The Freedom Tower

No one who saw the broadcast to the fallen firefighters of 911 will ever forget the taunt delivered by Mike Moran to terrorist Osama Bin Laden in honor of his fallen biological brother Battalion Chief John Moran, a Belle Harbor resident killed at the World Trade Center.

“Osama, step right up and kiss my royal Irish ass,” Mike said in the broadcast.

It was John and the hundreds of others like him that was on the mind of Dunn and his colleagues as they raced through the streets of Queens that morning. Bob Stec had Moran in mind too, a fellow chief from Ladder Co. 3, one of the good guys who literally wore the white hats.

“The men of Ladder Co. 3 told the New York Daily News that Firefighter Michael Moran was speaking for all of them when he told Osama Bin Laden to kiss his royal Irish on national television.” Moran, who works at the Manhattan ladder company, set off a frenzy at benefit “Concert for New York City” at Madison Square Garden when he blasted Bin Laden from the stage.

When Stec’s men arrived in Queens, the neighborhood was eerily familiar.

Stec and the firefighters and cops who rushed to the scene, quickly realized this fire would resurrect the nightmare of the Sept. 11. They had been to Belle Harbor many times before, for Moran’s funeral and many others since the terrorist attacks.

“I raced here after finishing my overnight tour, and the first thing that came to my mind was, don’t tell me. Not again,’” said firefighter Brian Harvey of Engine Co. 236 told Firefighter.com.

“It’s just devastating. I think the whole department is kind of numb. You’re still thinking about what happened at the trade center, and then something like this . . . I don’t even think it’s hit us right now,” said Fireman Randy Ballentine.

Part V

Queens firefighter Tom Dunn gave a first hand account of the events of that day on the Firefighter Exchange, a website for firemen. Dunn was working a 24 hour shift that morning when the alarm at his firehouse sounded.

He said the night tour was still working at his Brooklyn firehouse when it was announced over the loud speaker Flight 587 had gone down in Rockaway.

“I remember standing there and just thinking this can not be happening again. It had been only 2 months since the Trade Center and all the old feelings came racing back again. I just thought to myself, ‘Well, here we go again.’

“We ran downstairs and all gathered around the TV just like during the Trade Center. It was all too familiar. The TV was showing a picture of a plume of smoke rising over an area that we all knew too well. Eddie and Tom Ryan both have family that live in that area and we have all been there at one time or another for either funerals or bars or friends’ houses.

“Unlike the Trade Center, where terrorism was the last thing on my mind, I thought for sure this was another attack, seeing as this was Veteran’s day. We watched the TV for a couple minutes and discussed how we hoped they would send us so we could do our part. The scenario played out almost the same as the Trade Center. The computer went off and it was for the chief, but this time he was only getting relocated to cover the 49 Battalion’s area. Then I started to think, “Oh, man, I hope they don’t just relocate us to cover someone else’s area,” because everyone knows that the hardest thing to do when something big is going on is to sit and watch it on TV.

“The red phone began to go off announcing that a second alarm had been transmitted. And then almost immediately it went to a third alarm and the computer went off ENGINE! and the two tone noise that means we have an alarm. We all ran out to see if we were going. On the ticket it read that we were the 4th engine in on the 3rd alarm. The run was acknowledged the bell rang and the doors opened. We gathered our gear and got on the rig. We were on the road in seconds flat. I got dressed and checked to make sure I had everything. Helmet, hood, gloves, flashlight all right were they should be and we made our way to Flatbush Ave.

Missing that morning from the company was battalion Chief John Moran of the 49. He perished on 9/11 but Moran was from Belle Harbor where his company and Stecs, along with scores of others were now racing to fight a jet fuel fire.

The New York City Police Benevolent Association is getting behind a registry for cops who worked at Ground Zero to monitor illnesses related to toxins in the air at the site.

The PBA is among the latest to complain that government monitoring may be too little too late.

