Episode 2

25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks

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The views and opinions expressed on Beyond Command are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of any fire department, EMS agency, government organization, employer, or other organization with which they may be affiliated. The information presented on this podcast is for educational informational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for your department's policies, procedures, protocols, training, medical direction, or applicable laws and regulations. Fire and EMS professionals should always follow their agency's established procedures, approve training, medical protocols, and the direction of their appropriate authority. Today is September 11th, 2026, and it's the 2050 anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. A day that I'll never forget. Hopefully, nobody in this country forgets. It was a horrible day, and you know, something that changed our country, changed the people, changed families. There were a lot of deaths, I should say, a lot of murders were committed that day. September 11th, 2001 was an attack by Al-Qaeda terrorist network. There was several years in planning, and there were four planes hijacked. Two crashed into World Trade Center, New York City. One plane crashed into the Pentagon. And a third plane, I'm sorry, a fourth plane, which was United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 44 souls aboard when the passengers fought back and tried to retake the plane. That plane was headed toward Washington, D.C. Unknown what the ultimate target would have been. But the courageous people on that flight made sure it did not reach its destination. I'll always remember where I was that day. I was in the beginning, and it was I was a deputy fire chief at the time. I was riding in my car going to my office, and listening to the radio, and the DJ on the radio started talking about what he started seeing on the TV. They turned their TV monitors on in the radio station and started describing how an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. And you'd wonder, how would that happen? I thought it was like a small, small, maybe, you know, private jet or something like that. And, you know, it wasn't. It was a commercial airliner. I remember my mother telling me when I was younger that she would never forget where she was when she heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. And you know, when you're young, you don't process things like that until you have that moment of your own life. And September 11 was that moment for me. Never forget that. I pulled up to the firehouse and ran in. I told the guys, they're all sitting at the table having their morning meetings still. So it's probably about 7:30 a.m. Chicago time. And we turned the radio on. Everybody started to watch what was happening. You know, we're we were glued to the TV and uh discussing it. And you know, we watched as that second plane hit the other tower and erupted into a fireball. And you know, you could have heard a pin drop in that building. It was just something that none of us had seen before. I don't think any of us actually expected to see something like that. You know, until that time, we'd been talking about terrorism in a different light. We had homegrown terrorists that were running around. We had the Oklahoma City bombing in we had First World Trade Center to bombing or they blew up the car underground in the parking garage and some other attacks. A lot of us were worried as to when the we'd start seeing terrorists with suicide vests at the time. That was that was a concern. I don't think anybody thought that they would be able to hijack four commercial airliners and and actually attack New York City and Washington, D.C. So, you know, moving, we'll we'll move forward there that day. I think everybody in the country was was glued to our TVs, I mean, for hours. And some things that I remember, and we can talk about things that came out of this attack. Remember watching that, and when that second plane hit, just thinking, that's not an accident. You know, we thought the first plane was an accident. The second plane was definitely not an accident. We knew it. We knew there was an attack, something something bigger was going on that we didn't know about. And we watched the the coverage we watched as the brave people from FDNY and NYPD rushed up the towers to try and evacuate people to try to help the injured. And I remember distinctly watching the television, and at the time they had news helicopters and helicopter from NYPD that was up there, and you could see on the television that one of the buildings was leaning. You know, it almost looked like, well, is it a camera angle thing? What is it? But that building wasn't straight anymore. And, you know, we watched and watched, and sure enough, that that building came down, and that was the first catastrophic collapse of a high-rise building in the United States. I don't think anybody talked for hours, it seemed like it was just it was just surreal to see what was happening. And you knew when that building came down, we knew that it was full of firemen that were running up the stairs trying to evacuate people. We kept watching, and eventually that second building came down, and there was just this giant cloud of dust that the choppers, because the choppers all pulled out of the downtown area, you know, and they were they were farther out, and you just saw this giant cloud of dust enveloping midtown Manhattan. It's still emotional to think about. The coverage showed people that were above the fire floors because there was a lot of fire. You think about all the jet fuel and all of the stuff that was on these floors, everything is burning, and they you could see people started to jump because there's no way they were jumping to live, but they were jumping because they they just couldn't take the heat anymore. And the then the news just quit showing it. You know, if they saw people, they just switched the camera angles because they didn't want us to watch that at home. So the buildings collapsed, and we watched that for a while, and you wondered how many people died, and just like I said, it's it's still an emotional thing to really think about that day. At the World Trade Center, the totals were 2,753 people dead, and that includes the passengers on the plane, 343 New York City firemen, 23 New York City police officers, and 37 port authority police officers. And we're not counting the terrorists, because we don't even want to acknowledge their existence at that point. The Pentagon, American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon. And you wondered where is this gonna stop? The Pentagon, there were 189 deaths, and that includes 64 passengers of American Airlines Flight 77. The odd thing about the Pentagon, you know, it's uh it's a huge building. But what people didn't know is that that building was actually because of the target, it was had a protective layer around it, Kevlar, which slowed the plane. I think the plane actually hit the ground first before it hit the building a little bit, but it left a gaping hole at the Pentagon. And, you know, you could see a similar sight, like Washington, D.C. firefighters, police all over the place, and the military was there. You know, military people came in and they were evacuating. United Airlines Flight 93 was another plane that was hijacked. And somehow people on that plane had made telephone contact with families, loved ones, someone who said, Oh my God, do you know what's going on in New York? And you know, the people were saying our plane was hijacked. And the people on United Airlines Flight 93 knew that they were part of this attack, and that the plane they were on was destined to crash into another target. It was, you know, it was known to be heading toward Washington, D.C. And the people on that plane knew that they were not going to live through that flight and made the decision