Last Man Down: A Fireman’s Story by Richard Picciotto [TSS]

Today is September 11, 2011 and ten years have passed since the day the world turned upside down as terrorists claimed the lives of thousands of innocent people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. People who were going about their business in the World Trade Center complex, in the US Pentagon and aboard four airplanes that would never reach their destination.

Ten years, and I can still recall that day as if it were yesterday, and I’m sure you can to. Ask anyone and they will be able to tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing on that fateful day. Me I was actually fast asleep in a hotel room in Vegas, I remember being awoken by the clock radio and heard the words 747 and World Trade Center collapse and thought it was some sort of story. Then we switched on the TV and realised the sickening truth, that this atrocity was really happening and events were unfolding right before our eyes, there on the television screen.

Richard ‘Pitch’ Picciotto is one of the fire fighters who entered the North Tower that day in an attempt to rescue innocent victims from what he thought was just a fire, a big fire by anyone’s standards, but a fire nonetheless. Like many other fire fighters who entered the towers that day he wasn’t supposed to be there. His battalion had not been called to fight this fire, but like those other men who simply volunteered their services that day he couldn’t stay away.

In Last Man Down Pitch tells his story of what happened to him on September 11, 2001, as he found himself entering the North Tower, matching himself up with the men of  110 Truck and fighting their way up the chaotic stairwell in search of people trapped on the 21st and 25th floor. He shares the thoughts and feelings that he experienced up there on the 35th floor of the North Tower, in the 10 seconds that it took for the South Tower to collapse as they stood like stones waiting for the roar to reach them. “A thousand trains. A thousand rushing beasts. A thousand inconceivable terrors, and then a thousand more. Hell, make it a couple thousand, and it still wouldn’t have covered it, that’s how impossibly loud it was.” With the sickening realisation as to what had happened in the South Tower Pitch made a call to evacuate the North Tower. He did not wait for orders from a higher rank, he simply made the call, that every fire fighter in the North Tower must evacuate, and that they needed to get out as quickly as they could.

Pitch saved many a life making that call as the fire fighters and office workers on the lower floors were able to exit the Tower, but Pitch and a handful of men hadn’t made it past the sixth floor when the rumbling started again: “It was 29 minutes after then o’clock in the morning, not a half-hour since the first tower had fallen, and I suppose if I hadn’t just lived through the same muted roar across the plaza, and learned of the destruction that had come with it, I would have saved myself a few seconds of complete anguish and fear. As it happened, though, I knew. In a split second, I knew. And I knew for certain. There was no mistaking the sick rush of wind. There was no mistaking the violent, all-over shaking. It was terribly, terrifyingly clear. I even found time to give these thoughts voice, I learned afterwards, because as it registered what was happening, I blurted out, ‘Oh Shit, here it comes!’. Not exactly the most memorable parting phrase in the history of last words, but I said it without thinking.”

As the Tower collapsed around them Pitch, the other fire fighters and Josephine Harris (a 59 year old book-keeper) found themselves trapped in the stairwell somewhere around the 5th floor of the building. From here Pitch documents the minutes and hours that passed as they sought desperately for an escape route, and eventually found themselves on the outside of the building faced with: “Utter devastation. No signs of life, or movement. No noise but the rip of wind. Naturally this was the first I was seeing of the unfathomable, mind-boggling destruction on that plaza that morning. To burst on to such a scene, essentially unaware, was to question your place on earth. I had no frame of reference for a sight like this, no way to prepare for it.“

The Miracle of Stairwell B

Videos from a documentary which also recounted the events that took place in Stairwell B that day.