WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Tim Brown

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

9/11 survivor & Fire Department of New York Veteran Tim Brown joins Nicole Sighiartau on WRFH to tell his story of surviving the attacks of Seprembe 11, 2001. In September 2001, Brown was a firefighter detailed to NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management who responded to the scene shortly after the first plane hit. He lost dozens of his friends that day and has made it his mission to assure that our nation never forgets.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Nicole Seguir Tau, and with me today is Tim Brown, a retired FDNY firefighter and a survivor of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Now Brown makes it his mission to tell the story of 9-11 and help communities better understand grief, the resilience of the human spirit, and the path to hope. Thank you for joining me this afternoon, Mr. Brown. It's such a pleasure. Hi, Nicole. It's nice to talk with you, and thank you for having me on. Hillsdale. Oh, of course. I think I've heard your story before, but I would love for other students on campus to hear your story. And so with that, if you would just love to tell us your experience of 9-11, your direct account, and everything that you saw. Yeah, so I was 38 years old on the day of 9-11 2001. I was a New York City fireman detailed or kind of loaned.

to Mayor Giuliani's office of emergency management. And our office building was Seven World Trade Center, which was directly across Visi Street from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. So I was in the cafeteria of that building of Seven World Trade Center on the third floor, eating my Cheerios, drinking my hot tea and drinking my oil.

orange juice, which I did every morning around 8 a.m. And back then, we used to have something called newspapers, which your crowd might not know too much about, because that's how you get all your news on the smartphones. But back then, we didn't have the smartphone. So you got your information from the newspapers. And so I was reading all the local newspapers, eating my Cheerios, drinking my tea. And all the power went out in the building all at once, a complete power failure in a modern high-rise building in New York City. So a little bit, a little bit concerning, but not too

crazy. I did not hear or see anything at that point, really. But within five seconds, the people in the cafeteria who were at the glass that was facing the North Tower all at once stood up and started running past me toward the exit. I had to grab one young lady by the, by the shoulders and stop her and shake her back to reality and look her in the eye. And I said, what happened? And she said a plane hit the tower. And so that was the first that I knew of it. Okay, it's the big one. You know, we practice and train and drill and have some experience, but this is a big one. But it's not completely unprecedented because we had had helicopters and planes fly into New York high-rise buildings before.

But it was still a citywide emergency, which is kind of what we do in emergency management. We plan for the big unusual events. And I knew what I had to do. So we activated our emergency operations center in the building. My job was not to be a part of the emergency operation center, my job was to go to the scene, to the command post. And 99% of the time I was not the incident commander,

but I supported the incident commander with the gravitas of Mayor Giuliani. I went to my car on Visi Street. I put on my heavy leather boots, my windbreaker that said emergency management on it. and they made us put on these stupid green shiny helmets that I hated to identify us. If you don't want anything about firemen, your pride and joy is your helmet because your helmet's been with you in every fire and it reflects your experience. So for me, to put on a shiny green helmet is very insulting. I wanted to take a look at three sides of the North Tower.

to get a current size up of what was happening to that 110-story building. In order to do that, I had to run up an exterior concrete staircase to Plaza level, World Trade Center Plaza. That becomes an important part of the story because that concrete staircase becomes the biggest, heaviest artifact in the 9-11 museum, and they named it the survivor's staircase because later in the morning, hundreds or maybe a thousand civilians would use that staircase to run down and run away and live. And the museum got a hold of photographs of people, civilian people, running down that staircase to try and get away and live.

but earlier in the morning, I'm doing what our first responders and our military do. When something happens, we run toward danger. In very early that morning, that's what I was doing. I was running toward the danger because people were in trouble and people needed us to help them. When I looked out over the World Trade Center Plaza, it was Armaged. building parts, plane parts, black smoke, white smoke, fire. And if you look at the video from the day, all the paper that was knocked out of the offices on his upper floors was fluttering down. And that's exactly what it looked like.

It looked like Armageddon. I went into the North Tower at that plaza level. And in order to go to the command post, I had to go down one story inside the building to where the command post was. And right inside the door, when I walked in or ran in, there was an escalator that went down to the lobby. And there were hundreds and hundreds of office workers trying to get onto that escalator to go down and go down and go underground and run through the underground mall to safety. Civilians. And Nicole, I noticed something that was very clear to me.

I noticed what those people were not doing. They were not pushing each other out of the way, knocking each other out of the way, elbowing each other out of the way. for every person who was obese, pregnant, disabled, elderly, injured, there were four or five civilians helping that person, not cops and firemen, civilians. And I thought in that moment that I had great hope that we would be okay no matter what happened.

because those acts of kindness are true for the vast majority of humanity. If someone's in trouble next to us, we do what we can to help them. And I believe that's true for 99% of humanity. And that was actually happening in front of me in this civilian population. I got onto that escalator and I was going down the escalator. And as I was going down, the lobby revealed itself to me. And what I saw was hundreds of firefighters in their protective gear with the yellow reflective stripes and their helmets. And all their tools and equipment, which I estimate was 100 pounds.

each that they were going to carry up those stairs. And I had to laugh because seeing all the hundreds of firemen with their yellow reflective stripes reminded me what the cops called us. And the cops called us bumblebees. And now I'm looking at this lobby with hundreds of firefighters with their reflective stripes and the cops were right for once in my whole career the cops were right about something and they called us bumblebees and they were right because it looked like hundreds of bumble peas and i got to the bottom of the escalator and just to my right was a bumblebee and i looked up at

his face and it was my good and dear friend and colleague firefighter Chris Blackwell from Rescue 3 Special Operations in the Harlem Bronx Fire Department, where I worked with him for seven years. In law enforcement, you would call him my partner. We did everything together for seven years. So this guy was like my real brother. He was a badass special operations, Bronx Harlem Fireman. And when he went home to his family in Connecticut, in his community, he was a paramedic. So all Chris did with his whole life was help other people.

