Those Who Rush When Alarm Sounds

Jimmy Breslin

September 13, 2001

YESTERDAY, the city belonged to those who do real work.

Steve Casey, a firefighter out of Montgomery County, Md., was working in a long line of men handing out rubble. He came up here with two others. There were people like him all over downtown. The Steve Casey people know exactly what to do when the alarm goes off. They put on their work boots and head for the scene. Here was Casey, age 20, with short black hair. He was from Maryland, and there were cops from Sayreville, N.J., and dump truck drivers from Hartford, Conn., and carpenters from Allentown, Pa. And they were all here because they knew they owed it to New York, and everybody depends upon New York for a living and the life of their times.

Steve Casey worked with firefighters' gloves and he picked at the rubble by hand. The long lines of workers who passed the debris out could use neither shovels nor machines. They prayed that there were bodies in there somewhere. And uncovering them required gentleness in a brutish place. They hoped that there were people alive there someplace, never mind the word bodies.

Somewhere, in the jagged metal and pulverized concrete, there was a sound, a shifting. Steve Casey's 20-year-old hands picked at the rubble right over it. Picked at it, picked at it, picked at it. He got a handful of debris and handed it to the guy behind him, who handed it to the one behind him and on down the line of 100 or so, and into trucks.

Now Steve Casey heard more sounds. They were coming from maybe two feet down in the rubble. This time, as he passed the debris behind him, he said. "EMS."

The guy behind him said to the next, "EMS."

And that guy, in turn, said "EMS," and this spread thrillingly down the long line. EMS. A man is alive.

Casey scooped two feet of debris up and here was a New York City firefighter alive and on his back. And Steve Casey's hand and those of all the others started to lift the guy, he gave them a nod and a small wave of a hand. The EMS workers took him away.

"He was going to make it," Casey was saying. "Then we kept going. We found a deceased woman about an hour later. Then we found a few more deceased women."

"Nobody else is alive?" he was asked.

"Oh no, I know there are people in there still alive. I'll show you. I'll find them," Casey said.

He put his head back onto a blanket roll that served as a pillow and stretched out on the sidewalk. He was down the street from the Trade Center. He closed his eyes for a short time. He would be back. There were thousands of bodies in the rubble, and maybe somebody was alive.

When the plane went in under them, everything below in One World Trade Center was in flames, at least some office workers in the investment firm of Cantor Fitzgerald gathered in a conference room and prayed. Then they called families. One was speaking to a wife in Montclair, N.J. Another called his brother and implored his brother to find a way to help him.

Down in the lobby at this time, three senior Fire Department officers were with Father Mychal Judge, the Fire Department Chaplain. He is a Franciscan priest at St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street in Manhattan, and a city legend.

Also in the lobby were six members of a firehouse on West 77th Street who got into an elevator for a ride up high to fight flames.

And then the building blew. Everybody in the Cantor Fitzgerald conference room apparently is gone. About 850 others are unaccounted for. This is just the start of the counting of casualties. People whispered the number 20,000.

In the lobby, the three chiefs and Father Judge were killed.

And the six firefighters from West 77th Street were gone in the elevator.

In the firehouse on Amsterdam Avenue and 66th Street, 11 men were listed as missing. Three young women, wives or fiancees, sat in gloom and nervousness inside as the firefighters milled around.

Another, a young woman with long white hair and tears in eyes that were set in a heartbreaking face, leaned against a small tree in front of the firehouse.