9/11 Stories: Retired FDNY Billy Martin

[Music] i am william martin i was in engine 83 on september 11 2001 and uh we were just starting the day tour i had worked the night before and my group was actually in to work that day so i was scheduled to be on on the rig that day so it was just a typical you know beautiful tuesday morning um i was probably not thrilled that the yankees were in the playoffs again and the mets were playing golf you know things of that nature uh but we had a covering captain that was it was his first day in rank uh had come over from brooklyn so we were discussing how much bigger the buildings were and how much hotter the fires were and things like that in the bronx um you know just regular shop breaking um getting ready for the day tour and then the first plane hit uh so i you know we were obviously startled and bewildered because it was a gorgeous day i mean it was a beautiful as they would say down here at carolina blue sky and uh you know we just didn't know what was going on so i called my wife quick and i said hey listen we're gonna be it's gonna be a long day we're gonna be used for manpower at some point you know this is what's going on down there and um you know don't don't wait up i had a an 18 month old at the time and i said you know i won't be home for dinner even because this is gonna be a long day and uh we hung up and then you know we're kind of watching the tv getting the rig ready for the day tour and then when the second plane hit you know we we got turned out almost immediately on on that on that alarm and uh so my wife called me quick and i said listen i'm getting on the rig right now i i gotta go and um so that was that was the start of the of the day going to going to ground zero um we have uh a kind of a code in the fire department you know you got to take care of the probie uh the new guy uh in the house and we don't we don't want to get them hurt we don't want to get them injured in any way we want to teach them to be good firemen and learn and learn the ropes so we had a young guy named joe lacerdo um while we're getting on the rig he tried to get on the rig with us and uh you know looking at what had gone what was going on down there and things like that i i asked i i told him he couldn't come with us um because i didn't know if we were coming back i mean it was it was ugly stuff from what we could see on tv and then obviously the closer we got it was just getting worse so uh i assume he's still not mad at me um for not letting him on the rig but i i just felt duty bound to not let him on the fire truck with us that day um and you know we did lose several probes that day um because they felt their call to duty and they did get on their rigs so um with that we take off we're um you know we get a we get a uh a sheet to tell us where to go um and nobody really looked at it we just assumed we were going down to the trade center so we jumped on the rig out the door we went and we were you know we were going over the 135th street bridge uh to get on the d uh to get on the uh east side highway and we were stuck in traffic because everybody was looking south to the towers because you could see the smoke just billowing over manhattan from uh from there from our vantage point way up in the bronx and uh you know people were frantic people were on their phones and you know um i remember a lady in traffic she was hysterical crying and she looked up and she she yelled and i had the window down she yelled up to me she was how bad is it and i not knowing of course i just said i said it's really really bad it's really really bad and um with that we transfer you know we moved in traffic and so we were hammered down we were going down down the uh east side you know in a fire truck really nobody in our way uh when somebody i think it was the captain actually looked at the ticket and realized that we were not where we were supposed to be um so i always say this is it was like a divine intervention uh when i speak to schools and churches and things of that nature i always that's the title of my my story is divine intervention because um there's two or three scenarios where we should have been could have been killed and we weren't so the captain looks at the ticket and it says that we're supposed to go rendezvous with some other companies in harlem which was right over the bridge from us and so he radios manhattan he says you know engineering manhattan where do you want us this is where we are i think we're in the 70s at that point really making good time um but we're supposed to be in harlem where do you want us and they said to to go back to the firehouse in harlem so there we are and i always tell the kids that i that i speak to i said you know we're the new york city fire department we do not run away from the danger we go to the danger and we take care of business when we get there and so here we are going northbound on third avenue away from the danger and i'm literally hanging out of the fire truck looking southbound and cursing my brains out because we're going in the wrong direction and i was i wasn't too thrilled about it um but you know we're a paramilitary organization we had orders uh we got to go to where they tell us so we come flying up into harlem we pull into 35 and 14 and there's all the other rigs already there so as soon as our captain checked in we all got in the rigs and and we started a convoy down to the trade center right about that time these west side highway had opened up for emergency vehicles so we kind of made our way through the north part of central park down the west side highway and then it was you know we could go as fast as the rigs could go which is only about 60 because of the governor but which always bothered me why does a school bus not have a governor they can go like 75 miles an hour with kids in it and a fire truck can't but anyway it's an aside so you know with there's a lot of radio traffic with what was going on with the south tower we didn't know exactly the extent of that collapse we knew that there was a 1060 given which is a major a major uh issue aside from what was going on with the actual plane crashes and the fires um so we didn't know that the