Retired firefighter feels fortunate to have survived 9/11 attacks
Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, Phil McArdle believes that timing and circumstances led to him not being killed at the World Trade Center
Editor’s note: “After Ground Zero: Everyday Americans and the Unhealed Scars of 9/11,” a new book by Mike Kelly, an award-winning columnist for The Record of New Jersey and the USA TODAY Network, traces the lives of survivors, first responders, soldiers, victims’ relatives and others in the years after America’s deadliest terrorist attack.
The book begins as Kelly walks into the rubble of Ground Zero in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. The story then continues for a quarter-century at numerous locations, including Washington, D.C., Iraq, Malaysia and the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In this excerpt, which includes several scenes in the book, we meet Phil McArdle, a veteran of the FDNY’s elite Hazmat 1 unit who survived the collapse of both of the World Trade Center’s 110-story Twin Towers. In between dodging the falling steel and concrete, McArdle, along with fellow firefighter Jeff Borkowski, rescued a news photographer from under the rubble. The FDNY later would award McArdle and Borkowski medals for their heroism.
Now, in the months after 9/11, McArdle faces the emotionally wrenching task of eulogizing his colleagues who died.
* * *
The death of a building is never quiet. Steel slams into steel. Concrete crushes concrete. Foundations split and crack. Windows shatter in their frames. Pipes break. Wires snap.
Then comes the avalanche of debris and a final deafening crash to the ground.
And then – silence.
“When the sound stopped,” Phil McArdle said, “I knew the building was down.”
For the second time that morning, McArdle had managed to escape the collapse of a 110-story skyscraper. Now he faced another dilemma. He was entombed in a room of rubble. He couldn’t move or see. The narrow space behind the column where he had taken refuge was as dark as a coffin. He wiggled his fingers, flexed his arms, nodded his head, twisted his torso. But when he stretched out an arm, he could not distinguish his hand and fingers.
McArdle quickly realized that if he wanted to escape, he had to find some sort of passage through the rubble to crawl through. A small hole or narrow tunnel would do the job.
But where was such an opening? And how far was “out”? The avalanche of steel and concrete seemed massive. Was his tomb five feet deep? Or 10? Or 50? Or just one foot?
McArdle had no idea. Nor did he know how many minutes had passed after the North Tower fell or which direction he should take to escape – or if escaping was actually possible in this rubble-strewn landscape.
He took a moment to get his bearings. To the east, on the other side of the pillar that had been his shield: more rubble and fires from the fallen towers. To the west: the Hudson River and possible safety.
He reached to his right, then to his left. A narrow opening. He crawled a few feet over several steel beams and blocks of concrete. He pushed away a smaller piece of steel and a hunk of concrete. He stepped over more steel.
And then: faint light ahead – gray, like the evening twilight.
McArdle shimmied into in a larger space. Was he atop the rubble? Or just in a pocket? He had no idea. He inched forward a step or two more, then called out: “Is anyone out there?”
From behind another pillar, Jeff Borkowski answered.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” McArdle said, crawling toward the voice.
So began the torturous ordeal of finding survivors and counting the dead and missing.
Is anyone out there?
That day, McArdle found his way out of the rubble of the Twin Towers. But he soon faced another kind of rubble that extended far beyond Ground Zero and its carnage. His fellow surviving firefighters looked to him to offer meaning and insight to the sorrow that had now enveloped their lives. And so, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, Phil McArdle stood at a lectern and looked across the pews at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church in Melville, Long Island. His task: to eulogize one of his friends who died.
McArdle had already attended a dozen or more funerals and memorial services for some of the 343 firefighters who had perished in the collapse of the Twin Towers. Sometimes, there were 25 in just one day. McArdle couldn’t attend each of them. No one could. So sometimes he would stay for half of a service, then leave to attend the second half of another. The ordeal was exhausting. And while McArdle, standing over 6 feet, with broad shoulders, was known in the firehouse for his stamina, the sorrow-filled marathon of funerals and memorial services sapped his emotional and physical strength.
But the memorial for firefighter Dennis Scauso that took place on the Monday after Thanksgiving was especially meaningful. Scauso had been one of McArdle’s closest colleagues on the Hazmat 1 team. Every pew was filled with Scauso’s family, firefighters, local residents and many admirers. Even New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was there.
After his harrowing escape from the collapse of the towers, McArdle returned to a horrific reality at his firehouse in Maspeth, Queens. Nineteen firefighters from Hazmat 1 and its sister, Squad 288, had perished at the Trade Center – the highest death toll of any firehouse in New York City. Left behind were 51 children who would now go through life without their fathers. Scauso had been father to four of those children.
Years later, McArdle said he knew in those early days that he could not erase the emotional pain that was pumping through the lives of the remaining firefighters in Hazmat 1 and Squad 288 and their families. But he could help them continue living. He took it upon himself to become a “liaison officer” for the families of the dead or missing. He created information packets for widows and others that explained how to apply for benefits. When a firefighter’s body or remains were found at Ground Zero, McArdle accompanied senior FDNY officers to the homes of the surviving families to break the news. And when a funeral or memorial service was held, it often fell to McArdle to deliver a eulogy.
Dennis Scauso had been one of the most valued firefighters among the talented Hazmat 1 unit. To join the group, firefighters had to study far more than the basics of extinguishing a blaze at a home or apartment building. The hazardous materials that the unit was summoned to handle ranged from bombs to chemical spills.
