The Attack and Aftermath
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Moving on proves difficult task for members of FDNY
BY JONATHAN D. ROCKOFF / Providence (R.I.) Journal Staff Writer
NEW YORK – There was an earthquake here the other day. It turned out to be minor, just enough to rattle some windows. But at the time, it scared Vincent Caposio from his sleep.
"I thought it was a bomb," he recalls.
Caposio awoke. Like any firefighter, he rushed outside to the fire station near his house. He watched a fire truck leave, and he waited for its return. When the truck soon came back, Caposio knew things were all right – for once.
Early this year, Caposio found out his wife had cancer. On Sept. 11, he found out five friends had died in the World Trade Center. They were fellow firefighters. For days, he searched for them, with no success.
All that digging and searching through rubble proved useless. Caposio doesn't even know where they had been. He heard a rumor they were hosing down a stairwell in the World Trade Center.
"But we don't know how true that is," he says.
Now, Caposio balances the grim realities of home and work. He takes a week off to watch his two children while his wife receives treatment, but that means missing memorial services for his lost colleagues.
He coaches his son's football team to take his mind off things. "But there's always something in the back of your mind," he says in a Hell's Kitchen fire station. "You can't forget about it."
George Criscitello, a lieutenant who was filling in at the fire station, says two of the station's missing firefighters had their helmets buried because their bodies couldn't be found. It hurts, he says.
"There is nothing normal about this. Abnormal is normal," says Criscitello. "In six months, you're going to see guys in funny farms."
IN THE NEW YORK firefighting fraternity, a fire station is a house and a fellow firefighter is a brother. They call their company a family.
At Engine 26, a busy company serving Times Square, the brothers eat, sleep and joke together. Outside work, a few play hockey together, too, including Caposio, who looks the part.
Caposio moves his compact frame easily throughout Engine 26's drafty brick firehouse. At those times, he swaggers like Jimmy Cagney, joking with his brothers, slapping them on the shoulders and arms.
But other times, he slouches in a chair, and his eyes redden. The bluster is gone, replaced by few words. Caposio is talking about Sept. 11, a day off, when he heard the news and went to the fire station by his Queens home.
Caposio grabbed someone's gear and hitched a ride on a fire truck going to the World Trade Center. When he got there, there was destruction. In the days following, he went back again and again.
"Driving down there, I tell you, I was choked up," he says, speaking about riding to Ground Zero past adoring crowds. "All the people whistling and clapping – it was, you know, emotional but uplifting, too."
Engine 26 doesn't go down there anymore, and its family is broken.
Now, the station house has a revolving door of substitutes – firefighters from the Bronx and Staten Island filling in for a shift or two.
At the shift change Saturday evening, Caposio didn't know who was coming and who was going. "Anybody working the night report up front for roll call," he says over an intercom at the station.
"I'm Duffy, Captain Duffy," a mustachioed man from another station says.
He will be in charge. The station has 3 officers and 10 firefighters from 3 different stations. The captain is told that the day shift wasn't too busy, and no one had any problems finding their fires.
Soon, the captain will learn for himself. An alarm rings a few blocks away. Firefighters don gear, grab directions to the alarm spewed out by a computer printer, and jump into their trucks.
Caposio reminds the drivers that avenue numbers increase heading north.
One fire engine at the station speeds away. But the ladder truck, driven by a firefighter from another station, has trouble negotiating the tight turn out of the garage and onto the street.
For a minute or so, the ladder is stuck getting out.
ON SEPT. 11, the New York Fire Department lost 343 firefighters. Caposio's station, which houses the ladder truck, Caposio's fire engine and a second engine, lost 12.
Lt. Neil Skow's Midtown station lost another 10.
Skow, a compact Army veteran with a military demeanor, describes the difficulty of replacing veteran firefighters experienced in fighting fires in Manhattan's high-rises.