entire south tower had collapsed so if you can imagine being in a fire truck and not knowing that um so when we pulled up we kind of parked over by the the stuyvesant high school bridge i don't get familiar with that metal arch bridge uh that leads over to the school we parked in that general area we got our gear and we started making our way down to the north tower to check in with the chief to get uh an assignment and um so we're we're walking down and you know we know that some other things have gone on but we didn't realize the extent of it and there was still a dust cloud from the first collapse but we didn't we just chalked that up time or i did to smoke and other things going on from the towers um and so we're walking down and and people are obviously it's a frantic situations people running everywhere there's people screaming there's radio chatter on on the on the walkie-talkies and the handy-talkies and um so we're getting closer to one of the uh one of the pedestrian walkways that go from the towers across to the water and again we're checking we're trying to check in with the chief to get an assignment and we're basically just going to walk in the building and find a chief at some point that's that's my thought but as we're walking down to the to the trade center you know the smoke is built and the flames are billowing out of the building and all i can think of is you know there's six engine companies here from from the south bronx in harlem and i'm 27 years old i'm full of piss and vinegar it's going to be a long day we're going to take a beating walking up these stairs but you know you have six aggressive engine companies on the scene to help put out this fire and that's what we were going to do we were going to go in there we're going to kick ass save lives and put out the fire uh and i there was no doubt in my mind of that and so the closer we got you know you're looking at this this monstrosity and um and people start screaming that it's collapsing and i'm a country bumpkin from upstate new york i'm like what's collapsing you know and sure enough the world trade center in front of me is is collapsing in on itself and so i watched the antenna uh when that disappeared in the smoke i the fight or flight kicked in and i realized man i gotta go so i grabbed my friend dave i said run and we and we just started running the five of us just started running back up uh west street toward the fire truck or some semblance of safety um but we were inundated with with the collapsed cloud and we got pushed to the ground and it was complete blackness um you know for for a while and then we kind of regrouped uh we called each you know we called out engine 83 engine a3 and we all figured out where we were and then we just kind of went um two arms wide the five of us down west street to try to find civilians and direct them in the right direction to to what we would consider safety away from the collapse on of course um and that's when we realized you know that you know we're trained for that secondary thing that maybe there's a gas or or incendiary device or something like that and what was in my mind was that ricin attack in japan a couple years before that so we put on our masks our scbas uh and to walk down into the into the fray as it were but we realized that we really couldn't function well with them because it wasn't it wasn't an apartment it wasn't a project apartment or it wasn't an old law tenant where you know what you're looking what you're feeling and what you're looking for in the buildings this was completely different you know it was kind of like being in an open air maze and you couldn't see a thing so we kind of dispensed with those we kept them on our bodies but we didn't wear them initially so i had some medical masks in my pocket i gave one to the captain i had one and i think they lasted about 15 minutes between the grit in the air and the sweat and just the the goings on at that at that particular time uh i think those masks lasted 15 or 20 minutes they were they were useless down there um and then of course our eyes were burning because of all the stuff that we come to find out later you know between the cement and the glass and whatever else is in the building the asbestos so it started off you know uh as an irritating day and it just obviously progressed to get worse um physically in your eyes and your mouth and all that stuff uh and um so you know like i tell the kids i said we're we're trained to be aggressive interior fireman um and the collapse of the world trade center took that knowledge or what we would use is that knowledge for away from us right there was no more fires to put out in the building um [Music] there was no water source the the collapse had just destroyed the uh infrastructure under the towers it destroyed the infrastructure around it so there's no hydrant water there was no water in the stand pipes in the buildings was all residual so we hooked up to the standpipes to put out the fires but there was only just whatever was in the system because it couldn't be fed from anything so there was no water to put out the fires um and everything was on fire everything was on there was fire trucks cop cars ambulances uh there was a beautiful blue camaro down there that was burning i was a little miffed about that uh but the papers in the air were on fire it was it was a it was an unrealistic scene uh that we were standing in the middle of and to top it all off it was just deathly quiet deathly quiet it was unbelievable except for some handy talky chatter and and guys that we were standing with and talking to trying to figure out a pseudo game plan initially uh it was unreal it was so quiet and the papers and the dust coming down it was like a snow a snow storm but it was it was unnerving how uh how quiet it was and then um i don't know if you've never seen the youtube video there's there's a video of where when our pass alarms started going off um not the ones that we were wearing the ones that the brothers were wearing that were buried um and that's a an alarm that if you get if you go immobile for more than 20 seconds it starts having a shrill beeping tone and the longer you lay immobile the