New York City paramedic Gary Smiley was crushed beneath the weight of the World Trade Center's North Tower 25 years ago, but the fight is far from over. On 11 September 2001, 2,977 people died after hijackers crashed three planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Gary, now 63, was working overtime on the morning of the attacks, covering for a friend celebrating his birthday. While getting petrol at the Tillary Street fire station in Downtown Brooklyn, the team got a call from a screaming police officer - a plane had hit the World Trade Center. As Gary and partner Danny crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, they realised the horror that awaited.
Second plane and jumpers
Gary told the Mirror: "We could see the towers on the left of us, and we looked at each other, and we said, 'That's not a small plane'. You just already had the feeling that this was not going to be good." The paramedics parked in front of Broadway's Borders Books and saw injured people "flooding out of the building". As the most senior team member, Gary set up a triage area on the opposite side of the road, and a woman staggered towards him from the building's atrium, "cut horribly" from falling glass.
"I grabbed her, and I said, 'Let me get you across the street'. So I was carrying her across the street, and she was yelling, 'The plane, the plane!'" he said. "And I said, 'Yes, I know, a plane hit the building'. What I didn't realise was that she was looking not over my shoulder, but she was looking south down Broadway. She saw the second plane coming in." The father-of-two remembers looking up just after the moment of impact and wondering how the fireball had seemingly leapt from one tower to the other. His therapist now believes he may well have blocked out the thunderous sound of that second plane.
Gary sprang into action, covering the woman as the jet fuel rained down, suffering serious burns. "At that point, I'm like, my mind is racing. 'What's going on?'" he said. As more panicked people flooded the street, he realised that those trapped in the North Tower had started to jump and were landing all around him. "A jumper landed pretty close to me, and I was hit by some of that secondarily," he said.
Driving over bodies
Drawing upon his experiences working in the 1993 World Trade Centre Bombing, which killed six, Gary set up a zone for the injured on nearby West Street. To reach West Street, the team had to drive down Vesey Street, which ran directly adjacent to the northern edge of the North Tower. Gary said, "I remember that the street was littered with bodies. Probably people who had come out of the plane that hit the North Tower. We just had to drive over them, because there was no other way to get where we had to go. They were all dead."
As the emergency services got to work on West Street, the horrors continued. "We stood there, and I watched 37 people jump out of the North Tower. I know the number because so many people have told me I counted. There was a couple that held hands and jumped," Gary continued. "And there was a guy next to me who I worked with at my station who wanted to go across the street and catch them, because he thought he could catch them. I mean, at that point, people were losing their minds. I mean, it was just chaos, and you didn't know what to do, and you felt helpless."
Gary's team were advised that paramedics were needed in the South Tower lobby. They had no idea that the South Tower, located just 100 yards away, was around three or four minutes away from collapse. "We had just got our stuff on the stretcher when we saw people running at us. 'What are they running at us for?' And then you looked up, and you saw this cloud. Everybody was running." Gary kept right and dashed straight into the American Express building, a split-second decision which saved him from the full impact of the first collapse.
Crushed under an ambulance
Gary said, "People were banging at the windows because they had these huge glass windows in the building. So people started breaking out the windows. We said, 'That's not a good idea, let's get the doors open, because it'll be too much glass.' And a lot of people just kept running, I mean, running north up West Street. At that point, you couldn't see." After about five to ten minutes, the radios began working again, emitting chilling Mayday distress signals from emergency service workers, including his two good friends, Brian Smith and Brian Gordon.
With no idea where his friends were, Gary grabbed a scoop stretcher and medical bag and set off on West Street. He didn't know then, but the atrium of the American Express building where he had sheltered was minutes away from being destroyed. Had he stayed put, he wouldn't have survived. Visibility was poor, and those at street level had no idea that the entire 415 metre tower had fallen. Emerging from the gloom, fire battalion chiefs told Gary there'd been a partial collapse.
Once he reached the north pedestrian bridge - just 100ft from the base of the North Tower, he heard a terrible noise. "I looked up, and the North Tower had started to collapse. I turned to run, and I was able to get my body into a quarter turn, and then I was picked up, and I was thrown down the street by the force of the collapse. I actually landed underneath an ambulance, and the ambulance saved my life, because when the debris came down, the ambulance took the brunt of the debris."
Waking at 12:30 pm
Crushed beneath the weight of the vehicle, Gary radioed for help before passing out. Right before losing consciousness, his thoughts drifted to his young children, who had just lost their maternal grandmother. He pleaded with his own late father, who was killed by muggers in Manhattan two years before, to save him. Gary, who has a 9/11 tattoo honouring his dad, claimed: "I know for a fact that the reason I survived is because of my father. There aren't many people who were there who lived. So I know my dad had something to do with it. I carry his memory all the time."
