Retired firefighter Andrew Wallace remembers his New York brothers 25 years on from the 9/11 terror attacks

Despite more than two decades having passed, Andrew Wallace still has regular flashbacks to the devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It’s hard not to when you have a piece of the Twin Towers on your bedside table.

Mr Wallace, now a retired Perth firefighter, took leave from his job in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks to travel to New York to volunteer his help, compelled by a sense of brotherhood he felt with those all over the world in the service.

After six weeks of working on the mammoth recovery operation at Ground Zero, Mr Wallace was given a steel crucifix cut out of structural support wreckage at the site.

It had originally been presented to New York City fireman Mike Heffernan, whose brother John was among 343 firefighters killed.

“I became very good friends with Heff,” Mr Wallace, 64, recalled to The Nightly this week while holding his prized memento.

“I was with him when they found his brother. I went to his brother’s funeral with him.

“Every family of a firefighter that was killed was given one of those each. One of the steelworkers sat there for hours cutting them out for every firefighter, and that was presented to Heff’s family.

“He handed it to me at the airport (when I was leaving), and he said to me, ‘Seven weeks ago I lost a brother’. He said, ‘You’re my new brother’.”

While many of the flashbacks Mr Wallace has encountered have been of the death and destruction, including the faces of the dead bodies he recovered, catching regular glimpses of the crucifix helped remind him of the friendships he forged at Ground Zero.

“Some people might say that it’s morbid having it around, and I say, no, it reminds me of how strong the bond is with those firefighters I worked with,” he said.

“You get little flashbacks, and it was a lot of them. A woman’s head, a young person that I found a third of. Those ones were coming back virtually every night as soon as I close my eyes, it’d be like a mirage of those things. Now, I might get one, one of those sort of flashback type things a week or something like that.

“I know for a fact that there’s some of them will never go away because some of them were pretty horrific, but a lot of them have.”

This Friday will mark a quarter of a century since the world was shocked as it watched 9/11, which saw 2,977 innocent people perish as Islamic terrorist group al-Qaida carried out a series of co-ordinated attacks on US soil.

It remains the deadliest act of terrorism in world history, sparked when 19 hijackers took control of four commercial airliners, two of which were crashed into the two 110-storey towers at the World Trade Centre in downtown New York on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The third plane crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defence in Virginia, while the fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt.

Within minutes of the first hijacked plane hitting the north tower at 8.46am New York time, it was breaking news on TV screens around the world. When the second plane hit the south tower at 9.03am, the reality set in that it was no accident.

Mr Wallace vividly remembers watching the carnage on TV while on nightshift at Joondalup Fire Station. He said the realisation of what had happened had been so shocking, it silenced the normally rowdy room in an instant.

“We’d done all our station duties, and we were just sitting and watching TV, and then suddenly everything changed,” he said.

“A couple of the guys went, ‘Oh, this is some sort of movie trailer or something’. But then we started to realise, s...t, it’s not.

“Normally, you couldn’t hear yourself think half the time, let alone watch TV . . . but you could have heard a pin drop in that TV room that night. Everyone was just transfixed.”

Having been up the Twin Towers on a holiday, Mr Wallace said he instantly had an understanding for the scale of the task New York City firefighters faced just getting to where the planes had hit, above the 77th and 93rd floors respectively.

He said when the towers collapsed, the first at 9.59am and the second at 10.28am, his first thought went to the many people who would have been trapped inside, including firefighters.

“Being firefighters, we know signs to watch for,” he said. “You see that really light white, light grey smoke, a lot of that is steam from them plying water onto the fire.

“When that building collapsed, you could still see that white sort of steam being produced. So, to us, straight away, it’s like, ‘How many guys have just died’?”

Mr Wallace said he had personally known two New York firefighters killed, though he didn’t get confirmation they were among the casualties until after he had travelled to New York.

He said in the days that followed 9/11, he felt a strong urge to want to help, despite Australia not sending official firefighting personnel to the United States to assist in the recovery effort.

“My wife Deb is pretty good at reading me, and after a few days she said, ‘You want to go, don’t you?’” Mr Wallace, who had two children aged 10 and 12 at the time, said.

“We’d just taken out a loan to build that garage, and we hadn’t really started it, so we had the money there. She just said, ‘Build the garage another time — go’.”

Within days, Mr Wallace landed in New York on one of the first commercial flights allowed into the city again. And while he didn’t have any assurance he would be able to help, he was determined to give it a go.