And Chris and I always greeted each other the same way. So when we saw each other, we came face to face about three feet apart. And we came to attention. And he made a big arc. with his right arm and his right hand to his mouth, and he took out the unlit stub of a cigar out of his mouth, and he put it down to the side. And when he did that, we both leaned in at the hips

and kissed on the lips. And then we came back to attention, and he made that big arc with his arm again and put the cigar back in his mouth. And we did that for two reasons. We did that because we loved each other like real blood brothers. But we also did it because it freaked out all the cops' environment around us when we kissed them lips. And we thought it was very funny to watch their reaction.

Sorry, I'm going to interrupt you real quick, Mr. Brown. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Nicole Siguritow talking to Mr. Brown about the 9-11 terrorist attack. after we did that, after we kissed on the lips, firefighter Chris Blackwell said to me, Timmy, this is really bad. And I said, I know Chris, be careful. I love you.

And I said, I love you too. And he turned around and he went in the stairwell and he went up to save the lives of people he did not even know. In that moment, Nicole, he had free will, God-given free will. He did not have to go up that stairwell. He could have taken off his helmet and turned around and gone home to his loving family. But he didn't. He chose to go up that stairwell because people needed to him.

And he knew he had the experience. experience and training to help them. So he chose to go up. And so the question I asked myself over decades is why? Why would a human do something like that? Why would a human walk out of their own life for others? Two things. years earlier, firefighter Chris Blackwell had sworn on the Bible and taken an oath that

he was willing to give his life for his family, for his friends, for his neighbors, and even for someone he didn't know. But 15 years earlier, that was just words. In this moment of his free will, he chose to fulfill his oath in deed. And he proved that his oath was not empty words. And he proved his love for humanity. And he went up those stairs because people needed him. I call that the greatest love. Because that's what it says in the Bible.

There is no act greater in humanity than what firefighter Chris Blackwell did that day. He performed an act of the greatest love at the end of his life. And I saw this story repeated over and over and over that morning. Captain Terry Hatton, Captain Patty Brown, firefighter Michael Lynch, I watched Chief Donald Burns. I watched every one of them stand there bravely with humility and courage and selflessness. Every one of them knew that they were likely not leaving that building alive. those buildings. The only reason I crawled out of the rubble alive is because my mission took me elsewhere and I wound up in Three World Trade Center under the collapse. When that building

collapsed on top of me, but I was praying like crazy. I wound up holding on, when the South Tower collapsed onto the Marriott Hotel, which then collapsed around me, I was in the path of the tremendous wind of the air that was being pushed out of that building as it collapsed. I was holding onto a vertical column, and the wind was so strong that it lifted me off the ground that I was holding on to this vertical column with all my might. like a flag and a hurricane, I was horizontal. And it was trying to blow me out into the street. And I knew if I let go of this vertical column, I was certainly a dead man.

But even if I held down, I was probably dead anyhow. But I knew that I had to hold on. And in this moment, when I'm horizontal, that I think it's the end. That is my moment when I pray. And it was very personal. It was me and God. And I said, God, I'm not afraid to come to you. In fact, I look forward to it one day.

And that is still true today. I look forward to sitting at his side. But on September 11th, I said, please not now. I just want to hold my family and tell them I love them one more time. And then I will come to you. But please not now. And within seconds, the wind stopped, the noise stopped, and I was back down on the ground, and I was alive. Wow, that is just such a truly powerful and moving story.

And I think a lot of people in my generation don't really hear these firsthand accounts. Instead, they hear about different conspiracy theories of 9-11 or other people telling these stories. And what do you have to say about that? Because obviously this is very real and personal to you. And even though it's only 25 years later, it already feels like some people are misconstruing the events that happened. That's a very good question, Nicole. Thank you. Look, I personally lost 100 of my friends, including my best friends. or basically my whole male friendship world was murdered in one day.

If I thought that there was any of these conspiracy theory BS, I'd be the first one all over it. But what happened that day was simple. it was intentional murder of civilians by Islamist al-Qaeda terrorists, period. There is no other cause of what happened that day. And anybody that is espousing that BS does not know what they're talking about and has a different motive than I have. In fact, I sat in the courtroom in Guantanamo Bay when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the master planner of 9-11, said, I did it. I'm proud I did it. And if you give me the chance and I get out of here, I will do it again. There is no conspiracy theory space. The CIA did not do it. George Bush didn't do it.

You know, like, that is a cottage industry of people who are lying intentionally, I think, to make money that sell books, they sell T-shirts, they get notoriety and all that. And it is all BS. I was there. Do you think I would have stood by if I knew that this plot to murder all my friend was being planned, it's craziness. Al-Qaeda Islamist terrorists did this intentionally, and they admitted it, and they're proud of it, and they will do it again. So the conspiracy theorist

pissed me off. Thank you so much for making that extraordinarily clear to everyone. Unfortunately, we are all out of time today, but thank you again, Mr. Brown for your story and your time and all the effort that you've been putting in to talk to other people about this and make everything be known as clear and simply as you have put it today. Thank you, Nicole. By the book, The Greatest Love by Tim Brown, and you'll read a lot more about this. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Our guest has been Tim Brown, and I'm Nicole Segueratow on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.