I sped to my firehouse, Ladder 127 in Queens, from home. It was Sept. 11, 2001. After stuffing my face from our firehouse fridge — not knowing when or if I’d be eating again — our fire company reported to a staging area nearby. I’d tried several times to call my brother Bill and cousin Ken, also firefighters in New York City. No answer. It was not a feeling I’d ever felt before. We were taken to the World Trade Center with many other fire companies in a caravan of city buses through upper Manhattan.
At one midtown stoplight, as we sat silently in bunker gear and helmets wondering what we were about to encounter, people standing on a crowded corner in work clothes began pointing our way, then erupted into applause and cheers. Tears ran down our cheeks, I noticed, when we realized they were cheering for us, their protectors, heading in the opposite direction of everyone else.
I don’t recall any of us lifting a hand to acknowledge them, but at that moment I’d never felt so appreciated in my life as we locked somber eyes with empathetic faces, a cultural mosaic of brother and sister Americans, who moments earlier had been standing in the same zombielike posture that seemed to afflict everyone.
We arrived just north of where the twin towers had once stood and walked down the west side until we encountered a smashed fire truck. I froze. I’d ridden in that truck many times as a kid. It was from my father’s firehouse, Ladder 3, where he was battalion commander. I dropped to the ground and stared. Somehow my cell phone made a connection as it rang my dad, who had retired eight years earlier, shortly after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that his battalion had responded to. I didn’t know his colleagues’ fate at that moment, but we both feared that it wasn’t good. We later learned Ladder 3 had lost a dozen firefighters, all of them my father’s friends, men who had treated me as family.
That day was a blurry, massive feeling of insignificance, flies in the ointments of pulverization, but we marched forward, awaiting commands from our superiors of where to begin our rescue mission, hoping, though not quite believing, that we’d find anyone alive in all the rubble and twisted steel.
Then Building 7 — a massive 50-story structure — began to rumble. I looked up, watched its top fall into the floors below, one thundering pound at a time, at quickening intervals, vibrating through us with deafening roars.
As the building imploded, a rolling, white dust cloud expanded into a giant ascending mushroom, with large pieces of this and that rolling along its edges as it pushed up and out, away from the structure it was once part of. One of my colleagues yelled, “Run!” Without his warning, I’m not certain I would have broken from my frozen stupor in time to escape. In all our turnout gear with Scott air packs strapped to our backs, we sprinted down the street, turned the corner,and dove into the lobby of a tall building partly up the block. The light, which moments before was illuminating the lobby through its tempered glass doors, disappeared. Everything went dark.
We sat on the hard floor, backs to the lobby walls like soldiers in a trench, not knowing what awaited us outside. If anything. At some point slumber overtook me along with some of my colleagues, or maybe our eyes were just closed while our brains remained alert. I don’t know.
Eventually, we emerged from that premature cloak of darkness — I don’t recall how long we were trapped there — to begin our work. We streamed thousands of gallons of water from a tower ladder bucket into the somewhat-standing skeleton of another flaming building — Building 5 — all night long. Our impact felt insignificant, like kids peeing into a bonfire rather than some of the world’s most experienced firefighters trying to extinguish the largest fire and most devastation any of us had ever seen.
— Captain Joe Miccio
Captain Joe Miccio now lives at Key West’s City Marina aboard his Sept. 11 tribute vessel, the “FF Mike Carlo,” a 55-foot classic yacht that Miccio fully restored and named in honor of his friend and fallen FDNY colleague, who was killed on that horrific day in 2001. The Key West vacation he’d booked with his brother Rob, also an FDNY firefighter, to captain a sailing cruiser during Fantasy Fest week, was also stolen from him. Now, 25 years later, the vessel FIREFIGHTER MIKE CARLO continues to “throw off the bow lines,” and leave “the safe harbor,” to “explore, dream, discover” our Keys waters. In honor of Mike’s memory and adventurous spirit, “there will be no disappointments” by things not done, to borrow from Mike’s favorite literary quote that he’d kept on his bedroom wall.
