[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 123 (Thursday, September 20, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1674-E1675]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             NEW YORK FIREFIGHTERS GRIEVE FOR LOST BROTHERS

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. NYDIA M. VELAZQUEZ

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 20, 2001

  Ms. VELAZQUEZ. Mr. Speaker, I would like to share with this House a 
unique story of individual sacrifice and heroism after last week's 
devastating terrorist assault on the United States. The Washington Post 
published an article about Engine 202 from Brooklyn in the 12th 
District of New York. It tells the story of this company of fire 
fighters that rushed to the World Trade Center after it was attacked. 
Seven men from their company disappeared in the inferno and collapse.
  This is a personal story of heroism and loss tragically repeated in 
other rescue teams working at ground zero. I am proud of this band of 
brothers from Red Hook, and I join the country in mourning with them.

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 14, 2001]

            New York's Firefighters Grieve for Lost Brothers

                             (By Anne Hull)

       New York, Sept. 13.--The firefighters from Engine 202 in 
     Brooklyn called themselves the brothers from Red Hook. At the 
     firehouse, they tried out new recipes on one another. They 
     named their softball team the Red Hook Raiders and started a 
     cigar club that allowed them to puff on Macanudos at their 
     adopted hangout, Smokey's.
       On Tuesday, seven of them disappeared in the World Trade 
     Center inferno.
       Where, Tony Catapano wondered, did his brothers go?
       For 39 years, Catapano has survived his line of work. He is 
     61, with gray hair and a pension within reach. He is old and 
     they were young. He showed them how to make meatballs and how 
     to find fire hidden in a wall.
       Today he walked near the smoldering landscape of rubble and 
     kept thinking he would see them, shining flashlights 
     miraculously from a crevice.
       He looked for Tommy Kennedy, Terry McShane, Patrick Byrd, 
     Joe Maffeo, Brian Cannizzaro, Salvatore Calabro and Joe 
     Gullicksen.
       Even as the veteran firemen wept, he was calmly defiant. 
     ``Missing don't mean anything but missing,'' he said
       About 400 firefighters were missing and presumed dead, a 
     numbing toll exacted on a tight fraternity. Entire ladder 
     companies and squads were gone, including all five of the 
     elite rescue companies that serve New York City.
       Five of the department's most senior officials died, plus a 
     dozen battalion chiefs. Unlike other senior military 
     officers, who are strategically kept from the front, senior 
     fire officers typically enter burning buildings to assess 
     damage and plot a strategy for rescue and fire containment.
       But the rank-and-file firefighters--the Irish and Italian 
     sons of working-class neighborhoods in Long Island and Staten 
     Island, many of them grandsons of New York firemen--symbolize 
     the deepest loss. Men like the brothers from Red Hook.
       Wall Street, where they sacrificed their lives, was a 
     fancier world than they knew. They didn't shop for cuff links 
     or keep portfolios with Goldman Sachs. After nearly four 
     decades with the Fire Department of New York, Tony Catapano 
     made $55,000 a year. Once, ages ago, he splurged and took his 
     wife, Marie, for their anniversary dinner to Windows on the 
     World, on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center.
       It was expensive, Catapano remembered, ``but the view was 
     spectacular, and sometimes you need that.''
       The next time Catapano returned to the World Trade Center, 
     he could barely see his hands through the smoke.
       ``It was snowing dirt,'' said Catapano, who came in the 
     second wave of firefighters from his 32nd Battalion Tuesday, 
     following the first wave responding to a call that a plane 
     had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center--a 
     call that came just as shifts were changing at firehouses 
     across metropolitan New York. Firefighters coming off their 
     night shifts hopped on ladder trucks and engines with the 
     fresh day crews, fattening the deployment.
       Arriving early to the scene, as many of the companies from 
     lower Manhattan and Brooklyn did, proved fatal.
       ``You've got to understand,'' said Matthew James, the 
     Brooklyn trustee for the Uniformed Firefighters Association 
     of Greater New York, ``all the companies that were there, 
     they're not there anymore.''
       At 9:15 a.m., 18 minutes after the commercial airliner hit 
     the North Tower, a second airliner hit the South Tower. 
     Surviving office workers who were evacuating reported going 
     down stairwells while firefighters were marching up to help 
     those on the higher floors. One firefighter still on the 
     ground was killed when a person on a burning upper floor 
     jumped and landed on him. The fire department priest who was 
     ministering last rites to this fireman died when a crush of 
     rubble came down on both of them.
       At high noon, no one could really see anything. Catapano 
     hocked up thick, black spit. Medics washed out his eyes. He 
     kept looking for names he knew on firefighters' jackets.
       Hours later, when Catapano made it back to his firehouse in 
     Red Hook, not all the men were there. The young guys--the 
     ones who would poke fun at his culinary inventions like 
     ``Potpourri Ree-shard''--left empty beds. Catapano kept 
     thinking they were stuck somewhere or transferred to other 
     firehouses to sleep.
       He searched for them when he returned to the wreckage the 
     next day. ``Down there,'' he called it. Or ``the site.'' He 
     spoke with the Brooklyn union trustee James, an Irishman who 
     keeps a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black on a shelf in his 
     office.
       ``I lost some brothers, Matty,'' Catapano said, his voice 
     breaking.
       ``I know, brother, we all did,'' James said.
       None of the firefighters could escape the stink. At the 
     firehouses where they retreated after long shifts last night, 
     there piles of dirty T-shirts, socks and underwear reminded 
     them. They washed and scrubbed, but the smell beat soap and 
     clung inside their noses.

