The day started normally for Brian Kuntz, but that changed fast and forever
For fire dispatcher Brian Kuntz September 2001 started with a plumbing problem. A water pipe burst near his workplace at the Brooklyn Central Office in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. While a relatively minor break, the pipe burst in a problematic location, near both the Bureau of Fire Communications in the Brooklyn Central Office and the Franklin Avenue shuttle train. To coordinate the clean up a meeting was organized with officials from the relevant city agencies including members from the Mayor’s emergency management team, the chief of the Brooklyn Central Office and transit officials. The different officials arraigned to meet early on September 11, 2001.
By 2001, Kuntz had been working as a fire dispatcher for four years at the Brooklyn Central Office. On September 11, Kuntz, a former EMT with the build of a retired linebacker, walked into work to find that the meeting over the broken water pipe was not going very well. “They were going around in circles,” said Kuntz. Now a 38-year-old supervising dispatcher in the Bronx and the president of the Uniformed Fire Alarm Dispatchers Benevolent Association, Kuntz laughs a bit as he remembers the frustrated participants of the water pipe meeting.
At one point, Kuntz recalls, one of the officials from the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management walked out of the meeting to take a coffee break. Pausing before going back into the meeting, the man looked down at his phone. “He jumped out of his chair, slammed open the door and said, ‘We got to go! A plane hit the Trade Center,’” recalled Kuntz.
On any given day, the Brooklyn Central Office, also called the Brooklyn Fire Dispatch, has at least seven dispatchers on the operations floor to take emergency calls, radio different fire houses and decide which fire companies will respond to an emergency. The dispatchers oversee 67 different firehouses and are in charge of responding to any emergency within the 81.8 square mile borough.
On the morning of September 11, Kuntz was working at his preferred station, the radio dispatch. Although he realized the plane crash was a serious event, Kuntz initially assumed it was an isolated accident. “You didn’t think much of it, because it was just a big fire,” said Kuntz. “We have a million big fires.”
While normally the large open operations floor at the Brooklyn Central Office was a relatively quiet place, on September 11 Kuntz describes the room erupting with the noise of dispatchers shouting information from their stations. Drained coffee cups began piling up at the dispatchers’ desks.
In order to assist the Manhattan fire departments, the Brooklyn Fire Dispatch started sending multiple ladder and engine companies. On the dispatch recordings, the Manhattan dispatcher can be heard asking Kuntz again and again for new firefighting units. According to Kuntz, the office initially sent approximately 20 different fire units to the Battery Tunnel and another 20 to the Brooklyn Bridge before getting the go-ahead to send them to the World Trade Center. In order to keep Brooklyn covered while responding to the World Trade Center, only every other firehouse was sent in—although not everything went according to plan.
“The guys you tell to stop, go and the guys you tell to go, didn’t hear it,” said Kuntz. “It was madness, but it was pretty organized madness.”
This idea of “organized madness” can be heard on the recordings, as dispatchers and responders manage to remain professional and calm even as the horrific attacks continued to unfold.
Shortly after the second plane hit the tower, five tones were played across the radio frequency. Kuntz calmly announced there was another five-alarm fire, this one in the South Tower. It took four minutes for Kuntz to directly mention the crash, when he told a first responder, “Be advised. Something else just happened at the building—there was a huge explosion.” On the other side of the crackling radio channel, the responder said simply, “10-4, we—we’re aware of that.”
With the second five-alarm fire called in, additional fire fighting units went out. As a result, Kuntz became worried about being able to effectively cover the borough, which had an average of eight fires every day in 2001. “You didn’t even have time to be stressed about what was going on,” said Kuntz. “We were stressed we had no more fire trucks.” Kuntz started calling companies as far away as Staten Island and Rockaway Park in Queens in order to fill the Brooklyn firehouses.
Figuring out which companies needed to stay and which needed to go into Manhattan was complicated by the fact that many firefighters wanted to go to help. Multiple times an exasperated Kuntz can be heard on the recordings telling different fire companies that it is a “negative” for them to go in to Manhattan.
In addition, the FDNY issued total recall of all firefighters, meaning all off-duty firefighters were to report in. While all firefighters were supposed to assemble at a staging area to await instructions, one group of firefighters radioed Kuntz to tell him they were commandeering a city bus to get to the World Trade Center. “I said, ‘You’re not effing going in there,’” said Kuntz. “‘Don’t go over that bridge, I’m warning you!’ I was screaming at him. It was hysterical.”
