Dan Snow's History Hit - 9/11: The Fire Commissioner at Ground Zero

Episode Date: September 11, 2021

On the morning of September 11th, 2001 terrorists flew planes into both the World Trade Centre towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington with a further plane crashing in Pennsylvania as the passengers onboard attempted to wrest control of the aircraft from the hijackers. This atrocity utterly changed the world leaving thousands dead and injured and launched the War on Terror. Many people can remember where they were on that fateful day and for some, it was on the frontline of the attack. Thomas Von Essen was one of those people. A career firefighter in September 2001 he was the commissioner for the New York Fire Department. As commissioner, He played a key role in helping the city's fire chiefs attempt to coordinate their response to the planes hitting the towers. Although thousands sadly perished that day, thousands more were rescued by the selfless heroism of New York's firefighters and emergency services personnel. But, many of those emergency responders paid the ultimate price for their bravery. Tom and Dan speak about his memories of that morning, the pain of losing so many friends and colleagues, the pride he has in the commitment shown by his men and how some have turned the legacy of 9/11 into a cause for good.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. September the 11th, 2001, 20 years ago today. No one will ever forget where they were that morning, as we saw the drama unfolding beneath such clear blue skies in Lower Manhattan, the perfect fall day. That morning, four commercial airliners travelling from the Northastern United States to California were hijacked by 19 terrorists. They were divided into four groups, each one of which had a goal, which was to crash their plane into a prominent American building. American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46am. 17 minutes later, at 9.03am, United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. Within less than two hours, both those towers had collapsed, causing buildings around them to fall down or sustain significant damage.

About half an hour after the South Tower was hit, American Airlines Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon, and a final flight, United Airlines Flight 93, was also heading towards Washington DC, but it crashed in rural Pennsylvania at about 10 o'clock as the passengers attempted to storm the cockpit and regain control of the aircraft. It seems likely that flight was aiming for either the White House or the US Capitol building. Like many people, I had family members. My cousin Alex worked a block or two away from the World Trade Center in New York. Friends were in the buildings themselves.

I was lucky enough not to lose anyone personally, but just under 3,000 people, 2,996 people were killed in all and many thousands injured. Many of the casualties were members of the emergency services who had bravely dashed into the inferno to try and save lives. I'm very lucky to have as a guest on this podcast, a man who played a key role on that day, Thomas von Essen. He was the Fire Department of New York commissioner on 9-11. He's one of the few commissioners of the fire department who worked his way up through the ranks from firefighter all the way to becoming the city's fire chief. And as you'll hear, he can speak with such clarity about what he went through that day

as he tried to respond to the most catastrophic terrorist attack, the most complex emergency response in the history of New York. Tomorrow on the podcast, you'll be hearing from John Egan. He lost his father on 9-11 and his aunt, his father's sister, who was visiting him in the World Trade Center at his place of work. And so tomorrow is a chance to talk about the legacy, what that's meant for the city, the families, communities in the 20 years since 9-11. But today we'll be finding out all about the response to 9-11, what it was like on the ground dealing with that ever-changing situation

and how memories of that day have endured. So without further ado, here is Thomas von Essen. Tom, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Can you tell me what was your job in September 2001? So a fire commissioner of New York City is responsible for the fire and emergency medical service, fire prevention, you know, all those things related around fire protection, building safety, and everything else. There's about 17,000 employees, about 9,000 firefighters, a couple thousand fire officers. And we do all the ambulance and hospital emergency medical service, bringing people to and from hospitals. And what had been the biggest incident, the biggest challenge of your career before that fateful day?

Well, the biggest challenge is always when there's death involved with the firefighters or the civilians. And I had had a few incidents where we lost, one incident, we lost two firefighters, another one, we lost two firefighters, and then one a little later. So those are always the most difficult situations you have. There are management difficulties that you have on a regular basis, trying to figure out ways to keep the city safe on a limited budget. But the most pressing, the most griefful, the most heartache, the most pressure you have is always trying to keep firefighters safe. And when something goes wrong, that's the worst part of the job.

Had you worked your way up as a firefighter? What was your background? It's a funny story. Well, I think it's funny because I was a firefighter in 1970 in the South Bronx. About 1983, I became a union official. Spent almost 10 years doing that. And then I was the president of the Firefighters Union. And Mayor Giuliani asked me if I wanted to be fire commissioner. They had never done that before. The fire commissioner was leaving to become police commissioner. They asked him, who should we promote in the fire department? And he said, the best guy over there is the union guy. So naturally, Giuliani's team told him he should never have a union guy as commissioner.

