CNY Remembers:UFD members reflect on time at Ground Zero after 9-11 attacks
Story Created:
Sep 7, 2011 at 6:16 PM EDT
Story Updated:
Sep 10, 2011 at 5:05 PM EDT
UTICA, N.Y. (WKTV) - Utica Fire Chief Russell Brooks was Assistant Chief and a 25-year veteran of the fire service when he took a contingent of 11 firefighters to help out at Ground Zero after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
They arrived the night of the 11th. Most thought they'd seen everything, but they soon learned they were wrong.
"The firefighters had this stare of just bewilderment, disbelief, you could see in their eyes what they'd been through. Some were laying in the street, many were laying flat in the street, just exhausted," Brooks said.
Brooks watched the attacks on television at Central Firehouse in Utica and soon learned the reason his New York City counterparts looked so overwhelmed...and lost.
"I saw them looking up, knowing the product burning was jet fuel, knowing the construction of the building, knowing collapse was inevitable," Brooks said. "As they went into those stairways to go up, they genuflected, and the fire chaplain blessed them and gave them attrition and they went up those stairs."
Brooks says the actions of the New York City firefighters in the wake of the worst terrorist attacks ever on U.S. soil raised the bar for those in the fire service.
"You know, sometimes when we have a graduating class, I tell the graduates at the academy - this is what I expect of them; I expect no less of them," says Brooks.
Assistant Utica Fire Chief Andre Esposito also was at Ground Zero September 11, 2001.
"We slept in the Verizon Building that night on desks and when we woke up, the back part of the building was gone," says Esposito.
