He made a decision that night. The next morning, he would go.
## September 12: The Return
He grabbed his old firefighting gear — the turnout coat, the equipment that marks a working firefighter — and arranged a ride to the site. He did not call ahead. He did not ask permission. He simply went, because former firefighters showing up to help was the kind of thing that happened in the FDNY’s culture, and because the scale of the disaster made ordinary channels irrelevant.
At Ground Zero, the scene he encountered was defined by two things: the scale of the destruction and the intensity of the work. The pile — the term used by workers and media alike for the collapse site — was still smoldering. The air was thick with the dust that would become, in subsequent years, the source of a medical crisis affecting tens of thousands of workers: pulverized concrete, glass fibers, asbestos, heavy metals, and a range of chemical compounds from the towers’ contents that no exposure standard had ever been designed for.
He found Engine 55 working in the pile. He joined them. The work he describes in his TIME account is the work of a bucket brigade modified for a debris field rather than a fire: rubble coming down the chain, passed from person to person, moved away from the collapse site piece by piece. Occasionally body bags passed through. The face masks that workers wore clogged with dust so quickly that many workers found breathing easier without them — a detail that would become medically significant as the long-term health effects of Ground Zero dust exposure became apparent.