tower when the South Tower collapsed at 9:59. He was killed, apparently by falling debris, and he is recorded as the first official victim of the attacks.

I mention him because the department did what we sometimes forget a free society is allowed to do: it kept a priest on the payroll to be with its people in danger. It is a small and lovely fact, and it was in the right place at the worst time. He went because the men who needed him were there.

The Command Post and the Chiefs

The leadership went in too. The department's Chief of Department, Peter Ganci, and its First Deputy Commissioner, William Feehan, both died in the collapse of the North Tower. They had come to the site to direct the effort, and they died with the people they commanded. The same morning produced another story of ordinary people acting on their own, told in Flight 93 Passengers Voted to Fight Back and Saved a Target in Washington.

The Commission's account of the command post is one of the most careful and troubling in its report. It found that the lobby command post was the center of the FDNY effort and that its chiefs were trying to manage a rescue with limited information. One chief in the lobby told the Commission that critical information was missing about what was happening 30, 60, 90 and 100 floors above. Radio communication between the command post and the firefighters in the stairwells was poor.

What Went Wrong, Honestly Told

Here is the part that matters to anyone who wants these deaths to teach something. The Commission found several failures, and none of them reflects on the courage of the men who died.

1. Radios. The department's portable radios performed poorly in the high-rise towers. A repeater system had been installed after the 1993 bombing to improve radio signals inside the buildings, but on the morning of the attack a second button on its console was never pressed, so the chiefs in the North Tower lobby tested it, found it seemed inoperable and decided not to use it. When the South Tower fell at 9:59, an evacuation instruction was given for the North Tower. The Commission found that at least 24 of the at most 32 companies in the North Tower received it, yet many firefighters died, some because they delayed to help civilians or regroup, and some because they were on the wrong channel or lacked radios.
2. Two departments, two systems. The police department and the fire department had separate command structures and separate radio channels. The Commission found that FDNY chiefs would have benefited greatly from information from police helicopters, including pilots' warnings at 9:51 about the South Tower and later about the condition of the North Tower. It also corrected a widespread misperception: no police helicopter predicted the fall of either tower before the South Tower collapsed. The police evacuation instruction succeeded in part because of stronger radios, fewer users and the right channel. The Commission called for a more unified incident command.
3. Lack of a shared picture. Nobody had the whole picture of the fires, the damage or the risk of collapse. Those on the scene were making decisions based on a narrow view.

I say these things without any intention to shame the dead. The Commission concluded that the technical failure of the radios was a contributing factor but not the primary cause of the many firefighter deaths in the North Tower. The lesson it drew was about preparedness, integrated command and shared information, not about the courage of the people on the stairs. A federal system that likes to talk about "coordination" and "interoperability" should read that chapter slowly. A multi-agency alliance is only as good as the one radio that does not work.

Let me add a note of dry commentary. For years before the attacks, the city had commissioned studies, formed task forces and held conferences about how its agencies would talk to each other in an emergency. And on the day, one of the things that went wrong was a console on which a second button was never pressed. The lesson is that a hundred pages of coordination plans cannot replace a system that works when you press the button.

The Police and the Port Authority

It would be wrong to tell this story as though the fire department stood alone. The New York Police Department lost 23 officers. The Port Authority Police Department, which patrolled the World Trade Center complex, lost 37, the largest loss of any American police department in a single day in the nation's history. Many of those officers, along with emergency medical workers and ordinary civilians, had spent the morning helping people down the stairs. The building's own security staff and its employees helped each other. On September 11, thousands of people got out because other people stayed.

It is also worth noticing how much of the evacuation was voluntary. The people who left the towers did not follow a single plan. They helped colleagues who could not walk, waited for people with disabilities and carried those who needed carrying. Thousands of ordinary citizens did their part. The firefighters were simply the ones whose job it was to go in the opposite direction.

The Founding Roots of the Fire Company

There is a historical anchor here that I think conservatives will appreciate. The American fire service began as an act of voluntary association. In 1736 Benjamin Franklin organized the Union Fire Company in Philadelphia, a group of neighbors who agreed to help one another save property when fire broke out, an example of the civic habit Tocqueville noticed a century later when he observed that Americans form associations for every purpose, public and private, great and small.