And so Giuliani said, let's do the union guy. And they gave me the opportunity of a lifetime to implement all the things I had been complaining about all the years in the union. Gave us a lot of money for safety training equipment that was never provided before. And we had a great six-year run, I think. I will have detractors who would disagree because we tried to make a lot of changes that were not pleasant to a lot of people who were pretty entrenched in government service. I imagine it's the same way in Great Britain. You get a lot of terrific people, but you get a lot of real deadbeats too that just want to coast the whole time that they're working in the government. You can't

get rid of them. It's almost impossible. So those people didn't like me and we had a lot of fun battling with them for six years. And then September 11th changed a phenomenal job into the worst job I've had. In that role, were you often on location? Were you behind a desk at that point? Was it usual for you to be running big incident scenes? No, in New York City, there's a commissioner who does what I pretty much described, budget and runs the department, the leadership, all that stuff. But then there's a fire chief who is responsible for making sure that the fires, he has that expertise that the chiefs have to putting out fires. So it's a great combination.

He's allowed to do most of the fun stuff. He's in charge of most of the fun stuff. And the commissioner gets the other things to do. Since I was a firefighter, it was unusual for me. They had never had a firefighter who was a commissioner before. So I always went to all the big fires anyway, because I felt like I might be able to

help not run it, not be in charge of it, but kind of help the bosses get things they might not be able to get helicopters, water, you know, things that you needed, maybe some political push, some little political power to acquire. So that's why I always was at the big incidents. And Giuliani was a very hands onon mayor. He wanted to respond to those things. So naturally, if he's responding, you would respond and try to be his eyes and ears there. Were you born and raised in the city? I was born in one of the boroughs of the city, Brooklyn, New York. We moved to Queens, which is another borough, and raised my family in Queens and then out to Ansock County, which is a suburb of New York City.

What do you remember about that blue sky day, heading into work or what memories do you have of the start of that day? Boy, you described it properly too. It was a beautiful day. The sky was spotless, not a cloud in the sky. I was on the East River Drive. I don't know if you view it as Norman Ham, but it's an island. So they have an East River on one side, Hudson River on the other side.

I was on the East River on East River Drive on my way to the office about 8.30. And I got a call that a small plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. So I was very close. I could see smoke. Looked like a lot of smoke for a small plane. I didn't put it together at that point. I got there within five minutes, I guess, and fire chiefs were already inside. I was walking in. There were these big triangular windows that were blown out already, and I walked through one of them,

and that was unusual that those windows would be gone already. There was a loud sound about 10, 15 feet away from me right before I stepped in the window. I thought it sounded like a car almost from the sky, but it was a person. And I thought, wow, why would people be jumping? So I get inside and the chief said it was not a small plane. It was a commercial jet. So they're loaded with fuel. They're going five, 600 miles an hour. So we had a tremendous fire up on the 89th or 85th floor. Some of the original firefighters got up there in the elevators, but after that, it was too unsafe to put anybody in an elevator. They had to walk up. So it was going to be an extended, very, very difficult operation.

And explain to me, why were you in the building? Was that an accident or? No, I got there when I got a call on the radio that a small plane had crashed into the building. So how far was it from your usual HQ? Well, not far, a couple of miles over the Brooklyn Bridge. I would say maybe five miles, not even. And at what stage did you think this was an instance unlike any that you had ever been part of? Was it when the body started jumping?

No, it wasn't even that. It was when I was standing inside the building at a command center and some firefighter came running up to me and said, boss, the South Tower was hit and there's a plane missing. And we think the Sears Tower was hit and the Mall of America was hit. And when I heard that, I realized that we were in the middle of something that no fire department had ever faced before. Beautiful, clear day.

There's no way that two commercial jets can accidentally fly into the two tallest buildings in the world at the time. And it was at that moment when the second tower was hit that we knew we were in something that was more different than anybody ever faced before. Did a lifetime of service kick in? Were you programmed? I would have panicked and just run out of the door and jumped in the river. How did you respond? My job at that point, like I say, was just to try to help. The chiefs were in control.

They were trying to get everybody out already before the second plane hit the second tower. So when that happened, we had to split all of our leadership up, send some to the other building. And Ray Downey, who was a renowned collapse expert, came to me and said, boss, you know, these buildings can come down. And I knew that he meant over a period of time, if we don't put the fires out, which we were not going to be able to because all the water that we had, all the lines that we had to put fire out had been severed by the plane in both buildings because the second hit was even better from that perspective than the first. So we couldn't put the fires out. All we could do was try to help as many people as we could, as fast

as we could, get everybody out as fast as we could. But nobody, I don't think, and I'll always believe, no one believed that both buildings could have been hit and come down in 102 minutes. How good a job did they do of getting people out? Was it possible to get people out from above the impact site? No, above the impact zone, everybody died. We weren't able to save anybody. Now, maybe somebody got out, but we were never able to figure that. I don't think so.

