The lucky ones: Only one New York fire company got out with every man alive

By JULIET MACUR
The Dallas Morning News

NEW YORK – The machine inside the firehouse beeps twice. Another message starts printing.

"Funeral for Firefighter Peter J. Carroll, Squad Company 1, Blessed Sacrament Church, Staten Island ... Funeral for Firefighter Danny Shurs, Engine Company 216, St. Edmunds Church, Brooklyn ..."

Here in the home of Engine Company 9 and Ladder Company 6, this firehouse in the Chinatown section of Manhattan, these are the lucky ones. Of all the fire companies that had men inside the World Trade Center, theirs was the only one not to lose a single one. Lucky to cry the tears. Lucky to feel the guilt. Lucky to hear the incessant beeping ...

"Wake for Lieutenant Michael Warchola, Ladder Company 5, Hillebrand Funeral Home, Queens ..."

Brothers. Fathers. Cousins. Friends. Gone.

The men working Engine 9 and Ladder 6 didn't wait to hear the call to go to the World Trade Center. A few of them saw a plane flying low toward the towers. They heard the explosion, and they went.

They were there two minutes later. Peter Blaich, a 29-year-old whose father, two uncles and cousin also are New York City firefighters, was intent on gathering his gear from the engine – so he didn't see the bodies falling from the North Tower.

"Someone said, 'We have jumpers,' " Mr. Blaich said. "I kind of knew in the back of my mind that they were hitting the ground nearby, because you could hear the thuds."

He didn't look. He just grabbed his stuff and ran toward the burning North Tower.

"McSweeney? Oh no, not him!"

"Isn't that the guy who could hit the softball a mile?"

"Yeah, that's the guy..."

"Tommy Gambino? Oh God."

The fire department had never lost more than 12 firefighters in a single day. That day was devastating. Losing more than 300, unfathomable.

On a message board in the dining room, a note says, "We will be needed to step up and work for the neighboring co.'s so they can attend funerals. L-11, L-3, etc., etc."

Ladder Co. 3, less than a mile away, lost 10 men. Ladder Co. 11, about 15 blocks away, lost six, every man it had at the towers that day.

When the lobby elevator doors opened to Mr. Blaich's engine company, jet fuel gushed out, so they knew they knew they had to walk up. Ninety floors to where they figured the plane had hit, with each man carrying 100 pounds of gear.

At about the seventh floor, they heard an explosion. The other tower had been hit. As they climbed, people streamed past, going down.

Some people, fully clothed and calm, encouraged the firefighters as they brushed shoulders. Others were naked and whimpering, with charred hair and skin peeling from their bodies. A few of the naked ones covered themselves with jackets.

Ascending the same stairwell just ahead of them, Ladder 6's Billy Butler and his fellow firefighters stopped on several floors to break the glass fronts of vending machines and grab bottles of water. They kept a bottle for themselves, but handed out the rest.

"We were telling people, 'You're almost there. You're almost there. Just 15 more floors. Just 10 more floors.' "

At about the 28th floor, they heard and felt a tremendous blast. Traffic quieted on their fire radios. If they had had time to listen closely, they might have realized that virtually no transmissions were coming from the other tower.

It is Lt. Bob Marcoux's first day off after six days of digging – digging and crying.

"You cry because you're human," he says. "You cry because you have to."

He slept less than three hours last night, about average for a New York firefighter these days. He has a wife and two children in Campbell Hill, N.Y., a little more than an hour away. But he's not headed there.

Instead, he silently puts on his dress uniform: white shirt, blue pants, clip-on blue tie, blue jacket with an American flag pin on its lapel and medals on its chest.

On average, about three New York City firefighters die on the job each year. At their funerals, it's not unusual to see 10,000 fellow firefighters, from other firehouses, other parts of New York City, other states.

But these days, the funerals are relatively empty. Hardly any firefighters have time to go, unless the funeral is for someone in his own company. Men from the Chinatown station spend their time manning their firehouse, digging at Ground Zero, or volunteering at stations that lost men so that the survivors there can go to funerals.

"About 75 guys that I'd have over for dinner died," says Lt. Marcoux, a towering figure at 6-foot-5, with 22 years on the force.

Today, his day off, he's headed for the funeral of one of those guys.

"Collapse is imminent! Collapse is imminent."

That cry over their fire radios, which came somewhere about Floor 25, stopped the ascent of Peter Blaich and the others from Engine 9. They turned and started down, stopping at each floor, yelling for people to evacuate.

They found the lobby littered with slabs of concrete. A lieutenant from another engine company grabbed them and said, "I'm missing all my guys. Can you help me?" They stopped to help, as the smoke grew thicker and chunks of the building fell around them.