Scauso, 46, had been a commercial charter pilot for nearly a decade before joining the fire department. But what made him so valuable was his talent for fixing almost any machine or device that malfunctioned. The firefighters called him “MacGyver” after the fictional TV character who had a knack for solving technical problems and avoiding crises.
McArdle thought of all of these attributes as he was about to deliver that eight-minute eulogy for Scauso that he had written. There was no coffin. Scauso’s remains had not been identified. It would be months before his crushed fire helmet turned up in the pile. (Even 25 years later, Scauso’s remains had not been identified.)
The morning’s sunlight beamed through the red and blue and yellow and green stained-glass window on the wall behind the lectern. A potted palm stood in one corner. An easel holding a large photo of Scauso taken from the side as he looked up from one of his repair jobs stood on the other.
The church’s pastor, the Rev. Bruce Powers, had already spoken of how “God was truly present in Dennis” and others who rushed into the towers. “He was an actual rescuer. He gave himself totally. He gave himself completely,” Father Powers said. “He’s here. He’s with us all. He’s with us in spirit, in our hearts. He will not be forgotten.”
Mayor Giuliani then stepped forward. Giuliani had been already touted as “America’s Mayor” for his eloquent speeches that helped to calm New York City as well as the rest of the nation during the harrowing days after the 9/11 attacks. There were no hints yet that Giuliani’s political career would sink amid a series of personal, legal and political controversies linked to President Donald Trump.
“Our country has become stronger and more united and more courageous,” Giuliani said that morning. “That did not happen by accident. It happened because of men like Dennis who were there, who were so brave and so courageous that it now requires the rest of us to be that way or at least try to be that way.”
The crowd clapped loudly as Giuliani finished. McArdle stood and walked to the lectern and paused. His eyes darted across the pews and settled on the first row with Scauso’s wife and their four children.
McArdle knew from his other eulogies that one of the most difficult tasks was speaking to children who had lost a parent.
McArdle mentioned how Scauso loved to work on a boat with his son, Don. How he helped his oldest daughter, Darci, with her homework even after a long day at the firehouse. How he sat by the side of daughter, Gabrielle, when she was hospitalized with an acute bout of asthma. Then, to Juliette, he said: “Wasn’t your dad the best at piggyback rides?”
At just 4 years old, Juliette was Scauso’s youngest. Wearing a burgundy dress and with several strands of her thick brown hair pulled back in an elegant braid, she grasped her mother’s hand as she stood outside the church before the service. The FDNY bagpipe band played the Irish ballad, “Going Home.” In one hand, Juliette held a doll.
Years later, Juliette, who became a physician and a national advocate to investigate alleged links to 9/11 attacks by Saudi government officials, would talk of how she found it difficult at the funeral to understand that her father had perished. In a letter she wrote for the memorial service booklet, Juliette recounted how her father would tickle her and how he would pick her up from nursery school and take her to lunch at McDonald’s and let her ride on his tractor “even when it was bumpy.”
Juliette ended her letter with the memory of her father helping her get into bed at night and comforting her so she could fall off to sleep. “You wrap your angel wings around,” Juliette wrote. “I miss you, daddy.”
As the memorial service ended, Juliette was still holding her mother’s hand as she walked outside to the curb by the church driveway with the entire Scauso family. McArdle and two other firefighters approached and stood at attention and saluted.
One firefighter handed a Hazmat 1 fire helmet to Scauso’s son. McArdle handed a U.S. flag that had been folded into a triangle to Scauso’s father. The other firefighter started to hand a triangle-folded flag to Scauso’s widow, Janlyn. But Juliette reached for the flag. As the fire department bagpipe band marched away to the tune of “America the Beautiful,” Juliette hugged the flag to her chest.
* * *
Two months later . . .
Phil McArdle was at the lectern of another church for another funeral to deliver yet another eulogy.
But this one was even more personal.
McArdle’s 16-year-old son, Andrew, had been killed in a car accident on one of the icy roads that twisted through the hills near the family’s home in Carmel, New York.
McArdle had moved his family there to get away from New York City’s congestion and all the troubles that came with so many people living so close together. And now, McArdle faced the kind of tragedy that parents fear most. Still, he felt it was his duty to eulogize his son.
“Most parents, during their life, will talk about what they have taught their children,” he began. “While my wife and I had taught our beloved son many things, he has taught us a great deal more. He taught us how important the little things in life were. He was kind, gentle, respectful, humble and generous.”
As he ended, McArdle turned to his fellow firefighters, especially those with Hazmat 1 and Squad 288 who had driven to McArdle’s town for the funeral. “We’ve lost so much together,” he said. “I could not have gotten through this without your help.”
Still, McArdle knew it would not be easy to crawl through the emotional rubble now piling up in his life. Years later, as he spoke to officials who ran the fire department, McArdle was asked to describe why so many first responders carried so much pain for so many years. In a way, McArdle was describing himself and his own pain.
“We did a great job taking care of the dead, but a terrible job taking care of the living,” McArdle said.
Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network, as well as the author of three critically acclaimed nonfiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. A paperback edition with an updated epilogue of his 1995 book, “Color Lines,” which chronicles race relations in a small New Jersey town after a police shooting and was called “American journalism at its best” by The Washington Post, was released in 2023. His fourth nonfiction book, “After Ground Zero: Everyday Americans and the Unhealed Scars of 9/11,” a study of the impact of 9/11 and other acts of terrorism on a variety of people he has followed for the past quarter-century, was published this summer.