In total, 200 fire units responded to the World Trade Center or approximately half of the entire New York City Fire Department. But even as the rest of the world focused on the disaster in Lower Manhattan, the dispatchers and emergency responders still had to deal with the accidents and emergencies that happen every day in a borough of more than two million people.
Kuntz recalled receiving one such call in the chaotic minutes after the planes hit the World Trade Center, but before the first tower collapsed. A ladder company in Bushwick called in about a potentially dangerous basement fire in set of row houses. “A row of wood houses can just burn down the whole block,” explained Kuntz.
With the closest engine company in Queens, the local ladder company had to make due without quick access to the standard water pumping equipment. Firefighters managed to attach a three-inch hose to a hydrant and snake the hose through a window into the basement in order to put out the fire.
With emergencies in Brooklyn and the disaster unfolding across the water in Manhattan, Kuntz remained focused solely at the tasks at hand. On dispatch recordings, Kuntz can be heard giving directions to lost fire trucks in Manhattan, ordering off-duty firefighters to report in and frantically trying to stay on top of sending out new units.
“We couldn’t even absorb what was going on in the rest of the country,” said Kuntz. “We had such huge problems in Brooklyn.”
Then, when the towers collapsed, everything in the office came to halt, if only momentarily. A first-responder called in about a “visible dust cloud.” Asked for more details and growing increasingly frantic, he replied that visibility is “zero.” Without additional information, all Kuntz could do is ask if anyone on the fire truck is injured and then reassure the responder. “Just stay strong there,” Kuntz said on the recording. “Just hang on and we’ll get you out as soon as we can.”
While Kuntz and his colleagues on the radio and voice alarm were focused on the getting assistance into Manhattan, four dispatchers on the opposite side of the room were manning the incoming emergency calls.
Taking those calls, many from the people trapped inside the World Trade Center, was the most difficult job that day at the dispatch center, Kuntz said. Dispatchers were faced with the unbearable choice of remaining on the line with people trapped too high up to be helped or hanging up in the hopes they would be able to assist the next caller.
“All these people ask, ‘Can you call my wife, call my husband, call my kids,’” recalled Kuntz. “Then people started to understand the fact they were not going to get out. I guess they had a moment of clarity. They knew there was no way out. They were seeing their co-workers going out the window 95 stories up.”
Later in the day, some of Kuntz’s colleagues made the requested phone calls to family members of the callers.
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse, with half of the FDNY in Lower Manhattan, fire units from outside the city were called in as part of the rarely used policy of “mutual aid” in order to staff the empty fire houses.
Within hours, dispatchers and other Fire Department officials cobbled together a new department out of a patchwork of local, volunteer and out of town fire companies. In Manhattan, the empty firehouses were mainly staffed by other city companies, whereas, in the outer boroughs fire companies from places such as Nassau and Westchester counties staffed the firehouses.
In order make sure the companies from out of town didn’t get lost while out on a run, they were partnered with either another city company or with a fire officer who was working off a cell phone. In the confusion, some fire companies returning from the Trade Center tried to send the visiting companies home. “Did it work well? No,” said Kuntz. “But when you’re trying to build a whole fire department in 24 hours, you just have to hope it works.”
The fact that the FDNY was caught off-guard by a disaster of this magnitude means in the decade since the attacks, the department has instituted major changes in its operations to address these shortcomings. According to the official fire operations response released by the FDNY, coordination among different agencies was minimal during the September 11 attacks. As a result the FDNY has focused on integrating the dispatch centers with other emergency response services.
In 2009, the Brooklyn Fire Dispatch was moved to the Public Safety Answering Center or PSAC 1 in downtown Brooklyn. Joining the Manhattan and Staten Island Fire Dispatches as well as NYPD and EMS responders, the move is part of a continuing effort to encourage communication between the fire, police and EMS departments. At PSAC 1 the different departments share the same operations floor.
While Kuntz acknowledges how chaotic September 11 was, he prefers to have the dispatch centers separate and finds the new arraignment a possible safety risk. “Putting police, fire and EMS communications in the same building?” said Kuntz “You just made it a target.”
While Kuntz has dealt with the aftereffects of September 11 both professionally and personally for ten years, he remembers initially he was unable to process the event. On the morning of September 12, Kuntz, having slept in the rest area of the dispatch center, got up, poured himself some coffee and walked on to the operations floor.
“The phones are ringing but it’s like another morning,” recalled Kuntz. “I squinted and I looked at my boss and he said, ‘No, it did happen.’”
Listen: 9/11 Brooklyn Disptach Recording from 9:02AM
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