louder and sharper it gets and so as we're standing there we start realizing that these things are going off all around us but we can't find anybody because they're all buried um and that was you know that was aggravating because we were now it was a search and rescue mission and we couldn't even really rescue them because they were buried um so that was uh that was heart wrecking um we did wind up finding during the course of the day uh two guys two firemen that were had taken refuge under a fire truck we got them out um but obviously they had been deceased and then they had another guy that we they took down i think he was coming off the marriott [Music] i think because he was being jostled people kept thinking he had some viability that he might be alive but he had been burned and crushed um pretty badly and um he wound up succumbing to his injuries as well so uh that's the only i was down i was down at ground zero a lot in ensuing weeks and months and um that's the only day that i was involved in finding actual whole bodies everything after that was body parts and pieces um until i i think the last time i was down there was sometime in november or december but that was the only day that we found that i found that i was involved with recoveries of actual whole bodies so you know it was good to have them have closure for their families because i know a lot of people didn't didn't get to do that uh so i always tell people in the time pictures that you see of 9 11 you can tell kind of the date the time of day because most of the firemen still had their scba's on early in the morning after the collapses because we didn't know what was going on um and then when the re when the other guys started coming in uh the off-duty guys or guys just couldn't you know the weight of the uh equipment guys started shedding the scba late later in the afternoon um but all morning we wore our stuff just in case we were tasked with putting out different fires and literally different fires and to no avail because there was no water and that's when the the water the uh fire boats pulled into the harbor uh we started humping hoes hundreds and hundreds of feet of uh of two and a half inch hose dry of course into the seat of ground zero trying to put out uh the fires that we could and then they were pumping the water from the fire boats to to some of the tower ladders and into the hoses uh that we had down down deep in in the pit uh well ground zero at that time um but um from what i recall those those fires burned until uh beginning of december so for that many months we were inhaling you know whatever was burning uh the smoke the asbestos the benzenes the glass the cement all that kind of thing um you know as opposed to just the dust that was in the air these deep-seated pockets of fire were burning and burning and burning for months so it's hard to imagine something burning for that long uh with the thousands and thousands of gallons of water that was being put on it at any given time um and i'm sure i'm skipping something here but uh the um it's like i said we were tasked with different things at one point dave uh carpenter and myself were tasked with uh with manning the temporary morgue um so we were sent over there for i don't know how long it was an hour two maybe two hours um and you know people were bringing in in the deceased um for us to to kind of put toe tags on and and somewhat in an orderly fashion organize them um until the corners could get there and and more guys um but and i don't know why we got pulled back out of there but i was i was kind of happy that we did um because that was uh that was unnerving to see that and um knowing that the hospitals in hindsight that all the hospitals are waiting for their for the the wounded and the injured to come you know um but i always tell the kids that i speak to and even the adults i said you know it was it was a really weird day because you either you either got killed or you lived for the most part there were very few casualties there were certainly only a few rescues fortunately there were some rescues but there weren't there weren't many rescues and it was it was either you made it out or or you didn't um i had a friend of mine in the south tower i didn't know he worked there at the time he was a friend of mine from high school and he was always a terrible listener uh in high school too he you know kind of did what he wanted to do um you know and he and when they told him uh they made an announcement you know just kind of stay at your desk stay in your offices everything's fine it's the north towers has an issue he was like hell no and uh and he got out of that building and ran to brooklyn and wound up saved and saved himself but um it's just funny that you know you find out later that people that you knew that were in there uh that that wound up getting that went up living which is kind of nice um so excuse me uh like i said we were tasked with with several things um but a lot of it was just climbing over this this pile of unstable uh debris and um it's hard to explain to people how how big the piles were i mean it it was if you get a i always tell i have a picture that i show the kids it's if you have it's a guy if the fireman is 10 feet tall this this pile of debris is towering over them it's like 70 or 80 feet tall and it's like playing jenga you know you pull out the wrong thing on the bottom and everything above that is coming down on you and the men you're with so it was uh it was really grueling work trying to find people knowing that you know anything you did could could wind up getting other people hurt or getting yourself killed because we were going in in voids and we were searching for people and we were looking for for firemen and civilians and and anybody that was that was uh possibly alive um you know for hours and hours and um it was grueling work because you had to really be cautious of where you stepped and where how you walked on things um and not to mention the you know the pockets of fire and smoke and things like that so we uh we did that for for several hours um again with no water it's hard to put out fires thankfully the fire boats were there um at some point i my my