By Scott Brinton
Black smoke, thick with the smell of burning gasoline and oil, billowed out of the jagged-edged hole, which stretched four stories deep into Manhattan's underbelly. Seven 2,000-degree fires raged below. Heaps of crumbled cement blocks and twisted metal reinforcing rods lay in all directions.
Hundreds of car alarms screamed at once, only to die as, one by one, they melted. Cars were disintegrating like firewood or blowing up under the extreme heat. The concrete walls groaned, as if ready to collapse. It was a scene straight out of Dante's "Inferno."
Fusco, of Merrick, had gone down to the second level of the World Trade Center's underground parking garage to assess the damage. He was responsible for ensuring that the fires burning below the twin towers were extinguished as fast as humanly possible.
Fusco, who is now 68, was chief of the 12,000-member New York City Fire Department on the snowy, overcast day in February 1993 when six Islamic terrorists remotely detonated a nitrourea bomb under the World Trade Center.
It was the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
The bombers who were later apprehended and each sentenced to 230-year prison terms planned to destroy the twin towers by blowing a hole in the garage midway between them. The terrorists believed that the towers would then collapse onto each other and crash to the ground. The structures held.
The devastation, however, was beyond belief. The blast killed six people, injured 1,042, caused more than $300 million in damage and sent a chill across the nation.
The fires were so intense that their smoke shot up the north tower's elevator shaft and through the roof of the 110-story skyscraper. Within eight minutes of the explosion which ignited at 12:18 p.m. on Feb. 26 the New York City fire dispatcher heard the first reports of smoke inundating the north tower's 33rd and 88th floors.
Fusco was eating a liverwurst sandwich with colleagues at fire headquarters in Brooklyn when he received word of the blast. He raced to Manhattan via the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, arriving at the twin towers at 12:45 p.m.
As he emerged from the tunnel, Fusco recalls, "I looked up and said, ŒOh, my God.¹"
The chief stepped into chaos on West Street. Hundreds of firefighters, police officers and city officials huddled in a circular mass between the north tower and the Vista Hotel. From above, the swirl of people resembled a hurricane as seen from outer space.
The largest rescue operation in the city fire department's 128-year history was well under way. In all, 16 alarms were sounded that day. Each time another bell went off, three fire engines and two ladder trucks rolled into action. In all, 80 trucks full of firefighters were called. "It was unprecedented," Fusco says.
More than 50,000 people were working in the World Trade Center at the time of the explosion. They all had to be evacuated. As the day wore on, people slowly streamed out, accompanied by firefighters who acted as their guides through the dark, smoky towers. Many victims were covered in blood. Many more were drenched in black soot, with respirators covering their faces.
A number of people had smashed out their office windows and were standing precariously on ledges. One news station was telling people to break the glass and stand close to the edge so rescuers would know where they were. But that wasn't what Fusco wanted them to do. He feared they might fall out of the windows, or in a panic, they might even jump.
The chief knew that inside the towers fire wasn't the enemy. It was smoke. People needed to crawl to offices with clean air, seal them off and wait for help. Fusco had a fire official call the news stations and instruct people to do just that. They listened.
Fusco also directed firefighters to break the 3/4-inch-thick windows on the north tower's first floor, believing that smoke would flow directly from the underground garage out of the building. The plan worked. The smoke started to dissipate on the upper floors.
Meanwhile, firefighters stretched high-pressure hoses into the parking garage, jetting water 40 feet in front of them as they waded arduously through the heat and blackness.
Firefighter Brian Shea was on the front lines, battling a blaze on the garage's first level when the floor beneath him suddenly split in two, sending him falling five stories. Shea slammed into a debris pile laden with razor-sharp reinforcing rods, one of which impaled his leg. Miraculously, he survived.
Shea pulled himself up to a sitting position. He thought he might be able to drag himself out of the garage. Then he saw his leg, and fell back to the ground in horror. Shea radioed for help, praying that his signal would be heard above.
He waited. And waited.
Then Shea started to feel water droplets falling like spring rain. Firefighters were beating back the blazes around him with their powerful hoses. Rescuers rappelled into this hellhole and plucked Shea from certain death. He lived.
A sense of relief started to flow in Fusco's veins. "I was feeling a little elated," he says. The chief was waiting anxiously for massive death reports. But they never came.
Of the six dead, five were found in the first two hours after the blast. The sixth was discovered amid the garage rubble 17 days later.
Firefighters extinguished all seven blazes within 12 hours, and remained at the blast site for the next 28 days, sifting by hand through piles of wrecked cars and broken cinder blocks, searching for bodies.
"Everyone operated in the best tradition of the fire department," Fusco says.
The chief says his more than 30 years of firefighting experience gave him the know-how to cope with what was unquestionably the city's most nerve-wracking rescue operation to that point. The 43-year Merrick resident started as a firefighter in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. "It was not unusual to go on 25 runs a night in Brownsville," Fusco says. "It gave a lot of guys a lot of experience."
The chief, who was awarded a heroism medal as a firefighter for climbing into a burning building to save a 65-year-old woman, was promoted to lieutenant after 12 years. From there, Fusco worked his way through the city fire department's Byzantine promotion system, passing each of the officer tests near or at the top of the applicant pool. For the captain's test, he was first among thousands. Fusco, who's been married to Sylvia for 47 years, retired a year after the World Trade Center bombing.
Eight years and seven months after that first attack, terrorists slammed two jetliners into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, sending the buildings falling to the earth and killing nearly 3,000 people, including more than 300 firefighters. Many of those rescuers were Fusco's friends and colleagues.
With the recent London bombings, the chief worries about another terrorist attack in New York. "I'm afraid it's going to happen here. You just can't stop a suicide bomber," the father of three and grandfather of five says with a sigh of resignation.
Comments about this story? Sbrinton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000, ext. 203.
