9/11 Attacks Redefined Disaster Response, Fire Director Says

Twelve years ago, Cherry Hill Fire Director Patrick Kelly was working in Westchester County, just north of Manhattan, getting ready to head out to a firefighters’ charity golf tournament, when the planes struck the World Trade Center.

In an instant, the county emergency response center turned into a staging area, as fire and rescue crews streamed down from the north toward New York, with dozens of crews holding there until called down into Lower Manhattan.

And hours later, when 7 World Trade Center collapsed, taking with it the emergency management center, Kelly and others were called down to help run emergency response—a job that ended up lasting two weeks.

First responders didn’t have a lot of prior planning for a disaster on that scale prior to the attacks, Kelly said, but adapted on the fly.

“You just did what you had to do,” he said.

At the same time Kelly and his fellow firefighters and EMTs were worrying about how to handle the response, they also had families in the city to worry about—in fact, Kelly’s wife was in the Chrysler Building that morning, and managed to get out of the city on one of the last trains to leave.

While the shock has long since faded—“We’ll get over it, but we’ll never forget it,” Kelly said—there was much to take away from the horrors of that morning, at least as far as emergency response was concerned.

In the decade since, first responders have seen the job change considerably from what it was, and even local firefighters understand they’re part of a potentially much larger team, should something like the Sept. 11 attacks ever occur again.

“Times were very different then,” Kelly said. “We weren’t involved with Homeland Security or anything like that.”

Now, fire departments can’t just be focused on responding to fires—they have to be able to handle everything from HAZMAT situations to disasters, becoming all-hazard response teams, Kelly said.

And they need to be able to do it hand-in-hand with other agencies, which has resulted in closer ties with law enforcement, including between the local police and fire departments, both within the township and across borders.

“We don’t know what the future will hold,” Kelly said. “But Cherry Hill is very well-protected.”