uh in-laws were cops and stuff in harlem so they were all over at my house consoling my wife because they all assumed i was dead uh because of our proximity to the towers from the south bronx and just the total mayhem that had gone on so somewhere around two o'clock in the afternoon i found a phone in one of the offices and um lo and behold it you know you press nine for the outside line uh which nobody knows about anymore and um and i got a dial tone so i called the house and my brother-in-law answered the phone because my wife was outside with the my little guy um and he was just elated i was so happy that somebody was actually happy i was alive you know he was a lady he's like it's billy he's alive he's he just you know blah blah so um but up to that point they had all thought i was dead which is a weird feeling in hindsight um but i didn't talk to them long i talked to my wife i told you know i was safe at the time being and there was no guarantees because what was going on down there was just insanity and um then i i hung up and because i wanted other guys to call their loved ones you know because it was uh because we had at least a shot at that um so we gave you know we talk to some people for a while and then again we got tasked with uh with doing some searches in some buildings i remember some people kept calling um the manhattan dispatcher i think from uh from an elevator and they kept saying you know we're trapped in this elevator we're trapped in this elevator um send somebody to get us and so i think several units had gone to find these people and and they couldn't find them um and some some guys from the bronx were listening to it on the radio and they had made their way down there during the course of the day and uh several hours later they actually found that elevator where it was in the shaft and stuff and all the people inside it's come to smoke um so again it was it wasn't you know nobody was really safe down there that day um you know these people were just at work trapped in an elevator and and several hours later they died of smoke inhalation so um you know it's it's still taking its toll i think uh i think we're up over 220 firemen have died from 9118 911 cancers i know the cops are over 200 all the volunteers you know doctors nurses dogs i mean um it's it's still wreaking havoc on the 911 community as a whole you know and people just dying too young was there ever a point in the day that you felt fear didn't weren't you afraid uh you know i've always said i'm too dopey to know any better um i i and i yes i was afraid but i wasn't afraid during the collapse because i knew that i was running in at least a safe direction for some reason i didn't have fear there i just you know it was like i said earlier the fight or flight uh self-preservation uh later in the day i thought i thought that that i might get killed doing something or something might happen you know maybe a secondary attack even but um that's i was more i was more afraid after the collapse because at least now i knew that the building couldn't follow me again right but everything from the building could possibly could possibly injure or kill us so there were certain points that i thought you know that we may not make it out of this day after all even though we survived the collapse so yeah i was i was afraid and i tell the kids that i said you know the precarious positions we were in the places we were looking into um you know they weren't certainly safe um by any means so again we're not you know we're we're used to an apartment or or a house you know you kind of know the layout of those things but when you're thrust into these huge piles of debris and crevices and crannies that you know could just collapse on you at any time it's a different it's a different ball game you said it's sort of there but for the grace of god it could have been you could have been one of the 343 fdn wires who died that day why do you think you were spared it's funny i have a tattoo it says there but for the grace of god um for that specific reason uh because literally it was divine intervention so if if i had been driving the rig or my friend dave had been driving the rig i think we would have looked at the ticket so and that's not a shot at mike but we were the closest firehouse to the firehouse we were supposed to run everywhere so if we had looked at the ticket we would have been there early we still would have been down to the trade center well before the collapse with the other group with the other six engines so we probably would have been in the building if we just continued on the path we were doing going straight down there without looking at the ticket um we also would have been in the building so we probably would have been killed so if we had gone down there by ourselves all right we would have lost five guys but if we had gone with the other crew you know we could have lost 40 more guys because that's how many guys were in those other rigs and i've been up at the ski races and hunter and i've seen guys different junctures over the last years and i've had guys come up to me and say hey 83 engine you guys saved our lives at that and we didn't do it on purpose you know we just it was divine intervention that we were not we just didn't go in the right we didn't go we were supposed to um and you know i don't know if you know much about final we're not great listeners anyway so uh you know but fortunately that's how that's how it turned out where we everybody that was in that convoy was spared there's a thing called survivor's guilt have you experienced that uh i think i think we all have to some extent um [Music] you know i owe always wonder you know what uh what spared us what made us not be you know involved in those numbers um i always i don't have guilt of surviving more than i don't i have more guilt of not being able to help more people um you know we we could only do so much obviously but i always felt that that we got we got cheated out of doing more for guys um [Music] i don't know if that's true or not but uh you know i was i was down at the medical office to see uh dr kelly the head psychiatrist there for uh ftny and i'm talking to him and i'm talking