Schools

Local Firefighter Tells 8th-Graders of Ground Zero

Darien-Woodridge Lt. John Tabisz spoke about searching for survivors and the days following Sept. 11, 2001, to eighth-graders at Jefferson Jr. High School Monday.

Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the fire chief sent out an e-mail to his company. Don’t leave for Ground Zero, it said.

Lt. John Tabisz did.

“As fireman, we’re supposed to go do something,” he told eighth-graders at Monday. “I asked my wife, and she said, ‘Go. You can’t watch the television anymore. You can’t be as aggravated as you are.’”  

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They left on Sept. 15, once it seemed no more attacks would occur on the United States. Tabisz and other local firefighters drove the 13 hours to Ground Zero in one day. He took vacation time to search for survivors for six days.

When Tabisz reached Ground Zero, the destruction left him speechless for hours.

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“It was 16 acres of pure destruction,” he said. “It was overwhelming…Everything was full of dust. You see the wreckage of the buildings on TV, and I was standing in front of it. It was surreal. I didn’t understand how someone could do this to innocent people.”

The Ground Zero site was organized chaos, he said. The emergency responders who came to help had to give extensive personal information to receive clearance to Ground Zero while looters gamed the system.

Tens of thousands of firefighters weren’t assigned to a company or team. They walked around the circle of the site. When someone needed help, they helped.

They formed “bucket brigades,” a two-sided assembly line where they passed buckets of debris down one line to be dumped and then returned empty. They did the small work, Tabisz said. Cranes and other pieces of heavy machinery moved the big pieces. Then the search dogs would indicate where the firefighters would dig.

They took a break when they couldn’t work any longer. Tabisz said the sight of a crushed fire engine found in the debris pushed him to continue.

“If you got tired or hot, you would look over at one of the crushed rigs and said, ‘I’m not that tired,’” he said. “’I’m not that hot.’”

Tabisz worked with a piece of metal in his eye for five hours under that mantra.

He said his crew found a lot of things in the debris, including what appeared to be part of one of the hijacked planes. He saw people being carried out in stretchers. None were survivors.

One student asked him if he cried. He said he did not.

“Everyone had their own way of dealing with it. It was a lot easier to be there and have a task,” he said. “Did I see a lot of people cry? You bet I did.”

All the while, Tabisz kept an eye on building surveyors, who watched for any movement that would indicate another building was coming down.

For the first few nights, Tabisz and the other men slept in their truck on the streets of New York. “It was an atmosphere of confusion and fear,” he said.

Meals were made available, but they weren’t regular.

“When you were having something to eat, you filled your pockets,” Tabisz said. “You’re weren’t really sure where your next meal was coming from.”

Large crates of donations of gloves, shovels, coats and other items were left at the 16-acre site from those who wanted to help in some way.

After days of digging and searching, the local firefighters stopped by one of the area firehouses, Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9, on Sept. 18.

Tabisz explained that every day at 7 a.m., the fire department has a roll call and a board is filled out with everyone on duty that day and his or her assignment.

“This board had not changed since Sept. 11,” he said. “They left the names of the guys on duty that day. Next to their names was written, ‘Daddy, I miss you.’ ‘Husband, come home’…Nobody in that firehouse came home.”

When he returned home, he was a connection for many to what had happened thousands of miles away.

A piece of debris he took home with him became chipped away as others wanted to have part.

The students asked him if he got in trouble with his fire chief upon his return.

“My buddy had opened the memo on his e-mail,” he said. “I didn’t. I read it when I came back.”


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