Soon after checking in to rundown Manhattan backpacker accommodation, Mr Wallace went for a walk, finding the Engine 1 Ladder 24 fire station.

He stopped to lay flowers at a memorial and when he got chatting to a local firefighter, he was quickly invited into the station. After talking more over lunch, they insisted he stay.

“(The firefighter I got chatting to) said, ‘What are you doing here . . . it’s not a good time for a holiday in New York’. I said to him, ‘I’m not here for a holiday, I brought my kit. If there’s anything I can do to help, I want to help, I’ll just sweep up if you want’,” Mr Wallace recalled.

“There’s a massive brotherhood amongst firefighters. One of the guys just came over and said, ‘Oh, I hear you’re here to help’, and he just handed me all this bedding. A couple of the guys had gone and cleared this little room out. It used to be an officer’s accommodation and then he said, ‘This is your room. It’s yours as long as you need it’. I was in there for six weeks.”

Once vetted by law enforcement, Mr Wallace was allowed to get to work searching for and recovering the victims’ bodies inside Ground Zero. He said first laying eyes on the scale of the destruction while the fire chief took him onto the site had left him speechless.

“I lost the power of speech for a few minutes. I’m looking around, and he’s gone, ‘Yeah, a lot of people have this (response)’,” Mr Wallace said.

Mr Wallace said the work he was involved in over the next six weeks was as confronting as it was gruelling. Clearing the site officially took eight months and 19 days with crews moving about 1.8 million tonnes of material. But not before carefully searching for the bodies of those killed.

Using sounding equipment to locate voids in the rubble and often digging often by hand, the crews worked tirelessly to open them up and recover what they could. Around 60 per cent of victims had remains identified.

Mr Wallace said it was particularly hard for the crews when recovering fellow firefighters.

“These guys, they had mates that they’d grown up with, and were related to,” he said. “So to them, it was far more personal.

“I bagged 80 bodies, or body parts. There wasn’t a lot most of the time.

“One day, we opened up a stairwell, and in that stairwell, we brought 16 bodies of firefighters out and two civilians. Every time you found a body part that they could DNA test, it gave closure to somebody’s family.”

Mr Wallace emphasises the work he completed, over six weeks, was just a tiny fraction of the mammoth overall job, but that he takes satisfaction knowing he helped some of his fellow firefighters through an incredibly difficult period.

He said several had shared with him that his presence had been an emotional distraction that helped them through the trauma.

“They’re all asking me questions about Australia, and that gave them an outside focus to talk to me about that stuff,” he said.

“They all wanted to know about the Crocodile Hunter (Steve Irwin). Koalas. Kangaroos.

“When it was time for me to leave, I actually found it hard to pull away. I’d realised by then that it wasn’t my physical firefighting abilities that I was having the most effect with.

“It was the conversations and everything else.”

Along with the crucifix, Mr Wallace was given a fire helmet by another firefighter as thanks.

“To me, I don’t feel it was anything that anyone had to pay me back for,” he said.

“It’s helping other human beings that were in a similar situation to myself, being firefighters.

“But it’s little things like that make you realise that what you’ve done actually meant something.”

Mr Wallace has returned to New York three times since 2001 and hopes to visit again.

He also organised fundraising efforts to bring a heavily impacted group of New York firefighters and their families to Western Australia in 2002 for a much-needed holiday and reprieve.

This Friday, he will take a quiet moment alone to reflect on the anniversary and plans to speak with some of the New York firefighters he remains in contact with.

“I think it’s important to remember these things, to stop it happening again, and for the people that lost their lives to be remembered,” he said.

Several of the New York firefighters Mr Wallace worked with have since died, some from illnesses that stemmed from the toxic dust and smoke at Ground Zero, others by suicide.

“A lot of them are medically retired,” he said. “A lot of them had lung problems. One of the guys, he died of cancer as a result of asbestos and everything in the building.

“They’ve lost quite a lot of guys through health problems, but I think it was like 140 or 150 that had taken their own lives as well.

“I’ll probably sit here (on Friday) and text a few of the boys over there — wish them well on the anniversary day.

“There’s a couple of them that disappear out of New York to get away from it on the anniversary. They don’t want to be part of it, which is their way of dealing with it.

“I won’t message them on 9/11, I’ll do it a few days later.

“I can go 12 months or more without ringing Heff or some of the others, but then I’ll ring them and we’ll chat like we were talking yesterday.

“It reminds me again of how strong the bond is.”

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