to him and he's like he's like stay right there and he goes and he gets a book out of the other uh the office and he comes back and says read this and it was all the stuff i had just been telling them it was literally the definition for ptsd and i didn't know that i just you know was in a bit of a funk or whatever um but um i i had gone down there you know i'm a pretty practical guy my my thought process was this my lungs my health is pretty much already compromised right because i was there the first day of the initial collapse and all the doctors say you know you're screwed basically so my my thought process was once the fire department got accountability of us all and they put us on a schedule and then they had a volunteer schedule to go down there and work to work the pile so i volunteered for that because my thought process was this why would you send an uncompromised guy down there right just send me my lungs are already hammered so just send me down there and and keep the other guy healthy um so i did that i think they were three week stints and they were different hours i forget but i mean it was it was i felt good going down there i felt like i was helping i felt you know maybe i was trying to overcome the guilt of of not being more helpful on the first day but i really was thinking that less guys should be down here for their own health but you know guys firemen again we go to the danger nobody wanted to say oh i didn't go down there everybody wanted to go down there um so after the third three week or 12 day uh tour i uh i went back to volunteer again my one of my lieutenants was like no i'm not setting you down there anymore he said go study for lieutenant's test or something but you're not you're not going back down to ground zero so um but you know it's it was just one of those things where i didn't think anybody else should really have to get sick necessarily not that they are but i mean why do i take a chance you know um amazing but that's the guilt i had was not doing enough on 9 11. tell tell us about your health now i again i am blessed beyond measure um i my health is great um i have uh i mean i just i have the ptsd i have short-term memory loss from that i have you know some some anger management issues sometimes but uh you know i don't really chalk that up to 911 so much as being irish um but uh i mean i feel good i my wife takes good care of me we had a we had a health scare a couple years ago with a doctor uh and my lungs and fortunately he was wrong but it hit home to my wife that wow you really could get sick at any given moment so i take a lot of supplements she tries to feed me healthy uh even though i opine uh i'm a sweets guy um uh i like to claim that sobriety is killing me um but that's probably the greatest thing that came out of it was that i quit drinking years ago uh probably saved my health it certainly saved my my marriage and my time with my kids um because you know you can use that as a crutch you know you can it can define you know 911 defined a lot of guys um for good or bad it just it put them on the trajectory for the rest of their life and fortunately you know i i've married a great great girl and and she takes care of us and um so my health is good i mean i should run more i should lift more weights uh but you know i'm i'm working i work hard and uh you know just uh just trying to stay healthy for the kids i have a 12 year old uh he's my youngest um and i say he's gonna kill me or cure me anyway because you know i can't keep up with him half the time but um you know i have a 21 year old i want to see my daughter get married she's 18. you know i want to walk her down the aisle so i'm trying to stay as healthy as possible to do these things is there anything else you want to add um not without crying maybe uh one of the one of the most poignant things uh we uh we left the pile sometime around midnight um there was no relief policy uh the captain called manhattan said hey listen you know my guys are shot we're leaving um if there's no relief policy we've been here for 12 hours or whatever uh you know we're going back to the bronx so we uh we picked up a guy who was walking and he said hey man give me a give me a ride back to my firehouse she said sure sorry okay oh we got yeah we got up to the firehouse and um there was a whole bunch of women standing outside and uh so a whole bunch of women standing outside and uh all all those guys got killed and about all the crappy things i saw that day that hurt the most but so um you know they're all standing out there crying and and we roll up and i'm sure they were thinking wow our guys our guys are here and um it wasn't their guys it was just us and i think they lost 14 guys from that firehouse 5400 and 4 trucks so that's the one that hurts the most for me and not to mention losing you know a bunch of friends um that where i was improving school with i played softball with you know we lost tommy scholes was from our firehouse he was working in a different firehouse that day down in south manhattan on that rotation um that we had a training schedule uh he was only he was only on the fire department two years so i missed on but everybody else seems to be good uh you know mike and dave and uh paul and the captain i think everybody's in fairly decent health i mean in different states of uh you know we're all in various states of disrepair i think um mike survived some cancer they've had some pulmonary issues that i know are pretty bad sometimes and uh you know but we're trying to do our best and uh and and and never forget that's that's why i'm here with you today i'm not here to to um i'm just here so people never forget and that's why i speak around around this town i speak at schools and churches and things of that nature just uh just so people don't forget because i think people forgot i thank you for that i'm so sorry i know it's very very difficult but thank you it's important that you share the story it's important that this be documented i agree i agree i appreciate it thank you

Channel: Q1043 New York

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Length: 36min 49sec (2209 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021