"That experience is difficult to replace," Skow says, seated erect at his Midtown fire station's large wooden kitchen table. "If this was an infantry battalion, we lost three infantry companies.
"And all that experience and all that knowledge is irreplaceable."
Skow's station has received substitutes from the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn, but they work in relatively small buildings in those neighborhoods. The station's two rookies – well, they don't have any firefighting experience.
So the station, annually the city's fourth or fifth busiest with responsibility for 750 buildings, drills when it doesn't fight fires. The firefighters practice techniques in the station and at buildings.
Office towers with, say, a vacant floor, have volunteered the space for simulations. Skow places red lamps throughout the floor to indicate simulated fires. Firefighters paint their air masks black to pretend it's smoky.
Skow believes the practice has helped the new crews and himself.
"I share the grief with the brothers," he says. But "I'm tired of crying, and it's my responsibility to the guys we lost to carry on the tradition and pride of this firehouse. That's what keeps me focused."
Moving on, however, remains difficult. Skow was supposed to work on Sept. 11, but he had switched shifts with a captain, Fred Ill. "I'm here to talk about it," Skow says, looking down, "and he's not."
A memorial service the other day for Capt. William Burke, another friend, brought back tears.
During work, Skow focuses on keeping up the station's work. He is proud that it has finished inspections of all the fire hydrants in its district and of all the highest-priority buildings. Now, it will inspect lesser priorities.
When not working, Skow just wants to spend as much time as he can with family. And fortunately, well-wishers have been offering firefighters opportunities to take their minds off the terrorist attacks.
"Like," Skow says, "Yankee tickets."
IN CAPOSIO'S STATION, in Hell's Kitchen, in Manhattan, surviving members of Engine 26 gather in a narrow office to answer the telephone, monitor the emergency radio and watch sports on a small television.
It is Saturday night, and the New York Rangers are playing their archrival hockey foes the Boston Bruins in Boston. Caposio stands to watch the playing of the national anthem. On the ice, firefighters are saluting.
"Those are our guys," Caposio says, amazed. "New York guys in Beantown – you've got to love it."
Throughout New York, fire stations have received bouquets, donations and cards of support from well-wishers across the country. At Engine 26's station, the greetings are everywhere: on the walls, a soda machine, metal cabinets.
A hockey stick signed by supporters hangs above an open closet.
Shortly before 8 p.m., Caposio switches the television station to the World Series. His beloved Yankees are playing. If New York wins the championship, he says, it would lift spirits.
"I'd love to see them win in New York," he adds. "This place would go berserk."
The games is in Phoenix, though. The Yankees are playing the Arizona Diamondbacks. Caposio stands again for the national anthem. The network shows Phoenix firefighters raising an American flag.
"Look at this," Caposio tells his colleagues. "Nice."
They all stare silently at the screen.
After the game begins, Caposio and his fellow firefighters study a calendar on the wall. They point out the dates of memorial services, paying particular attention to Nov. 8, their dead captain's date.
"We've got to get those days off," firefighter Paul DeBartolomeo says.
Roughly an hour later, a chicken dinner is served. DeBartolomeo and then Caposio join their temporary colleagues at two long tables in the kitchen. A television shows the baseball game there.
They watch as the Diamondbacks score four runs in the third inning. A lieutenant from another station gets a teasing call from a firefighter there who is a New York Mets fan. Everyone groans when a Yankee muffs a catch.
This makeshift family of firefighters is finishing dinner and complaining about the Yankees when a fire call comes in.
"Everybody goes," the intercom barks. "Everybody goes."
The firefighters drop their forks and knives on their plates, scramble into their gear and hop into fire trucks. Garage doors rise, and the trucks scream off into the night, leaving a cold breeze and quiet.
When Caposio and the rest of the firefighters return 20 minutes later from a stove fire, the Yankees have given up so many more runs that it's clear they will not win the game.
Caposio, with so much else on his mind, will have to dream about victory on another night.