20 Years Later, Long Islander Reflects On Massive 9/11 Evacuation Where He Saved Hundreds

OCEANSIDE, NY — The largest naval evacuation in history happened in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. After the planes hit the twin towers, all of the bridges, subways and tunnels in and out of Manhattan were shut down, stranding hundreds of thousands of people in the city.

Michael Banahan helped rescue them.

Twenty years ago, Banahan was working for the New York City Department of Corrections, in the now-defunct harbor unit. The unit worked from Rikers Island, normally patrolling the waters around the island prison.

But around 10:30 a.m on Sept. 11, after the second tower fell, the United States Coast Guard put out a call for any ships in the area who could help transport people off Manhattan. Government boats were called in by the city's Office of Emergency Management. Banahan's boat answered the call.
"Everyone was all over the place," he said. "It was chaos."

Banahan worked a late shift, from 3 to 11 p.m., so he was actually asleep when the attack happened. He was woken up by his answering machine that morning with a message about the attack. He jumped up, called into work and said he was coming.

As he was getting dressed, another call came in, and he let it go to the answering machine. It was his wife, Debbie, calling to tell him not to go into the city that day. But Banahan went anyway.

“But I'm a correction officer, and that's what I'm trained to do,” he said. “I did what I was trained to do.”

Over the course of the day, Banahan's boat made dozens of trips between lower Manhattan and Jersey City, ferrying people off the island and to safety. Medical assistance, food and water were being provided in Jersey.

Banahan said his boat made 40 or 50 trips to and from Manhattan that day, if not more. "We rescued hundreds of people, but I think it was more like 1,000," he said.

The evacuation of 338,000 soldiers from Dunkirk took 10 days. More than 500,000 people were evacuated from Manhattan in a matter of hours.

Banahan's job didn't end after Sept. 11. Because he worked for the government, his unit was tasked with moving first responders to and from Manhattan in the days after the attack. A staging area was created at Shea Stadium, and Banahan's boat would ferry firefighters and other people who were going to work at ground zero to and from the site. They would also berry supplies between the sites.

One moment that particularly stuck with Banahan was when, after the evacuation, he was transporting a fire department battalion chief and 40 of his men. He asked the chief if there was anywhere he wanted to go, and the chief said they all wanted to see the Statue of Liberty.

“When we got to the statue, they had their uniforms on with dust, and they went to their knees and started crying,” Banahan said.

Banahan spent weeks after the attack ferrying people and supplies to and from Manhattan. After that, his boat was ordered to patrol the area around a Con Edison power plant.

In 2002, the Department of Corrections disbanded its harbor unit.

Today though, a lot of people don’t know what Banahan and his coworkers did. They don’t know about the evacuation — which was turned into a short documentary narrated by Tom Hanks called “Boatlift” — and they don’t know that the Department of Corrections had a harbor unit.

Banahan said that he was at a bank in Oceanside one day, and was wearing a Department of Corrections jacket that had a patch on it showing he was a responder on 9/11. He said a person came up and asked him if he was there, adding that they thought it was only firefighters and police who responded.

“I said the Office of Emergency Management called everyone down,” Banahan recalled. “The park police, you name it. Everyone was down there, and then a few days later people came from all over the country and all over the world.”

In 2005, like so many other 9/11 first responders, Banahan was diagnosed with tonsil cancer. He retired from the Department of Corrections in 2007 when his illness made it too hard for him to work. He worked with the Coast Guard Auxiliary at Jones Beach for a while, too, until that was too difficult.

Since then, Banahan has worked to help raise awareness of what the Department of Corrections did that day. He donated the uniform he was wearing to the 9/11 Museum, where it now sits in the archives.

Despite everything, he would do it again.

“I don't consider myself a hero,” he said. “I consider myself someone who helps heroes.”