"That's when our lieu[tenant] said we have to go," Mr. Blaich said. "We didn't want to leave."

One block from building, he was knocked to the ground by a flying tire. Another guy from his company dragged him behind a car as the freight train of concrete, steel, smoke and dust slammed past.

When it had passed, someone dug them out from the rubble and helped them to their feet. Nearby, two other people lay deathly still, just lumps under dust and debris.

Mike Price was the one who saved Peter Blaich.

The sadness in his blue eyes is deep and palpable. His friends at the firehouse see it every day.

"I give him a hug every time I come onto a shift with him," firefighter Nick Lucenti said. "You have to feel for him and what he's been through."

Mr. Price hasn't been to any funerals, weddings or parties for the past two years. He has been mourning for his 5-year-old son, Mark, who died in a backyard accident. He wears a necklace with a photo of Mark, and has another photo tucked into his helmet. There's also a gold guardian-angel pin on his helmet and on every shirt he wears.

"He saved us," Mr. Price says in a soft voice, speaking of his son. "I could feel him watching over us."

The engine guys were out, but Billy Butler and five other ladder guys were helping an elderly woman named Josephine down the stairs. She had walked down from the 73rd floor. Her legs were like jelly.

"Josephine, do you have kids?" Mr. Butler asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Do you have grandkids?"

"Yes."

"Those kids want to see you again," the firefighter told her, "so we have got to get you out of this building, OK?"

Suddenly, it was black as night. Debris knocked them down and buried them. Bodies hurtled past them down the stairwell and landed a flight or two below.

"I thought a bomb went off at the bottom," Mr. Butler said. "It was like an earthquake and a tornado wrapped up into one."

When the maelstrom subsided, they dug out. Everyone from the company, six all together, was still alive, as was Josephine.

"Mayday! Mayday!" they yelled into the radio. No answer.

It didn't occur to them that the whole building had fallen. They began to climb downward again, through the rubble.

A couple of floors down, they came to a yawning void, a drop of several stories to what remained of the lobby. There was nothing to do but wait and pray.

The firehouse is like a fraternity times a thousand, filled with men who sleep in the same room on single beds and eat homemade food in the dining room. Their culinary tastes are well-defined.

"Geez, this soup is so salty, I can't eat it," Lt. Marcoux says, tossing it in the garbage. "Who made this?"

Joking is like breathing. One favorite prank is to tie a string to a wallet, then toss it onto the sidewalk, reeling in whoever stoops to pick it up.The men never hesitate to hug one another. Or laugh together. Or cry.

Like several of the guys, Matthew Komorowski has been on sick leave since last week, but – despite his wife's pleas – he can't stay away.

"I want to work, get back there and dig with these guys," says Mr. Komorowski, a 38-year-old, 12-year veteran of the department. "But my wife ..."

"Should I get a desk job?" he says, staring at the ground and lowering his voice. "But I can't work behind a desk. I just can't."

From the stairwell, Billy Butlertried to call 911, using the phone of a Port Authority officer who was trapped with them. When he couldn't get through, he called his wife in Greenville, N.Y. After countless busy signals, he got a connection.

"Diane, we're trapped in the World Trade Center, but I'm OK," he said.

Diane Butler started whimpering. But her husband told her she had a job to do. She was to call the authorities for help.

"Tell them we're in Tower One, in the B stairwell at about the fourth floor," he said. "Calm down. You have to do this."

So they sat, drywall and dust and other unimaginable things caked onto their faces.

Hours later, one of the radios came to life. A voice told them help was on the way, but it didn't arrive, even though they had given their exact location.

"I'm thinking, 'Are these guys stupid?' " Mr. Butler said. "We know exactly where we are and they can't find us? What idiots."

What he didn't know was that the 110-story building had collapsed around them, and that they were in the middle of a sea of mangled metal.

The station is on Canal Street in the heart of Chinatown, where store signs are in Chinese characters, and people speak more Chinese than English. Until last week, residents mostly kept their distance, minding their own business.

These days, the firehouse walls are covered with letters from children in the neighborhood. "Thank you Firemen!" "We love you Fireman!"

A class of second-graders stops by to sing "God Bless America." Neighbors show up with soup, cookies and pasta. Chinese people by the dozen bow as the firefighters go by.

A 3-year-old boy brings a red-white-and-blue pinwheel to the house, handing it to firefighter Matthew Komorowski.

"Thank you very much," Mr. Komorowski says, tears in his eyes. "You say hello when you stop by from now on, OK?"

