Lieutenant Bradley Mann was supposed to be in Mexico on Sept. 11, 2001. But on Sept. 10 he called his boss at the New York City Fire Department and said that he had returned early.
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"I shouldn't have even been there. I should have been on vacation in Mexico with my fiancé, now wife, but when we got to Mexico we became sick and ended up coming home a week early. I got home on the 9th, and like an idiot, I called my boss on the 10th – I worked for the 5-star chief of the department – and I told him, 'Hey, I am home early, it was terrible, do you have stuff going on that you need me to work on?'" Mann recalled during a recent interview with Israel Hayom.
"He said, 'If you are home, and you want to come in, we have stuff going on.' I said OK, and I went into work the morning of the 11th," Mann recalls. Little did he know that this decision to come in early to work would be so consequential and that it would be the day he would last see most of his unit, including his boss, the chief of department Peter Ganci, the highest-ranking firefighter to die in the attack.
During the horrific events of the day, Mann almost died by a crashing steel beam and later almost suffocated in the rubble but survived thanks to a personal oxygen tank that miraculously lasted for several hours even though it was shared by two people; he also saw Ganci die because he would not leave his men behind; and he heard his colleagues send out their last messages of love to their family after they realized they were not going to make it alive from the burning towers.
"I was sitting in my office in the headquarters in Brooklyn, talking with one of the captains, telling him about how horrible Mexico was and how the water made us sick and we came home. As I relayed the story to him I happened to glance up and I watched the first plane hit the [North] tower. We didn't know what was going on at this point, I walked down the hallway to my boss' office, and I told him: 'Chief I need to talk to you.' He looked at me and he said, 'Lieutenant, how many times have I told you don't come into my office in the morning if you don't have a cup of coffee in your hand.' I said, 'Chief we don't have time for that, look,' and I pulled up the Venetian blinds, 'a plane just hit the north tower of the world trade center."
Mann explained how the Ganci, despite not having to be at every incident, decided he had to be there because he was the chief of the department. Mann and the rest of the unit also made their way to Manhattan along with him.
"We went over the Brooklyn Bridge, we got to the middle of the bridge and the north tower at the point was completely on fire. I said, 'This is going to be bad.' We went to Broadway and then to Vesey Street, parked the car in a corner in front of a post office and I remember getting out of a car, got my equipment out and my helmet, coat and looked at [one of the commanders] Chief Cassano, and we hugged and said 'We will see you back at the office.' He went one way, I made a right turn on Vesey Street and I was walking between the two towers. There is a footbridge the runs across the street and I was looking up at what was going and not paying attention, and by that point, the first two engine companies were there with the hoses stretched. I tripped over a hose line. I picked up my stuff put my helmet back on, walked about 20 steps, and then all of a sudden my helmet was flying off. I turned around and there is an arm laying next to me," Mann adds, noting how this event made it all-too clear that things were going to get worse, and he told himself: "I guess I can see what kind of day this is going to be." The next thing he sees "two people jumping holding hands, I watch those two people hit the ground and spatter." He then proceeded walking to West Street, the main road in front of the World Trade Center. He was effectively implementing pre-planned contingencies for a major fire in the area. Mann knew those plans well because planning was part of his job description at the headquarters. His job was to deal with oversight of field operations and help the staff chiefs with policies, and he had a direct line of communication with the chief of the department.
"The plan was actually executed exactly the way we have always drilled for it. The World Trade Center drill was something that we drilled three times a year, so everybody was very well aware of it and everything was going on perfectly as planned, but, not to jump ahead, the moral of the story was that all of the planning and all of the preparation for so many years since the buildings were built in the 1970s was designed for a plane that was coming into land, because the WTC is in the flight path for all three New York-area airports, and that if anything happened they would have no fuel load. But both planes had over 1,000 gallons of jet fuel each and as it turned out that's what contributed to the building coming down because the fire burnt so hot and melted the fire coating off the steel of the building," Mann, said.
Indeed, nothing could prepare the city for an attack on this scale.
"So we set up all the ambulances and we were in the middle of the street coming up with a plan and that's when we got notice that a second plane hit. At that point, we kind of knew this was not some isolated accident. People started yelling 'We are at war.'
"Eventually, we got an evacuation call that the south tower was coming down. If you ever ride the subway in New York, right before the train gets into the station, when the train is still in the tunnel the platform starts to shake almost like an earthquake. That's what it felt like. And then within seconds, there was just debris everywhere," Mann said as he began telling his account of the events that almost him killed.
As the first tower was collapsing, he and his team did what they could to survive, often improvising and finding ad-hoc solutions to the rapid pace of events.
"I had about 15 guys with me and we just started running toward the river [because the tower was collapsing]. We got to the end of the street and we had to make a split-second decision. We could jump over the wall and die from contamination. But there was also a little side street that I saw from the corner of my eye I saw a steel construction trailer, so I said, 'Right turn!' so 15 of us piled into this little shed. And we were in there for I would say 20 minutes, but it seemed like 2 and a half hours; we just stayed in there until we heard no noise. We opened the door and it looked like a nuclear explosion. Everything was dead silent, covered in that greyish dust, and everything was just eerily dead silent."