that they were going to try and take back their plane. Or at the very least, that that plane was not going to be used as a missile to attack other Americans. And they rushed the hijackers and subdued the ones in the cabin and attempted to get into the cockpit area. Not known if they got into the cockpit area. Excuse me. It's just a little emotional here. It's unknown if they got into the cockpit area. And um, excuse me. But ultimately, that plane rolled over in air and nosedived into the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard. But possibly saving many, many, many lives because that plane was itself going to fly into Washington, D.C. The Capitol building is the biggest building in DC that they could have hit, but they could also have been going for the White House, which, you know, from the air isn't as big as the Capitol, but you know, you see the White House, they know what it is. And these hijackers are trained for some time learning how to fly the planes, and they knew what their targets were. So at the end of at the end of the day, you know, it took weeks and weeks to identify and recover bodies at the World Trade Center. Firefighters from around the country were there helping FDNY. I know there was a large group of Chicago firefighters that left. I went out there. I they they were on the way that night and arrived the next morning and started helping their brothers as they tried to recover people. As I said, 343 members of the FDNY passed away that day. 23 members in New York City Police Department and 37 members of the Port Authority Police Department passed away that day in New York. It was the largest loss of life, got most of the press coverage, but never forget that on top of those two buildings, they we also had the attack on the Pentagon where we lost 189 lives. And we also had Flight 93 with some of the bravest people that you probably could ever meet. And that plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. So that that picture went on for months. Ultimately, people were identified by using DNA analysis on pieces of bone that were recovered, because when you have a 110-story high rise collapsed to a pile that was probably fifty to 75 feet tall, there was very little left. The people that that perished, you know, they stayed, rescuers stayed and stayed and stayed to try to account for every person. And it still it took, I think it took two years before they honestly had found every piece of bone because they were they were going through dust with sieves to find what they could so that the families of the people at Parish could have some closure. So what were some of the lessons that we learned from the 9-11 attack? One thing that was learned was that they were a lot more better trained, and that these operations were large-scale. Planning was ongoing to attack the United States. I remember another thing I remember vividly, which still angers me to the day, is on the news, they were showing clips from around the world. And, you know, the United States and Muslim countries is uh referred to as the great Satan. And I'm sure some people take offense that I just said that, but I saw in Muslim countries people dancing on cars, burning flags. They were overjoyed that the United States had been attacked and seriously wounded. The United States provides millions and millions, probably billions of dollars in relief aid around the world. And they don't ask anybody what their religion is, but there were countries, people in other countries that were celebrating this attack. And I'll never forget that personally, and that's enough said about that. But yeah, some things that we learned were that these terrorist networks were bigger, they were smarter than we thought, they were able to plan clandestinely without us knowing. You know, we had the best intelligence network in the world, and some things just made it past. They had we had terrorists in this country attending flight school to learn how to fly those planes. And I know that's something in the days that followed, that you know, they started looking at all these flight schools and identifying other people that were in sleeper cells. Some things, how to affect the fire service, you know, aside from losing people. I said earlier about the buildings leaning that you could see on the TV. And the police helicopters were in the air, could see that the building was leaning. And they let their command know, all right, but nobody let the fire department know that that collapse was imminent. That building was leaning and it was going to collapse. And that's one of the reasons perhaps that there were only 23 police officers from NYPD and 37 port authority police officers that perished. The helicopters from the police were able to tell the police command, and the police command was able to get their policemen out of the buildings. Unfortunately, the police couldn't talk to the fire, and that's why today we have interoperability radios that you're able to change a frequency and talk to police. You can talk to fire. I know I had radios that if I knew what frequency the guy, public works director in Carbondale, was on, I could get to them and talk to them on the radio if I needed to, because of repeaters and whatnot that they built into these systems. That was one of the big things that came out of the 9-11 report. And also unified command. And everybody now knows what unified command is. You've heard about it, you've trained in it. In large incidents, a unified command post has everybody that's working there. You have fire, you have a police, you have EMS, you may have forestry service, but they get all of the a representative of all the services together so that information from one can be disseminated. It doesn't get missed. And and hopefully when there's intelligence, we don't we have no problem sharing it. You know, was it a struggle at first? It was. We all had to regroup and start retraining on how we ran large-scale incidents. But you know, it's built to be a scalar command structure. It gets as big as you need it to. And if it's not big, you don't make it big. You don't have unified command on car fires. But you can have a police officer close to your command, fire command people. So if something's happening, some pertinent information comes out, we're able to share it. Yeah, September 11th is a day that hopefully the United States, nobody ever forgets that. I know for years that's what everyone said, never forget, never forget, never forget. You know, we're still through 25 years, there's still fire departments that'll have a moment of silence. Some will still read names that people have perished. You know, it it was a tough day for our country, a tough day for the fire service, a tough day for police, a tough day for so many families that lost loved ones. I hope that the U.S. never does forget what happened there in the terrorists that perpetrated it. It affected, you know, so many people so hard. And you know, we don't want to, if we forget that, you know, if we forget the memory of what happened, it's just an injustice to those who died. Because we need to make sure that that never happens again. So just to close here, you know, it's September 11th, and we'd be doing a disservice if I didn't touch on that with this podcast, because it's such an important date in the history of our country. It's an important date for the fire service. You know, we lost so many people. And for all the all the families, I hope that you've healed. And uh, but you never forget the people and what happened. So that's the end today. We're gonna sign off on a solemn day. And you know, in the future, let's make sure we remember the 26th and the 27th and the 28th anniversary, and we keep going and we never forget what those terrorists took from us. And we continue to be vigilant so that that never happens again. Thank you for joining us on Beyond Command, where we strive to elevate emergency response leadership. And this was episode two, September eleventh, two thousand one. Thanks for being here.