(WHTM) — Pennsylvania Task Force One rushed to Ground Zero and got right to work.
abc27 News caught up with two members of that team: Susquehanna Township fire marshal George Drees and Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency Director Randy Padfield.
“I was going into work late at Harrisburg Area Community College at the time, and a friend of mine called me and she was on a plane actually, at Harrisburg International Airport and they were held,” Padfield said. “She said ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but it sounded pretty significant,’ and being part of PA Task Force One I turned on the TV and that’s when I saw footage of the second plane striking the towers.”
Padfield said he went into work and then got his gear.
“Good Morning America was on and they just had a report of a plane crashing into the one tower,” Drees said. “Left a note for my family and grabbed my gear.”
Both men were headed to Middletown in New York.
“We showed up at the 193rd Special Operations group, which was our point of departure or the task force at the time to start to mobilize the equipment,” Padfield said.
They were then deployed to New York City.
“We got in, set up at the Java Center right away. We send an advance team in. We work through unified system, through PEMA and FEMA, then New York Fire Department and New York City,” Drees said.
“We were in the rubble piles, all the way down into the parking garages to the top of the buildings,” Padfield said.
PA Task Force One spent nine days at Ground Zero as the search continued for missing loved ones.
“They came up and posted 8.5x11s of family members, and unbelievable descriptions of birthmarks, tattoos, earrings,” Padfield said. “I walked around the Java Center and pretty much read everyone of those. The biggest challenge was understanding what I was reading and what I was seeing and the family members not necessarily understanding that.”
[sailthru_widget name=”Sailthru Widget Block” sailthru_list=”This Week in PA” title=”This Week in Pennsylvania”]
Drees has a friend whose daughter was killed on Flight 93 and another who survived the Pentagon attack.
“The amount of population that doesn’t know what it felt like. It’s easy to forget, I think the hard part is trying to get the public to understand what that was like,” Padfield said.
Drees son is also part of PA Task Force One and he also remembered the K-9 search and rescue teams that responded.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC27.