The effects of 9/11 on the New York City Fire-fighters

Learning to Live: Firefighter Bill Butler.

(Photo: Nigel Parry)

A firehouse is a physically intimate place. Twenty-five guys take turns cooking together, bunking together, living together for days at a time. They call one another brother, enjoy a near-tribal camaraderie, much of it around the firehouse’s kitchen table, where a posted sign reads, WHAT YOU HEAR HERE STAYS HERE.

Komorowski was recently promoted to lieutenant, and the first floor of his new station in an Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn contains barbells, a pool table, a gas pump, a garbage can of dog food, a soda machine, a tool bench, a pole, and two big red trucks. Off to one side is a memorial to the 343 firefighters lost in the World Trade Center. A minute after Komorowski, now 40, steps into the communications room, an alarm sounds. “Can you wait?” Komorowski says, though it’s not really a question. He pulls his gear over his pants. As a truck leaves, a fireman shouts, “Can you close the door?”


The firehouse hasn’t been a place where people generally “give themselves permission to share their emotions.” The environment has not been therapy-friendly. Maybe that’s good. “This is a job for physical, proactive, problem-solving people, which are great qualities if my house is on fire,” says Malachy Corrigan, director of the department’s counseling unit. Emotional distance is probably protective. Sooner or later, every fireman hauls a burnt child out of a fire. “You have to tell yourself that this dead kid I’m pulling out of a fire is no different than pulling a deer out of the woods,” explains Butler. “You can’t look at it like, Oh, my God, I’m pulling out my own child. You can’t go killing yourself.”


September 11 overran the usual defenses. Jonas and his men, finally freed from their stairwell, looked around at fires and flattened buildings. They thought they were witnessing a nuclear attack. “We usually show up at a chaotic situation, we make it better and we go home, almost every time,” says Jonas. “In the World Trade Center that really didn’t happen.” Well-disciplined emotions were suddenly impossible to contain.


By December 2001, probably half the city’s firefighters have gone into therapy—6,100 uniformed people have received counseling through the department. The department now has 60 full-time counselors instead of the 9 it employed before September 11.