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| Trapped in World
Trade Center on 9/11, firefighter Bill Butler still answers the call |
| By
Douglas B. Brill | The Express-Times |
When he heard the first roar, Bill Butler retreated from the 28th floor
of the North Tower of the World Trade Center and, on his way down,
found Josephine Harris.
Then he heard the second roar. |
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“The last thing I remember before it went dark, I whirled around and I
saw her face,” Butler said of Harris,
who was badly fatigued and
had abandoned her retreat from the 74th floor until Butler and five
fellow firefighters from New York’s Ladder Co. No. 6 helped
her.
“And then,” he said, “she
was gone.”
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Butler, 48, who got his start as a volunteer firefighter in Pohatcong
Township, next found himself on Sept. 11, 2001, pinned in the corner of
a fifth-floor stairwell, patting his body parts to make sure they were
still there.
But he was alive, as was Harris and 12 others in the stairwell during
the collapse. They felt and fumbled their way downstairs though the
dark of a dust plume. But the rubble was infirm and impassable. There
was no going down. Up was gone. Radio calls met only silence.
They were trapped.
‘Expect to find me where the action
is’
Lt. Butler isn’t bitter.
The five hours he spent breathing dust and hoping for help left him
with a lung ailment that now sometimes makes him feel like he’s
breathing through a straw. He knows his health can get worse, speaking
matter-of-factly about cancer and “weird diseases” that have struck
other 9/11 first responders.
In the months after the attacks, Butler attended half a dozen funerals
per week, greeted passing aircraft with skepticism, panicked when car
doors shut and shot out of bed at the sound of early morning thunder.
He’s not as cheerful as he used to be. His wife says he’s turned
“crotchety.”
But it’s hard to tell as Butler fields calls and directs young
firefighters at Engine 48 Ladder 56 in the Bronx, where he went for a
post-9/11 promotion instead of retiring. There, he breathes easy.
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“I’m not bitter,”
said Butler, a 1981 graduate of Phillipsburg High School who
volunteered with the Huntington Volunteer Fire Co. in
Pohatcong and
the Palmer Township Municipal Fire Department. “I’m
a little
upset there are guys far sicker than I am. The politicians,
the
powers that be, aren’t taking care of them well enough. I get
up. I function.
I come to work. I still fight fires. I’m in pretty good shape.
“There are a lot of people who have
questioned me why I don’t just take disability,” he said.
“(But) I still like the
challenge. I still like going to fires. When we’re kids we
have that thing with the fire
siren. Wherever you go, you’re checking it out.
“Expect to find me where
the action is.”
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They went up while all else came down
In July 2001, Butler married his wife, Diane, and the couple moved into
a new home in upstate New York.
Bill Butler left for work at 4:30 a.m. Sept. 11 to study for his
lieutenant’s exam and went for coffee as firefighters outside his
station saw a low-flying plane and heard a crash.
They sensed catastrophe. But that was their call, and they went.
As they approached the World Trade Center, the crew saw so much falling
from the sky that they couldn’t distinguish the debris from the
desperate leapers. They sprinted into a lobby blown apart and entered
stairwell B as 12,000 people ran for their lives — firefighters going
up as everyone and everything else came down. |
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“We
fight hundreds of high-rise fires every year and we’d never had one
fall down,” Butler said. “The plan was to go up, rescue people
and probably
start fighting the fire. Obviously, those two planes dictated
something different.”
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At the 28th floor, the firefighters heard the first roar: the South
Tower collapsing. Then they heard a louder roar and everything went
dark.
‘Everybody’s gone but you guys’
The North Tower collapsed around them, and the firefighters and Harris,
remarkably spared, sat in bleakness waiting for help they couldn’t be
sure would arrive.
As time passed, someone spotted a heat lamp over the head of Butler,
who turned to realize it was only the sun revealing itself as the dust
dispersed around the weary crew.
As one firefighter endured a head injury, another a broken shoulder and
Harris remained too tired to walk, the long-silent radio finally
squawked: “Hey brother. We’re coming to get you.” Rescuers from Ladder
43 were on their way.
It would be three hours before they arrived, and when they did, they
discovered the route they took to get there was now on fire.
Now the only way out was a high-stakes obstacle course over debris
dotted with deadly ravines. The World Trade Center had five basements,
which meant the fifth floor was 90 feet from the ground, and a fall
would be almost certain death.
Slowly, gingerly, deliberately, they completed the course. |
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“Where are the guys from the engine?” Butler asked once he reached
triage.
“They’re gone,” he was
told.
“Who’s gone?” he asked.
“Everybody’s gone but you
guys.”
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What has changed?
Josephine Harris, 69, died in January of a heart attack in her New York
City apartment. Butler and the five others from Ladder Co. No. 6 who
saved her served as pallbearers.
Three hundred forty-three New York City firefighters died on 9/11,
others retired and others have since died. They were replaced by
younger recruits and a largely new generation of firefighters in the
FDNY.
Osama bin Laden’s dead.
Three of Bill and Diane Butler’s four children, who were 13, 11, 8 and
3 on 9/11, are now college-age adults. The fourth recently learned
about 9/11 in history class and then pressed her dad on the real story
behind that time he saved a woman from a fire.
Asked how life has changed since 9/11 and whether it’s for the better,
Butler said he feels like he’s living on borrowed time, “almost waiting
for the hammer to drop,” but he largely couldn’t answer. |
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“I
really don’t know,” he said, seated at his Bronx fire station. “It’s
tough to compare before and after 9/11, you know.”
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Soon, the fire alarm rang for smoke in a Bronx home. In a flash, the
33-year veteran was dressed, in a truck and out the door, on his way to
where the action was.
And for that instant, it seemed 9/11 hadn’t changed much of anything:
That was his call, and he went. |
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