The heat and the explosion, the fireball that those folks faced was too significant. Now, the floors immediately below that, there were different levels of danger, grades of fire. So it was just a nightmare for all those folks and for us. And all the people that we weren't able to save, of course, went through something that's a horrible way to die. Firefighters obviously became absolutely world famous. They ran into the flames. They ran towards the danger. What was that moment like?

Was there awareness of what you might be sending men up there to do? Yeah, well, like I said, the fire chiefs were the best in the world, I think. They make those decisions to how many people are being sent up, the best decision they could make at the time, not knowing how many people were up there. We found out later on there were about 17,000 people, I guess, that had signed in the card readers in the Trade Center that morning. Remember, also, we had six, seven floors underground.

We had subways underground. We had restaurants, parking facilities, air conditioning, heat, everything else. So there was an awful lot of people in that area, those 16 acres, that we had no idea where, how, what. So everybody was just doing the best they could to assist people. The stairways are narrow. It was difficult for a lot of the folks to maneuver. Maybe they had been hurt on a floor below the impact. There was still a lot of damage and danger below the impact. A lot of doors have been twisted. People have been trapped. People have

been underneath desks waiting for help. It was just a very, very difficult operation after you've walked up all those flights and you're exhausted. Plus, then you're being told, get out of the building as quickly as possible. So now if you're 60 floors up and you've got to get out, that's a time-consuming process to get out. It's not easy. You say the chiefs were indirect commanded. Do you have interactions with the firefighters on the way up there? Did you talk to them?

Did you have to encourage them and send them on their way up there? Well, you didn't have to encourage any of the guys, but you could see it on their faces. I'd been around a long time. I had been already in a job 30 years, and having run the union for so long, I knew a lot of people. So I was watching a lot of friends and acquaintances, sons of firefighters that I knew.

I was watching them go up and knowing that after that second plane hit that we had a good possibility a lot of these folks are going to be in a dangerous situation of course when the second tower fell that realization set in that we were going to lose a tremendous amount of firefighters because there was no warning at all the second tower came down first so then we knew that we had to get everybody out of the first tower as quickly as possible. The second tower was hit better as from a perspective of taking a building down. It was hit lower and was hit on a corner. So we think that's why it dropped in a shorter period of time. But the firefighters were busy trying to help people and get them out of the

building. And that's why so many of them were in there too long, and we didn't get them out before the buildings both collapsed. They got out a huge number of people. You mentioned 17,000 workers, and the vast majority got out. Yes, yes. You know, the number of 2,700, 2,800 people died that day includes the Pentagon, includes Shanksville, includes Flight 93, and it includes everybody. So there were probably about 2,000 people, I think, at the Trade Center,

between subways and everywhere else, you know, plus 343 firefighters and 37 police officers, 23 New York City police officers. They did a tremendous job getting a lot of people and helping a lot of people and making, even if they didn't physically touch somebody to rescue them they had the duty of making all those folks feel at least safer and seeing that the firefighters were going up while all these folks are coming down as quickly as possible i think made an awful lot of people not only respect what our guys do but felt like they had more time because the firefighters were going in.

That was wrong, but I'm sure it made them feel better at the time. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about 9-11 with someone who was there. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive,

but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. As one of the senior figures in authority, do you ever have regrets about sending so many guys up there? Do you ever think about those who didn't get back? And do you beat yourself up about that? No.

One of the regrets I have is something that was unavoidable. We had a plan in place for both buildings. There had been a bombing there in 1993. So all the experts got together after that. Before I was commissioner, the Port Authority, police, fire, everybody, all the collapse experts, everybody got together, came up with a plan that if something happened in one tower, they would keep everybody in place in the other tower

because they thought that was the safest place to be. In 1993, when the bomb exploded in our tower, their garage, the damage, there was a lot of debris in the street, the ambulance, police, everybody coming. It was mayhem in the streets. So the plan was to keep of debris in the street. The ambulance, police, everybody coming. It was mayhem in the streets. So the plan was to keep everybody safe in the building. When I Monday morning quarterbacked that, that was a bad decision that day. It was a good decision. It was a good plan. It was well thought out. The best minds in this business came up with it.

