And then September 11 arrived.
## The Morning of September 11 and What It Meant to Engine 55
The two hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center towers at 8:46 a.m. and 9:03 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Within minutes of the first impact, the FDNY had begun mobilizing. Companies across the city were dispatched toward Lower Manhattan. Engine 55 was one of the first units to reach the site.
The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. The South Tower had already collapsed at 9:59 a.m. Three hundred and forty-three firefighters died in the attacks — the largest loss of life in the history of any fire department anywhere in the world. The collapse of the towers killed firefighters and police officers and Port Authority personnel who had entered the buildings to evacuate civilians. They were doing exactly what they were trained to do.
Engine 55 lost five of its members that day. Their names are recorded in the memorial plaques outside the Broome Street firehouse: Lieutenant Freund, Faustino Apostol, Stephen Russell, Robert Lane, and Christopher Mozzillo. Five men from one company, one building on Broome Street in Little Italy, dead before noon on a Tuesday.
Steve Buscemi was in New York when it happened. He watched the coverage. He felt, by his later account, the thing that many people felt on September 11 and that he described with unusual precision: a feeling of connection — to the city, to the event, to the particular community that was suffering most directly. He had lived and worked in Lower Manhattan. He had driven to fires in the neighborhood around the World Trade Center. He knew what it meant when an FDNY company went into a building that was already compromised, because he had been part of companies that did that kind of work.