Calling All Boats: The Fireboats of 9/11

And we continue with our American stories and with a story about 9-11. Dr. Mike McGee is the author of All Available Boats, which is about Manhattan's trains and bridges shutting down on 9-11 and the heroic evacuation of 300,000 people off of the island by boats that happened to be in the area. It was a larger evacuation than Dunkirk and it was executed by a wide variety of boats that answered the call for help from pleasure boats to tugboats. And today Mike tells us about the fire department of New York's fire boats that bravely served that day. One of them was the John J. Harvey, which had been decommissioned. It was in 1931, the fastest, most powerful fire boat in the world.

It could pump 18,000 gallons a minute, which was just unheard of at the time. It was named after John J. Harvey, who had died in a fire on a boat. But the interesting thing about it is that at the time of 9-11, it was completely decommissioned, but it was functional. And the guy who actually was in charge of the John J. Harvey was a architectural preservationist who had gotten interested in saving the John J. Harvey.

So this boat, which is about 130 feet long, was formally preserved and saved beginning in 1999. And Huntley Gill was the guy who raised the funds and coordinated it. And then he became the captain. He was aided by a former truck mechanic whose name was Tim Ivory, who became the chief engineer for the boat. And he just got a kick out of, you know, keeping this thing functioning.

It's a mechanical wonder. And then there was a third person named Jessica DeLong, who happened to be from Massachusetts and was a maritime historian who had gotten interested in the boat, became one of the crew members for it. So at the time of the attack, Huntley Gill was asleep in his Manhattan apartment. Tim Ivory, who lived on a houseboat in a marina in New Jersey on the New Jersey side, was having breakfast at a diner.

And Jessica DeLong was writing a freelance article in her Brooklyn flat. Within hours, the three of them were on the boat and the boat was on the Hudson heading south to the disaster. And the first thing they did when they arrived there was to, over a loudspeaker, address the crowd that had gathered to be evacuated. You know, the most panicky people and those who were injured in the falling of the towers immediately, obviously, tried to get off the south side of the island and they were all gathered there.

So at Pier 63 on the Hudson River where the boat originated, it headed south. And the first thing it did was use a loudspeaker to tell people anybody want to go uptown. And 150 people boarded the fireboat and they took them uptown. Then they got a call by the time they reached uptown to discharge these 150 people. They got a call to rush back because the fire trucks had already run out of water and they needed this retired John J. Harvey to pump 18,000 gallons of water a minute to fill the trucks that were all out of water.

So that's what they did and they stayed in action down there for four days. Now one of the boats that was there as well was the John D. McCain fireboat. That fireboat was actually in service at the time. And it was a newer boat. It wasn't that brand new.

It had been commissioned in 1952 again named after a firefighter in 1953 actually who had lost his life in a steam explosion on a boat. The captain though, Ed Metcalf, this was only his second day as captain of that boat. So he had just arrived. And the second day of his command, he gets this call to come down immediately to the seawall at Liberty Street. In fact, this was right after the first plane had hit and the second plane had not yet hit. They were down there within about five minutes and Metcalf got off the boat to go to the command center to see what the fire department wanted him to do next. He subsequently was lost in the turmoil and the collapse of the second building after the second plane hit, which they all saw. That's another part of this story. Anyone who witnessed those attacks or anyone who witnessed all of the citizens covered in inches of dust and debris slowly walking either north out of Manhattan or south to try to be evacuated by boat.

Anyone who witnessed those images has never really forgotten those images. And when Ed Metcalf didn't come back immediately, one of his crew members, Tom Sullivan, went to try to find out where he was. And Tom ended up in some of the wreckage of the second building collapsing and nearly lost his life as well. But in any case, what happened was that this boat, the John D. McKean, which is 130 feet long, it played a major role in the in the evacuation. And it was not designed, obviously, to transport people. In fact, these boats, the way they're designed, they need a gangplank of about 12 feet to reach the shoreline. And the shorelines down there were never designed for multiple purposes at either. I mean, one of the things that we learned from this event is that that New York Harbor area was not well designed for a disaster. You know, the people who run these boats, they talk about the commercial uses and bringing in liners and shipping containers over on the New Jersey side. But in general, it isn't a very good edge between the water and the land for boarding human beings.

Not designed for that at all. So the fact that they were able to move safely somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 people off that island in a short period of time is nothing short of a miracle. And when they moved the John D. McKean fireboat and started using it, people were panicked. The towers had just collapsed. People thought that the entire southern tip of Manhattan was going to blow up.

They didn't know what was coming next. And they were panicked. And you had not simply Wall Streeters covered in dust, but you had babies in the water. And you had people in the water. You had babies and nannies and civilians who lived in the buildings around this area all trying to get off the island. And the John D. McKean fireboat really ran into a lot of challenges in terms of children.

Their deck was about eight foot down from the loading shores. And they were literally throwing some of the babies to the open arms of these firefighters on the boat. And then the babies were taken down and four babies to a cot were placed and the firemen were taking care of the babies as they were loading the nannies. In one case, a lady who was panicked actually jumped in the water and got trapped between the boat and the shore. And the firefighters had to actually jump into the water and save them by throwing a plank ladder down and boosting them up. One firefighter had to dive under the water to push an exhausted lady onto the ladder.

So this is a very chaotic situation. And so for the boat captains who are not used to doing this kind of work to remain calm and to as much as possible protect the safety of people who were inclined to do anything at that moment to get off the island. One of the common features of almost everyone that we interviewed was that when the boats were moving away from the island and looking back, you could see initially the twin towers on fire and then they all witnessed their collapse and then they were just gone. The thing that was most in common in every story was the extreme quietness on the boat itself that was nothing like they had ever experienced. The solemnness.

Everyone was deep inside themselves. And he is right about the silence. And that's the silence in New York and also in Washington, DC. And I bet it was the quietest time in American history. People were just shocked. A special thanks to Monty Montgomery and Alex Cortez for the work. Dr. Mike McGee, author of all available boats, our 9-11 special here on Our American Stories.