So it's really difficult to criticize. But I know that people came down into the lobby in the South Tower and they were told to go back up because they were safer in their office. Some people say, get out of my way. I'm from New York and I was here in 93 and I don't care what you say. And they lived and some of the folks that went back up, followed instructions, followed the plan. They died. So that always has bothered me. But it really it's no one's fault. It was just no one could have dreamed up. I mean, I had seen planes hijacked throughout my lifetime. And even maybe a younger guy like you has seen planes hijacked, but you never saw them used as missiles, except on that day. Nobody had ever used them as missiles and crashed them into a target to take it out.

So no one could expect that that was going to happen twice that day. So, you know, you can't beat yourself up on stuff that's really impossible to predict. I mean, a lot of mistakes were made by the FBI, by people. They're watching all these suspected characters taking flight lessons, but nobody's taking landing lessons. You know, a lot of things were missed by people in other areas. But in our area, in the firefighter area, we did everything I think we could possibly do. Like I said, I wasn't the guy saying you go up, you go up. But I don't think that the chiefs did anything wrong that could be criticized. When did the time come for you to evacuate?

Well, the mayor had been calling me. Like I mentioned before, he was a person who always wanted his guy or his commissioner to report to him. So he'd been calling me. I'd been kind of stalling. The lobby was the place that I wanted to be. After the second tower was hit and we had split everybody from one tower to the other, we took half the leadership in both. Then we were accelerating the evacuation. We decided to move that command post out to the street where Chief Gansey was out on West Street. So I went with that

whole crew. We evacuated the lobby, went outside and couldn't find May Giuliani. Went around to a command center. He wasn't there, started a walk where they told me he was. And then it's when the South Tower fell. So I became totally covered with all the dust and debris, but was not injured or anything because it was like a small building that was blocking me from all the debris that was flying down the street. And then I connected with him and we set up another command post and started to try to put together a plan to go forward. Do you remember your feelings when the towers came down?

Were you thinking about the big picture or were you just trying to work out what you could do to try and make this day less of a disaster? No, I definitely wasn't that far along at that moment. When the tower came down, I had two of my guys with me, and they said, boss, the South Tower collapsed. And I said, how many floors? I'll never forget that. And one of my guys said, the whole building.

And I said, no, it can't be. It can't be the whole building. Try to find out how many floors. And he came back to me a couple of seconds later and said, boss, the whole building collapsed. And that, I mean, I still get, you know, like, feel like heat in my chest, even today, 20 years later, thinking about that. Because at that point, I knew we lost an awful lot of firefighters because they're very fast. They're aggressive. We had a great team of people from our special operations. I knew they'd be

pretty far up into that building. And there was no warning at all. I mean, for the North Tower, we had a warning. We then got on the radios and say, accelerate your evacuation, get out, get out, get out. The South Tower came down, you know, that kind of thing. So that made people go even faster than what they were going before. But when I heard that, you know, the mayor, we were on the street and he said to me, Tommy, how many guys do you think you lost? And I said, boss, I have no idea. He said, I have no idea. I think it'll be a lot because I don't know how many guys were in that building. How has it been for you over the intervening years? Have you suffered?

been for you over the intervening years? Have you suffered? No. Like I say, I think about it all the time. It's horrible. I think of the grief. I think of the loss. I think how lucky I was. You know, I have eight grandchildren that I really get to see a lot that I've watched grow. Took one to law school yesterday. She was two years old around September 11th. She used to come to the funerals. My mother would bring her to funerals and I'd see her outside on my way out because I wasn't home much. I was just running around crazy for a couple of months. So, you know, I'd had a couple of minutes with her and really got a lot of joy out of that.

And here she is now starting law school. But I haven't suffered. I mean, I have a lot of grief over it. I deal with it. Psychiatrist says I deal well with it. I let it out and make bad jokes and then put it back in and go about my life. I think that's the way people who move forward as best they can deal with it. If you sit and dwell on it all day, I mean, certainly it's not doing you or

anybody else any good. I've watched, I don't know if you've ever heard about Tunnel to Towers, but it was a family of Stephen Siller, it was one of the guys that died, and his family started a Tunnel to Towers. He came through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, so the family started a race, and then it turned into a charity. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. Now they're building homes for veterans, amputees who lose their arms, legs or whatever. They're building these special homes for people with those disabilities. So, I mean, I've watched people take this horrible tragedy and turn it into something positive. And I think those who have done that are remembering their loved one and doing a better job of trying to go forward anyway. So on this anniversary, how should we get that balance right