“Over 8,000 workers are currently filed against the city of New York, the Environmental Protection Agency and dozens of private and public contractors who allegedly failed to protect workers against environmental toxins at the Ground Zero and Fresh Kills landfill sites where the debris from the WTC was taken and sorted, according to attorney James Farrin, a North Carolina personal injury lawyer.

Farrin says thousands of workers now claim the cancers, respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses they are suffering are a result of poor environmental protection and a lack of proper management oversight at the cleanup locations.

He cites the autopsy results of retired34 year old  New York police detective James Zadroga. Doctors concluded that Zadroga’s death was directly related to respiratory failure due to the toxins he breathed at the Ground Zero site, the lawyer claims.

The autopsy report set off a wave of articles in New York City newspapers drawing attention to the plight of safety officers and emergency workers who now seem to be paying a steep price for their service after the attacks. The federal government has appointed Dr. John Howard to oversee its response to the public’s growing concern, but the NYC PBA’s spokesperson, Pat O’Leary, says his fellow officers may not have time to wait on the government.

“Those who are alive today need to know what kinds of symptoms they should be watching for,” O’Leary said.

At least 25 police officers have joined the registry but those numbers are expected to swell rapidly.

Part IV

Flight 587 was a French Airbus A300-600. When it broke apart, it showered debris and flames on an unsuspecting, working class neighborhood that had lost an unprecedented 60 people in the 9/11 tragedy, firemen and police officers. All 251 passengers, five infants and nine crew members, aboard the aircraft perished. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said 262 bodies were recovered, including five people have been reported missing from the community.

Although the world believed this plane accident was no accident at all but a second wave of terrorist’s attacks, especially when the explosion rained fire down on this neighborhood of first responders. It was later determined that the plane crash was a tragic accident but not the reign of terror it was first thought to be. A sailor headed to the Dominican Republic to see his wife and children before he returned to duty in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was heading for duty in the Arabian Sea aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

The crash site was familiar territory to many of the firefighters who responded to the call, including chief Stec. The area is residential - schools, apartment buildings, churches, doctors offices, a blogger who watched the story unfold on CNN on television monitors at nearby Kennedy Airport, would later write. “It is a beach front community comprised of hard working people. Most of the children who grow up there - marry and settle within the area. It is smaller soul group within a larger soul group who remain together joined by life and death. They love living on and near the water. Most humans are attracted to property on water as it is that which connects us to the flow of the collective unconscious - the creational grids - forever changing,” he said.

The embattled Freedom Tower construction project has taken a new twist in the pages of European newspapers with Scotland  on Sunday today reporting a bribe scandal has hit the Ground Zero project.

The new scandal, the newspaper said, surrounds accusations of corruption linked to one of the main contractors.

“The row centers on Dino Tomassetti’s construction empire, which is working at Ground Zero, where a glance reveals his company’s Laquila cranes, heavy equipment, trucks and crews. His oldest son’s vehicles will deliver concrete for the foundation of the Freedom Tower, the most symbolic of the five skyscrapers planned to replace the iconic building destroyed in the September 11 terrorist attacks. His daughter’s company will deliver the steel rods that strengthen the concrete walls.

But Tomassetti, the 79-year-old patriarch, is barred from setting foot on the 16-acre site. He is under indictment, accused of making thousands of dollars in illegal payoffs to union officials over a 10-year period.

Federal prosecutors and testimony have linked him to organized crime, and his companies have been banned from obtaining city contracts.

One Laquila company was fined for its part in a scheme organized by a member of the Gambino crime organization to dump construction debris illegally in New Jersey. But none of this means his family will be on the sidelines when it comes to constructing the city’s tallest tower and one of the world’s most eagerly awaited buildings.

The central contract for excavation and foundation work, which is worth tens of millions of dollars, was awarded to his youngest son, Dino Tomassetti Jr, 27, whose job until recently was chauffeuring his father from site to site.

When actor Kevin Costner, built it they came in the film “Field of Dreams.”