That tradition did not begin with a government order and was not invented by a bureaucracy. It began with neighbors. It later grew into professional departments, supported by taxpayers and governed by local officials, which is the right level for such a service, close to the people it serves. The firefighters who climbed on September 11 carried that heritage up the stairs, and it is the same spirit described in loving your country is not idolatry, a believer's case for patriotism. The fire department is, at its root, a form of self-government.

Ground Zero

When the towers fell, the work did not end. For months, thousands of workers moved through the rubble. Firefighters, police officers, construction workers, iron workers, engineers and volunteers sifted the debris, looking first for survivors and then for the remains of the dead. Fires burned in the pile for weeks. The cleanup was finished in the spring of 2002.

Dignity guided the recovery. When the remains of a firefighter were found, work stopped and the others formed an honor guard to bring him out. The rule was that no member of the department would be left behind, and the rule was kept.

The Cost That Came Later

The attack did not stop killing on September 11. The dust and smoke at the site contained a mixture of toxic materials, and many people who worked there, including firefighters, police officers and civilians, later developed serious illnesses, including respiratory disease and cancers. The numbers are large and are tracked by the programs that serve them.

The country responded in two stages. Congress created a Victim Compensation Fund shortly after the attacks, in the law passed on September 22, 2001, to compensate victims and families. Later, to help the people who fell ill, Congress passed the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, signed on January 2, 2011, which created a health program for responders and survivors and reopened the compensation fund. In 2019 Congress extended the fund for many years to come.

A conservative can support this, and should say why. The usual arguments against open-ended federal spending are strong, and this site makes them constantly. But a payment to people who were injured responding to an attack on the nation, on a federal emergency, at the request of their government, is not a handout. It is the same kind of obligation the nation owes its wounded soldiers. The test for any such program is whether it is limited to a defined event, whether it is audited, and whether it pays those who were actually harmed. A fund that meets those tests is a duty, not a giveaway. For the model of care that treats veterans the same way, see Veterans Should Carry Their Health Care Dollars the Way They Carry the GI Bill, and for the failures of vetting that let the hijackers in, Terrorist Travel and the Visa Lessons the 9/11 Commission Laid Out.

The Strongest Objection

The objection comes from a thoughtful direction. It says that if we dwell on the heroism, we risk sanctifying a failure of planning, and that the better memorial would be a reform. I accept the first half and reject the dichotomy.

1. We can do both. Honoring the dead and fixing the system are not alternatives. The Commission did both, and the reforms that followed, including improvements to interagency communication, are a form of honor.
2. Remembering is how reform survives. A reform that nobody remembers the reason for erodes. The names, read aloud each year, are a standing reminder of what poor coordination can cost.
3. The courage was not the failure. It would be a mistake to confuse a failure of radios with a failure of men. The firefighters did what the job required, and they did it with a bravery that the planning did not deserve.

The Names

The reading of the names is the heart of the memory. At remembrance ceremonies the names of all 343 are read, one by one. The names are not a statistic. Each belongs to a man with a company, a house, a family, and a place at a firehouse table where someone is missing.

If you want to know what a free people can be, look at that list. It includes the chief of the department and the probationary firefighter, the chaplain and the rookie. Every one of them went up.

The case in brief

1. Of the 2,977 people killed on September 11, 2001, 343 were members of the FDNY, and 60 more were New York City and Port Authority police officers: 23 and 37.
2. They went up the stairs while thousands came down, on the reasonable belief that the job was a rescue and the buildings would hold.
3. The 9/11 Commission found real failures, including radios that performed poorly in the towers and separate fire and police command systems, and the Commission drew lessons about preparedness and integrated command, not about the people's courage.
4. The American fire service began in 1736 as voluntary association and remains self-government close to the people it serves.
5. The later illnesses of responders created a debt that the country met with the Victim Compensation Fund and the Zadroga Act, which a conservative can support when it is limited, audited and tied to a defined event.

What you can do: find out whether your own town's fire, police and ambulance services can talk to each other on a single radio channel, ask at the next public meeting, and thank a firefighter in person.