At around 12:30 pm, Gary woke up, determined to survive. Gary said, "I got myself partially out. A firefighter had also self-extricated himself, don't know who, I mean, we all looked like powdered doughnuts, but in grey. He helped me, and then both of us staggered around until we were able to get off the debris pile." The pair made their way to a deli filled with police officers, firefighters and other emergency services professionals. "The dust was everywhere, and it was in your mouth; you couldn't breathe. It was like having your head under sand," he said. "They had a hose in the kitchen, so people were just trying to hose each other off, and trying to get at it, you were just pulling it out of your mouth, you know, it was petrifying because you couldn't breathe. You felt like you were suffocating."
Gary and other injured personnel were laid out on the pavement and given IV drips, while burning vehicles exploded around them. Alarming rumours swirled in the wreckage. "I had heard emergency services people saying, 'Well, they attacked the Pentagon, they attacked the White House, they got the President'. Somebody said they attacked the Empire State Building. We were in a four- or five-square-block of a different world. All this had happened, and we didn't know what was going on. You just had no idea."
Kidney failure and missing friends
Many immediate survivors feared more planes were coming, but headed out into the ashen wasteland to help more people. Having had no idea then just how serious his crush injuries were, Gary continued working around the pile until around 11:00 pm, when he suffered kidney failure. Those who opened the ambulance at Long Island College Hospital to see Gary alive burst into tears, having been told he'd died. "I got very angry, because a lot of us were reported missing and presumed dead way before they should have said anything," he said.
A call had been made to Gary's then-wife, telling her he was "missing, presumed dead". A priest even walked into the trauma bay, amazed to find Gary living. He spent five days in the hospital but yearned to get out and help his friends. He was relieved to learn that the two Brians had survived, although Brian Smith lost his father, a member of Hazardous Materials Company 1. Gary was eventually cleared and reassigned to the World Trade Center site for rescue and recovery, but was still in tremendous pain.
More than a dozen of Gary's friends remained missing, and two were confirmed dead. In total, Gary spent 480 hours at the pile. He continued the grim toil until shortly after New Year's Day. By then, the seemingly endless procession of funerals was well underway.
9/11 related illnesses
The events of 9/11 remain to this day the most deadly terrorist attacks committed in human history. A total of 2,977 people were killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Thousands more were injured, and many regard the full death toll to be much higher when accounting for the still-unfolding aftermath. More people have now died from 9/11 related illnesses than on the day itself, with a landmark 25th anniversary report produced by the FDNY World Trade Center Health Program, determining that more than 9,000 people have passed away, including 600 firefighters.
This includes Gary's close friend and advocacy mentor, Ray Pfeifer, a firefighter of Engine 40 and Ladder 35, who died from cancer six years ago. Many emergency services personnel, like Gary, spent long periods of time at the pile, breathing in toxic fumes with carcinogenic properties. Gary said, "I have a phone full of dead people's phone numbers. So many people are gone. I've lost so many friends, dozens. And you miss them. They just get these cancers, and a lot of them are pancreatic cancer and liver cancer, you know, stuff that's just detected way too late in the game. They were just all great people. Men and women who were just great at their jobs, and just great humans, and should still be with us. The terrorists are still attacking 25 years later. It's just a nightmare that never ends."
Advocacy and pension fight
After the attacks, he trained as a hazardous materials technician, then as a rescue paramedic and served on the Urban Search and Rescue team as a medical specialist, the "highest honour" of his life. Now a retired grandfather living in New Jersey, Gary has contended with various 9/11 related health issues of his own, most notably his asthma and sinus issues. He says he fought to have his pension reclassified as disability and says the city pension he did receive stopped him from working.
Gary has since lobbied in Washington for more funding for the World Trade Center Health Program, and pushed for change with the New York Pension Board. The Victims Compensation Fund was refunded permanently in July 2019, ensuring that the families of anyone who does get sick receive a legacy. Nowadays, Gary continues to keep busy with his advocacy, as well as spending time with his family and his research oncologist partner, Joyce. He's also an accomplished gardener.
Considering how 9/11 has shaped him as a person, Gary reflected: "As a paramedic, you always had empathy and compassion, I think it's maybe raised that in me some. It just opens your eyes to how delicate life is, and how you really should help your fellow man, and there should not be many exceptions to that. Ray had a saying: 'You do the right thing even when nobody else is looking'. And I try to live my life that way, to honour him."