Q: So at this point, the only thing you knew was that the south tower had collapsed?
"Correct. Other than that we had no idea what was going on. We looked around, we didn't see anyone or hear anything. So the only thing we could do at this point was walk north. We walked for a couple of blocks and sat at an office building.
"There was no power, no anything. As it turned out there was a front and back entrance, and a fountain in the middle. We came in through the back door and another bunch came in through the front door. So we had no idea they were there. At some point, the radios started to come back on. Luckily there was a one-star chief there and other officials there. At that point, we thought we were the only ones who survived. We assumed there would be a lot of bodies. That was a big concern. Coincidentally, I had been a manager of a girls hockey team and there was a double Olympic size ice rink 20 blocks north of us at Chelsea Piers, so I said to the one-star chief, 'Well chief, I think I have your morgue problem solved.'"
Eventually, Chelsea Piers became the northern command post for the operations, as well as a morgue, although not to the extent that was anticipated. As we all know, there were hardly any bodies found at the site due to the intensity of the heat during the crash and subsequent fire.
After realizing that there were more people in the WTC and that the North Tower was still an active scene, Mann and the rest headed back south.
"So at that point, there were 25-30 of us, we didn't know who else was alive. The one-star chief was in charge. As time went on the radios started to come back and then we started hearing guys on the radio on the North Tower calling for help that they were trapped and then all of the panic set in and guys realizing they were going to die. They were saying, 'This is firefighter so and so, I'm trapped, tell my wife and children I love them.' I heard voices of guys that I knew, guys who were probably the strongest people I had ever known screaming that they were running out of air. I still wake up in the middle of the night hearing their voices.
"We were in the lobby of North Tower as it was starting to lose its integrity and starting to collapse. And there were probably a dozen of us there with the chief [Ganci], and he told us, 'Everybody out, the building is coming down.' So we turned around and walked about 60 yards across the lobby and we all ran to the exit; we were actually right inside of the exit and the door frame, which is probably the only reason that I am alive. We watched the lobby pretty much disintegrate and the chief did not get out; the steel beam came down and we saw him get decapitated 60 feet from where we were standing. If one of us had stayed or grabbed him, or one of us had done something and he had come with us he would be here today, but unfortunately in our line of business when a supervisor gives you an order and you question it you can be dead yourself. So we did what the boss told us to do and we ran. Who knows what would have happened. It is what it is."
At this point, having realized that saving anyone from the WTC site was virtually impossible, the only thing left to do was to reassess the situation, Mann recalled, adding that this was also the moment that brought him close to death.
"The next thing I remember doing was being assigned to a team doing damage assessment with the mayor Rudi Giuliani. We were going through the outer buildings, we were actually in Building 7 [just next to the former towers] when that started to collapse. We were with him for about an hour and a half. We were trapped in Building 7 in the garage space only because we couldn't get the door opened. So I spent an hour and a half with Rudi talking about my soon-to-be wife, and everything I wanted to do in life. We didn't know what was going to happen at this point, because we didn't know what was going to happen with Building 7, we thought it would be lights out for all of us. And later we were at Building 6 doing a damage assessment when that building came down. I and my friend were breathing rubble off to our necks and between us we had one air pack with a 30-min air bottle. I tell everybody that it was like a story of Hannukah: Amazingly it lasted for 4.5 hours until they came and dug us out.
"At 3:30 p.m. we made our way back to the staging area, they gave us 30 minutes and we started doing accountability and trying to figure out where other people were. The biggest problem that we had in that regard was the fact that this occurred in a shift change in the city. All of the guys who were ready to get home, instead of getting home jumped on the truck, so normally you know who is working where. But because we had a whole extra shift of people who were getting off duty they weren't technically accounted for. We were trying to figure out who is alive, who is missing, who is there. At the end of the day, out of 13 people in my unit, I and Chief Cassano were the only two that survived.
"I tell people I have no reason and no explanation of why I am still here other than not being very religious. I guess God had a plan for me to marry my wife and have two terrific children, but really, I have no right to be here and have no right to be talking to you right now."
Mann notes with disappointment that the sacrifice and conduct of his fellow firefighters were not properly appreciated in the aftermath of the attack by people who never had to face the same choices under the same circumstances.
"Everybody said 'Never Forget, Never Forget.' That all lasted for about six months. What is more frustrating is that everybody knows how to do it better. Everybody has something to say about us, or how the command staff could have done this and that differently. It's really easy to sit and play Sunday afternoon quarterback from the rocking chair. I say that's all fine and well and everybody has their opinion, but you weren't there so you keep your mouth shut, I don't understand why people need to point fingers. It's not my boss' fault 343 of our guys got killed; it happened because it was full of jet fuel. At the end of the day, the buildings did what they were supposed to do. They twisted and came down on themselves, they were designed to twist so that they won't take down 200 city blocks, so the buildings were designed to twist and pancake.
"I tell people I didn't really do anything heroic. I went to work that morning like I went to work every other morning, a radio call came in and we went; we did our job and a lot of people I know did not come home. But that's something that unfortunately we signed up for when we took the oath and put our right hand up, that's what we agreed to do. And everybody did their job and then some."
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