Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001, among them 343 firefighters and 71 police officers. First responders ran toward the World Trade Center towers, knowing it could be their last call. In the aftermath of the smoke and rubble, departments from across the nation dispatched to New York, including a team from San Francisco Fire Department. Jessica Aguirre met with Chief Dean Crispen to reflect how the work he did that day as a volunteer, lessons learned and the impact it made on his career.<\/p>\n
Shortly after the nation’s ground stop was lifted, eleven firefighters from San Francisco packed their gear and headed to ground zero as volunteers, unsure of what they’d be doing or what they’d find. At the time, Crispen was a young firefighter on the department’s rescue squad, training on disaster responses.<\/p>\n
“Several members of the FDNY knew we were coming. So we’re able to kind of tell us, you’re not going to believe what you’re going to see,” said Chief Crispen.<\/p>\n
And, when he did arrive in New York. <\/p>\n
“Mass devastation,” he says, “I think we all thought we’d see big parts of buildings. We thought we would see, you know, just larger elements of the building and really it was all pulverized. It was incinerated.”<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tIt has been a quarter of a century since the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history. September 11, 2001, a day that changed our nation and our community forever. Nearly 3,000 people died that day – more than a dozen from the Bay Area. Twenty-five years later, the Bay Area remembers the lives lost here at home, the sacrifices made, the enduring legacy of bravery and our collective vow to never forget the agony of that horrific day.\u00a0\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The SF crew worked at ground zero for 10 days. <\/p>\n
“We were actually using buckets to remove debris and trying to find bodies. We were given very clear instructions that if we found anybody, FDNY pulls them out,” said Crispen.<\/p>\n
The firefighters also stood as honor guards for funerals of their fallen New York City brothers.<\/p>\n
“Every once in a while we’re on the pile … you’d hear the order to stop and that would mean that they found somebody and then everybody would turn towards the area that the person was found and salute and FDNY would do their ceremonious removal of the body that was very very difficult to witness.” <\/p>\n
Since 9\/11, some 400 firefighters, who like Chief Crispen, rushed to help at the pit, have also died from health complications brought on from responding to that day. A battered steel beam from the World Trade Center sits in the lobby of SF fire headquarters, a reminder of the heroes lost and the sacrifices Chief Crispen and others made on September 11, 2001, 25 years ago.<\/p>\n
Crispen says, “In San Francisco, we talk about earthquake a lot, and that event clearly put a punctuation mark on disaster preparedness for any department and that’s been the 100% number one issue in my administration.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001, among them 343 firefighters and 71 police officers. First responders…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[123228,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-461305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-9-11","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}