between thinking about the past and remembering and also helping our kids and your grandkids, my kids to move forward with their life with happiness and joy and not feel oppressed by this terrible thing that happened? Where's the balance there? How will you approach it? I don't know the answer to that. I think that I've figured it out for me and for my family, but I kind of respect the people who haven't figured it out. I've watched the arguing last year, for example. I've always thought we should change the ceremony. The ceremony, the ceremony itself is just, they read every name and family members get up there

and they talk about, my father, Tom, was the greatest guy that ever lived. And the next person gets up there and says, my brother, Dan, was a phenomenal person. It's so painful. It's so hard. I've always thought it should be just beautiful music and just reading the names, you know, over a screen and stuff greedy that if it was 1941,

we'd always speak in German. So I get that. I get that we need to remember and I get that we need to respect what people have done for us in the past. But I don't think it's fair or it's good for us to do that to the next generation. I don't think that every generation has to suffer through September 11th the way I do. You know, I lived it. I had so many friends and people that I cared about. Okay, I'm stuck with it and I do the best I can. But I don't think we ought to lay that on every generation. Now, groups like since 9-11 that you have there, Peter Rosengarten in Great Britain, have done a great job of trying to educate. You should at least educate people about it. I mean, if you don't know about all these lowlifes that are out there that want to destroy our way of life, well, that's not good either.

So finding that balance of not forgetting, remembering, and moving on, it's a tough one. I've watched widows who have moved on as best they can. They've remarried. Do they love their deceased husband any less than a person who is sitting in that kind of anger, not anger or whatever it is, that depression every day? Do they love them any less? I don't think so. Maybe some do. Not every marriage and everything is wonderful. I don't know how to figure it all out but I do know that I think we owe the past the respect and the education and also to prevent it from happening again but we also owe it to generations to enjoy their lives and be wary of people that want to destroy our way of life how many funerals of your men did you go to in the months following 9-11 oh god I don't know I must have given eulogies at over 50 funerals of your men did you go to in the months following 9-11? Oh, God, I don't know.

I must have given eulogies at over 50 funerals. I would have done more, except sometimes there were two, three, four a day, and I couldn't only go to one or two, you know. I never spent so much time in a helicopter as then just they'd fly me to this funeral and pick me up and take me to another funeral. It was the hardest part of the job, I thought, because you'd stand up there in that pulpit or wherever they had you, and you looked at that first row, and it was this young woman

with three or four kids, or it was a mother that I lost to. I mean, we had a lady that lost her husband, who was an old-time firefighter getting ready to retire, and a son who had just gone on a fire department. I mean, what do you tell that lady? I had a good friend who had just retired. He had two boys he lost. One was a cop and one was a fireman.

So you can't do anything for those folks. What they want is their loved one back, but you can't give them what they need, what they want. People listening to this who are in positions of leadership, when that crisis comes and you're not expecting it, what did you try and focus on as a leader? Well, what I was really happy about here in the States after it was the unity that I felt with the politicians. And I really hate politicians. I've gotten to, I had a normal disdain for them before September 11th. I've gotten to have a horrible hatred for them ever since.

Because I think they're disgusting as a group. And it doesn't matter what party it is here. They're just horrible, horrible people because all they care about is getting reelected. And I'm generalizing, I'm stereotyping. I know I know there's exceptions, but I think as a rule, it's just horrible. And what I would tell a politician is to try to come together like we did after September 11th. For those four months, it was phenomenal. What the country could have done if they kept that four-month spirit up for another year would have been monumental. I mean, they could have fixed all kinds of issues, I think,

health care, immigration. You could have sat down and fixed everything if you really wanted to. And that, I think, is a wonderful thing. But to advise a politician, I think when you have something like that, all you can really do is, like Giuliani did, just try to show compassion and strength and try to get people to look forward and say, you know, we can handle this. We're not going to let these cave-dwelling morons

change our lives. And I think that's what we did. And we did a phenomenal job showing respect, admiration, compassion in a very, very difficult time. We treated those remains like it was an archaeological dig. You know, it's not easy to spend that time, effort, energy, spend that amount of time trying to find remains. I was at the memorial the other day taking some folks there, and there's still a place at the museum where the medical examiner has still got remains that are unidentified and as the technology the dna technology improves he or she that whoever the medical examiner is is it available to identify people if the loved ones want to know so there are a tremendous amount of great great people you know i just don't see them in our politics tom thank you very much indeed for coming on the

podcast and sharing your thoughts on this anniversary you're welcome i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished thank you for making it to the history of our country, all work out and finish. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done.

And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would would be fantastic and feel free to share it we obviously depend on listeners depend on more and more people finding out about it depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in really appreciate it thank you you