For two weeks you’ve heard their stories separately: the NYPD detective who worked the world’s largest homicide scene for eight months, and the FDNY firefighter who survived the collapse and carried it home. The final episode of our series is different: it’s the two of them together.
No Podium, No Script
After their talks at our Annual Convention ended, Joe and Tim sat down together and kept going; one NYPD, one FDNY, one conversation about the same morning from two sides of it. There are things a man will say to the only other person in the room who was there that he won’t say to an audience. This recording is full of them.
One of them is a story Tim didn’t tell from the stage. The spot where he survived the collapse by holding a structural column against 185-mph winds turned out to be the exact section of the complex destroyed in the 1993 bombing and rebuilt afterward by American steel workers who, in Tim’s words, used steel far stronger than required because they were “so proud and patriotic to be Americans.” “That column that I was holding on to, trying to live, was actually one of the new columns they had put in,” he says. “These great American steel workers — what they did saved my life.”
“We Were All One”
Joe said it from the podium, and the conversation proves it. Racing in from Queens, he and Detective Curt Harris heard the second plane hit: “I looked at Kurt. Kurt looked at me, and basically we said: we’re at war.” In the South Tower lobby, Chief Donald Burns was telling Tim the same thing. And in the months that followed “there was no New York City Fire Department. There was no New York City Police Department. We were all one.” Twenty-five years later, that’s still the standard; the reason POAM brought these recordings out of the archive.
Listen to Episode 3
Catch up on the series: Part 1 — Joe Blozis [link] · Part 2 — Tim Brown [link] · Series announcement [link].
A quarter century has passed. Our promise has not changed. Never forget.