[[Page E1675]]

       At the divisional headquarters of the Salvation Army in 
     Manhattan, where many out-of-town search and rescue workers 
     camped, the cots were filled with great, heaving bodies that 
     tried to find sleep and peace. But even their blankets 
     carried proof of the mission: that sour smell, like singed 
     hair, lit matchsticks and a child's chemistry set.
       Nor could they get away from everything they saw.
       At 2 a.m. today, the site was like a stage set for a 
     disaster movie, blasted with light. So many steel beams and 
     girders were still strewn through the wreckage that 
     firefighters resorted to bucket brigades, with long lines of 
     men passing pails of small chunks and dust from the top of 
     one mountain down to the waiting hands. It was almost 
     farcical, but then it wasn't.
       ``We were digging around and saw a face,'' said Charles 
     Diggs, with Engine 207 from Brooklyn, ``We uncovered a part 
     of her and put her in a body bag.''
       Their work was a crude archaeology of pickaxes, shovels and 
     Halligan bars. Sniffer dogs trotted out across the foothills 
     of rubble, but because of the breeze and the pancake of metal 
     tonnage, the dogs were thrown off course.
       ``There's dead in that pile,'' said a handler from 
     Evansville, Ind., watching from the sidelines. Dogs on rest 
     cooled their paws in buckets of water.
       And when the dogs yelped excitedly, it meant there was 
     life. One brindle-colored female set out into the pile of 
     metal and concrete, and 30 feet away from the perimeter she 
     began yelping and running in circles, and all eyes turned 
     toward the dog's horrible joy. But it was the just the wind 
     playing tricks.
       Overlooking the rescue efforts was a blasted-out Brooks 
     Brothers. The front of the store had been sheared off, making 
     it open-air. Inside, stacks of folded dress shirts were 
     undisturbed but blanketed in the gray grit.
       The streets were littered with crushed vehicles and tons of 
     financial documents. ``We are pleased to confirm the 
     following transaction,'' read one investment statement nearly 
     ground into the sidewalk.
       Tony Catapano noticed none of it. His eyes could not stay 
     off the rubble.
       Before he returned for another shift this afternoon, his 
     wife told him not to push too hard. But it was no use. 
     ``Those guys are a strange bunch, a family, you know,'' she 
     said. ``Tony is not really their brother; he's more like 
     their father.''
       While Catapano suited up at the firehouse, a father and son 
     brought flowers and a toy fire truck. The pastries and cakes 
     kept coming. But Catapano was edgy to return.
       ``Be strong, guys,'' a man on the sidewalk called out to 
     him.
       Catapano didn't even hear. He was already mentally back on 
     the rubble. With a four-day beard and red-rimmed eyes, he 
     gunned the car back down to Lower Manhattan.
       When he was a boy he dreamed of being a cowboy. Then he 
     worked in a bank, pushing papers around. Then he found his 
     calling as a firefighter, ``trying to save people.'' His son 
     is now on the waiting list to join the New York City Fire 
     Department.

     

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