Thursday, October 1, 2026
The first day of Inwood native John Norman’s vacation was scheduled to start on Sept. 11, 2001. A New York City Fire Department battalion chief in Harlem, Norman planned to spend three weeks relaxing at home — until he heard his answering machine that morning.
The Chief Battalion Commander of the FDNY’s 16th Battalion chief on duty, Tom Roby, called to say that all off-duty firefighters were being summoned back to work.
“We didn’t have a total recall in 1993 for the Word Trade Center bombing,” Norman, 74, said. “I’d never had a total recall in the Fire Department in my 22 years. I had no idea what was going on.”
Norman’s younger brother David, a member of the New York City Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit Truck One, had already arrived at the World Trade Center, shortly after American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower. He didn’t know the plane was a commercial airliner.
“I thought it was a light aircraft, ’cause only a few months earlier, [one] was tangled on the torch of the Statue of Liberty,” David, 63, who now lives in Woodmere recalled. “I didn’t realize it was such a gaping hole until we got close enough to see it.”
Before long, United Flight 175 struck the south tower. One of its landing gear wheels, David said, hit the ground just feet from where he stood. He could feel radiant heat from the impact, but thought it was a secondary explosion in the north tower.
“If you watch[ed] it on TV, it was obvious,” he said. “But when you’re on [the] ground level and that stuff just comes down on you, you don’t know.”
David and his crew climbed the north tower’s Stairway B, with medical equipment on their backs to the 31st floor, where they set up a medical triage station. When the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., his crew was ordered to evacuate the building. They ran north, to the West Side Highway.
When the north tower collapsed, David and his colleagues took cover beneath a fire truck, which he said nearly crushed them.
A later arrival
John Norman, meanwhile, was taking another route to what would become ground zero. After hours of navigating Long Island’s bottlenecked parkways from his home in Merrick, and a ride on an FDNY-commandeered city bus through Brooklyn, he arrived at the World Trade Center at around 1 p.m., returning to buildings he had known since January 1973.
His first job, he said, was as a fire protection engineer, helping to assemble the sprinkler systems for most of the buildings in the Trade Center complex. He was also an instructor at the Nassau County Fire Academy in Old Bethpage, teaching structural firefighting.
“I knew those buildings as well as anybody in the FDNY,” John said. “When I [got] there, I [couldn’t] recognize a thing.”
He recalled absolute chaos. “The damage from the two towers collapsing sheared the water mains that fed the water to the hydrants in Lower Manhattan,” he explained. “We had no water to fight fires, very few masks, and no radios. We had very poor logistics support to mount a fire on high-rise building[s].”
John was assigned to take charge of the Verizon building, at the corner of the West Side Highway and Vesey Street, where he helped organize searches and fight fires. At one point he was asked to assess the adjacent 7 World Trade Center, and he recalled heavy damage from roughly the sixth through 20th floors, where debris from the north tower had struck the building.
At 5:20 p.m., Building 7 collapsed.
The FDNY solicited help from volunteer departments across Long Island, including the Inwood F.D., which sent a six-person crew to what was then known simply as the pile. Among them crew was John and David’s brother, Warren Norman, who stood by at Belmont Racetrack, and then in Brooklyn before traveling to the pile.
Warren arrived at 5 p.m., just after Building 7 collapsed. Now a retired NYPD detective who lives in North Carolina, Warren said that he and David always shared the tours they worked. “My concern was to get there as fast as I could to find out if David was alive,” Warren, 72, said.
Warren’s crew was relieved by other Inwood volunteers around 3 a.m. on Sept. 12. He learned David was alive from a fellow NYPD Sgt., Ernie O’Conner.
He heard stories that he has never forgotten. An FDNY crew member told Warren that a firefighter next to him had been killed by a falling body.
“I’m [just] thinking to myself, ‘My God,’” he said. “‘This must have been a nightmare.’”
Helping clear the wreckage
For some 48 hours, John Norman helped clear a destroyed footbridge that had spanned the West Side Highway between Vesey and Liberty streets, which allowed heavy equipment to reach the pile.
He was also appointed chief of special operations when the FDNY held an emergency reorganization meeting at nearby Federal Plaza In the weeks that followed, John was assigned to be a search-and-rescue manager at ground zero, overseeing five of the department’s heavy rescue companies and seven squad companies, as well as its Hazardous Materials units and its Marine Division.
Crews remained in rescue mode for weeks, he said, with the survival of people in the north tower’s Stairwell B demonstrating the possibility that people could remain alive within the wreckage.
“When we got into the sub-cellar area, you could count the floors collapsed into a 2-foot-high pile,” he said. “There was no void space.”
David, who suffered a scratched cornea, said he worked at the pile twice a week after the attacks. To him, it felt like a different city.
Since 9/11, the brothers have returned to the World Trade Center site a handful of times. John said he often reflects on the chief officers and senior assistant chiefs the Fire Department lost.
David often has what he described simply as negative dreams at this time of year. “I don’t need a calendar to remember,” he said.
Warren was diagnosed with Stage 4 mantle cell lymphoma, a rare blood cancer, in June 2023. He says he acquired the illness from ground zero. Now living in North Carolina, he returns to Long Island every eight weeks for treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Commack Nonna’s Garden Foundation Center.
The brothers — who also have another brother and sister, say they hope to someday take their families together to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and ground zero, to explain the family’s connection to Sept. 11, 2001.
“There’s so much misinformation out there now,” John said. “We got a whole generation of kids and firefighters who were born after 9/11 — they need to know the legacy. What happened? Why did it happen?”