Now that Larry Silverstein is building the Freedom Tower, it remains questionable whether or not the number of tenants the developer needs to occupy the 2.6 million square feet of the Freedom Tower will come in sufficient numbers to make building fiscally sound.

Last week, Silverstein told reporters the controversial design of the center piece tower and the buildings that will go up around it by 2011 will be indestructible. “That is for the purpose of peace of mind - letting the people who will occupy these towers know that they can do so in safety and with confidence.” Silverstein said, and each building will be build by the same standards.

Another argument being put forth by Silverstein is the claim that it is highly unlikely that a similar attack using hijacked airliners is “extraordinarily remote.” ‘If you build it to be impregnable and explain that to the world, (the terrorists) would not even try,’ Silverstein said. Silverstein’s argument might make sense if you believe the bureaucracy heading up the department of homeland security in America is up to the task. What is more likely is that heightened airport security and armed U.S. Marshals flying anonymously aboard domestic flights make it highly unlikely that coordinated attacks like those carried out in 2001 won’t be easy to carry out.

Part III

Bob wasn’t on the job when the Twin Towers toppled. He wasn’t supposed to be downtown, after all the battalion he commanded was up in the Bronx and Bob lived upstate in Putnam County. He wasn’t even scheduled to work when the two planes hit the World Trade Center and every firefighter in the fire service knew immediately that nothong but the grace of God it could have saved them from the same fate. So, when the word spread that hundreds of their brothers were trapped in the rubble, and the word spread quickly, Bob made his way into lower Manhattan that afternoon along with every other able bodied working or retired firefighter who came to dig and haul debris and to hope to find any one of the firefighters in the rubble, dead or alive.

“I probably knew, personally, at least 100 of those fellows,” he reckons, describing the tightknit world of New York firehouses. When the New York Times published photos of the department’s 9/11 victims, he would later tell a newspaper reporter, he showed his son every picture.

Part II

All hell broke loose.

When Stec’s unit got the call, the unit sped south, took the bridge that spans across Jamaica Bay and headed towards Belle Harbor, Queens. The bay is that body of water every passenger who takes off from Kennedy Airport sees just seconds before their planes land at Kennedy. On November 12, flight 587 took off and began to climb on its flight to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic when something went awry. Ten seconds later, this plane with more than 260 passengers aboard, suddenly plunged and crashed into Belle Harbor in the Rockaway section of Queens.

Day in and day out, Stec worked a regular shift putting out fires all over the city, assisting accident victims in car crashes and on their days off, Stec and his men traveled to Ground Zero where they assisted combing through the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center in search of the remains of their fallen brothers.

Battalion Chief Bob Stec, commander of Battalion 20 in the Bronx, took to calling it “the job site” after 9/11. But there was no time to volunteer at the “job site” that morning in November, 2001.

Flight 587 took off and 114 seconds after take off the pilot knew something was wrong, according to the flight recorder tapes. The take off was interrupted by “the wake effect” from a Japan Airways Boeing 747 that had taken off minutes earlier. Just two and a half minutes after takeoff, the flight recording ends. The flight was down. Belle Harbor was an inferno and Battalion 20 was called to the scene to join 60 other units to fight a jet fuel fire that morning.

Part I

America has real heroes. This is the beginning of a serial about the life and times of one, one of New York City Fire Department’s bravest.

The life Robert Stec, like the careers of every other firefighter in America, was tragically and irrevocably changed after events five years ago when two hijacked jet planes slammed into the World Trade Center.

The planes toppled the world’s tallest buildings within hours, killed thousands of people trapped inside WTC buildings and sent hundreds of New York City fire fighters to hundreds of funerals for fallen colleagues killed, lost and presumed dead that horrible morning of 9/11.

Two months later on November 12, 2001, Stec would again be hurled into a life-altering situation when he led the men of the Bronx firehouse where he was a battalion chief to join 60 other fire units and 220 firefighters assigned to a five alarm fire in a sleepy, working class neighborhood in Queens.

