The call came within a few hours of the September 11th attacks. California Task Force 8 was being mobilized to go to the World Trade Center. That call sent people to the “cache,” the warehouse where their supplies and equipment are kept to make sure everything was in order so the team could leave.
Task Force 8 is one of 28 Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Teams coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) around the country. They are trained and equipped to respond to a variety of natural and man-made disasters, to find victims in confined spaces, most often collapsed buildings. Their specialties are search, rescue, medical, hazardous materials, logistics and planning. The team includes physicians, structural engineers and canine search teams. But most of them are firefighters.
The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department is considered the sponsoring agency of Task Force 8. The majority of its members are SDFD firefighters, but every city fire department in the county and CalFire has firefighters who are members of the team.
On September 17, 2001, 62 members of the team and all their equipment left from Naval Air Station North Island for New York on a C-130. They would spend 13 days in Manhattan, one of eight US&R teams at the site. They relieved the first wave of teams who had been there around the clock for a week. This would be the last search and recovery mission at Ground Zero.
By the time they were deployed on the 17th, they had seen the images on television and read the accounts in newspapers. “I expected the worst possible devastation,” firefighter-paramedic Brian Kidwell said. “But it was worse. I can’t describe it. It was a pile of rubble five stories high and several stories underground.” What the rest of the world would know as Ground Zero was referred to by the teams as “The Pile.”
Split into two groups, half would work from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. and the other half 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Each rescue team had a medic assigned. Kidwell, who recently retired from San Diego Fire-Rescue, says his scope of practice increased considerably in those two weeks. He knew how to suture, but had done it very infrequently. Suddenly, he was stitching up cuts and treating wounds that any other time would have been sent to the emergency room. “Guys would just look at me and say ‘stitch it up, I’m not leaving,’” Kidwell says.
Nobody left. They stayed at The Pile. It was rare that they only worked a twelve hour shift. They were lucky to get four hours sleep. They felt overwhelmed. And 14 years later, it is still on their minds. Battalion Chief Lane Woolery now manages the US&R program for Task Force 8. In 2001 he was a firefighter-paramedic, and one of the 62 who went to The Pile. As difficult as it was, he sees it as a privilege to have been there. “You felt like you were able to do something,” Woolery says. “From here we could just watch. But being there, we could help out. “
It’s hard for most members of the team to explain what it was like. “It’s like the Grand Canyon,” Woolery said. “You see pictures and videos and talk to people about it, but until you’ve been there you can’t understand.”
Back on the job at home, disaster came to San Diego when the Cedar Fire broke out in the East County and spread west. By the time containment was declared on October 28th, 28,676 acres within the city had burned. 335 structures were destroyed, 71 others were damaged. The dollar loss was estimated at $204 million. In the city, Scripps Ranch and Tierrasanta were hardest hit. Throughout the county, the Cedar Fire destroyed 280,278 acres, 2,820 buildings and killed 15 people. It is the largest wildfire in California history.
The Cedar Fire was not a US&R operation. But those team members, and every person in the Fire-Rescue Department worked hard and long on that fire. And it is no exaggeration to say that for the people whose homes were in the Cedar Fire’s path, it was an emergency of 9-11 proportions to them. Not terrorism, but terrifying nonetheless.
Every first responder has an appreciation for what the people they serve are going through. San Diego Fire-Rescue responds to about 140,000 calls a year. And everyone on the job knows that each one of those calls is somebody’s 9-11. It won’t make the newspapers, or if it does it may be no more than a paragraph. But for the people who live in the house that is on fire, work at the business that is burning, love the person who is having the heart attack, or are the victims themselves, it is for them every bit as cataclysmic an event as 9-11. While the word is bandied about, first responders will tell you they are not heroes. It is their job to help people on the worst day of their lives. And they know they owe it to each one of those people to work just hard to help as anyone did on The Pile.