When Peter Blaich, Mike Price and the rest of Engine Co. 9 learned their firehouse-mates were trapped, they went back to what had been the North Tower. The lobby was a jumble of steel girders and concrete boulders, pocked with fires, but they managed to find the B stairwell.

Mr. Blaich's father, Bob, was with them. He is a battalion commander who once was a captain in Ladder 6. He urged them forward, with his son leading the way, toward the flames shooting from the base of the stairwell.

"Your mind and body is telling you don't go back there," Peter Blaich said, "but you're heart is telling you something else."

A girder smashed to the ground 20 feet away. An officer from another company ordered them out of the wreckage.

It was, Mr. Blaich said, "the most depressing thing I've done in my life. You want to stay there until you get the last guy out."

Engine 6 sits in front of the firehouse, with windows blown out and sides pocked by flying debris. The guys drove it back, but it conked out before they could get it inside the station.

Peter Blaich climbed aboard the front bumper and painted "Company God Country" above the windshield. Elsewhere, in the soot that blankets it, people have written, "God bless America" and other patriotic slogans.

For more than four hours, Billy Butler and his group of survivors waited for help that didn't come. Then a ray of sunlight hit his shoulder.

Somewhere in the wreckage above them was an opening. Leaving Josephine behind, the men scrambled toward it – and emerged into a world that, even with all they had been through, they could not have imagined.

Mountains, acres of smoldering rubble. Hulking steel silhouettes, surreal in the smoke. And above, nothing. Where a 110-story building had stood, a wasteland.

One of the guys had an air horn. They blew it until, finally, other firefighters came. Those firefighters lowered a rope and went down for Josephine as the Ladder 6 guys picked their way through the carnage.

They changed course when fires flared. They moved back at the sound of ammunition exploding. They skirted gaping holes. It took them an hour to climb out of the wreckage.

When Mr. Butler tripped over an I-beam and fell, two firefighters from another companypicked him up, all 275 pounds of him, and carried him to safety.

"Snot was hanging down to my chest, but I didn't care because I was alive," Mr. Butler said.

Minutes later, Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex collapsed onto where he had been clinging.

One of the lucky ones.

Mr. Butler took a boat to Jersey City that afternoon, where he was treated for smoke inhalation and scratches on his eyeballs. Then Mr. Butler, who has a bald head and biceps the size of hams, replete with firefighter tattoos, headed back to ground zero.

"I asked him if he was OK when he finally came home," Diane Butler said. "And when he said, 'I need a beer,' I knew he was OK."

Returning to the place they nearly died, the firefighters from Chinatown walk past crushed fire trucks. They stare and wonder if everyone got out alive. When they can make out the company number, the shudder.

"There's the bumper from Ladder Co. 11," Lt. Marcoux says. "They lost a lot of men."

Moving closer, they walk through thousands of pieces of paper, once filed neatly but now lying everywhere, burned and torn, in inches of soot. One is a note, nearly five blocks from the wreckage, penned by a worker at Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., a stock brokerage located above the 100th floor that lost more than 700 employees.

At ground zero, pieces of the towers' façades stick out at crazy angles, like pins in a pincushion.

Fewer and fewer rescue workers have gone there in recent days, as hope of finding survivors dwindles. The ones who are there dig and dig and dig and dig, only to find a hand or part of a face or half a torso.

"You can differentiate different types of fires and smoke by the way it smells," Lt. Marcoux says. "And this? This is the smell of death."

Driving to the Lt. Michael Warchola's wake, Lt. Marcoux passes fire station after fire station, each with flowers, candles and American flags surrounding its doors. He's a tough smartass, like many of the city's bravest, but seeing all the memorials, he aches inside like a lost, lonely child.

He remembers working with Mr. Warchola 20 years ago at Engine Co. 93 in northern Manhattan. He remembers how they had dated the same woman, whom Mr. Warchola eventually married, and how that became a joke between them.

And when Lt. Marcoux pulls up to Hillebrand Funeral Home in Rego Park, Queens, there isn't a car or a firefighter in sight.

He had called Ladder Co. 5 twice to confirm the time and date, but in the mayhem of this terrible time, everything is out of place. Schedules change. Funerals change.

As it turns out, the wake is tomorrow. So Lt. Marcoux says a prayer and bids goodbye to his friend in a room full of empty chairs.

On his way out, he grabs a funeral card. He reads it and tucks it into his breast pocket, as his eyes become glassy.

"Grieve not ... nor speak of me with tears ... but laugh and talk of me ... as though I were beside you. I loved you so ... 'twas Heaven here with you."

Staff writer Victoria Loe Hicks in Dallas contributed to this report.