Box Number 1398, located at 127th Street and Newport Avenue was transmitted at 0917 hours EST. Within minutes first arriving Fire Department units transmitted a 10-60 “Major Emergency Response”. A short time later, fire box 1441 went off near a gas station located at 183 Beach and 133rd Street in Queens. An American Airlines Airbus A300 bound for the Dominican Republic, Flight 587, had crashed in Belle Harbor Queens.

Stec’s life was changed that day and would never be the same again.

It was like being called to fight fire in hell!

by Peter Mehlman

A friend with an office near Ground Zero called. He knows nothing about construction but he sees a lot of people who look like construction workers milling around. That’s the thing about New York; everyday you pass big people in hard hats doing nothing but eating lunch on vacant lots and by the end of the month they’re eating lunch on the completed frame of a 88-story building.

That’s why now - before leases are signed, maps redrawn, signs replaced, subways re-routed and the collective conscious re-wired - is a good time for New York to seriously rethink naming The Freedom Tower “The Freedom Tower.”

At first blush, and all subsequent blushes, a structure called “The Freedom Tower” belongs in Epcot, not New York. Its twangy jingo-ism (should) trip the same cringe reflex you (should) get when rah-rah Olympics fans chant “USA! USA!” as NBA players squish some remedial team from Swaziland.

Besides, New York already has a Statue of Liberty. Liberty, freedom - synonyms, no? Not that “Statue of Liberty” is such a hot name either but it was a gift, no one wanted to be rude, so it was plopped it in an unobtrusive spot in the middle of the river and that was that. But The Freedom Tower is no gift. It’s costing lots and lots of money.

The hurdle to picking a new name lies in those who insist this new structure must (!) stand as constant reminder of our freedoms. As if pedestrians will look up, see the tower and suddenly remember, “Wait a minute. I can do whatever the fuck I want.” The truth is, when pedestrians look up and see the tower, they will think, “Shit. I thought I was walking Uptown.”

Even wobblier is the logic of hyping our freedom as a response to the September 11th attackers. “They hate us because we’re free and they’re not,” goes the theory. Zipping from Egypt to Afghanistan to Germany to American flight schools and strip clubs sounds pretty free, but let’s go with this theory a moment. If that’s why they hate us, maybe it’s a bad idea to rub it in the face of the next novice maniac - you know, similar to how you might avoid calling your identity thief to let him know you also have stock options.

Not that a new name should imply any intimidation on the part of America ( The You-May-Be-Right-About-Us Tower), but as things stand now, we’re coming up just shy of erecting The Infidel Tower. A happy medium (The Cautiously Pessimistic Tower) has to be lying around somewhere. After all, when you’re the richest, most powerful nation in the world, modesty is super charming (The Hey: We-Do-What-We-Can-Do Tower). And, not unlike the guy who buys a yacht and names it “You’re Poor,” America is not the most popular sailor in the marina these days. A little charm can go a long way about now (The Did-You-Lose-Weight? Tower).

Perhaps more local, Chamber of Commerce-y concepts should be explored in re-naming the most highly anticipated addition to the Manhattan skyline of all time. Oh wow, New York has so much to offer (The Duane-Read-Every-Two Blocks Tower), so much opportunity (The Fall-On-The-Street-And-Sue-The-City Tower), so much nervous energy (The Klonopin Tower), so much subversiveness (The Apocalypse ASAP Tower).

The possibilities are endless. The odds of improving upon Freedom Tower are even more endless.

Of course, there will be the issue of what to do about people who will, immediately upon the re-naming the tower, flip out. And people will flip out. Not the people of New York, but people. Underlying their apoplexy will be the pervasive American fear that, minus the maximum number of mnemonic devices, anything can and will be forgotten. Have you no sense of history? they will ask with a smug air of inferiority.

As if 9/11 was like a vacation that never happened without the proof of a “Welcome to Aruba” Snow Globe. As if 9/11 needs an emotional lien.

Please.

The Guilt-Free Tower. The Back-Off Tower. The Yeah-We-Know Tower….