The six-man crew on FDNY Ladder 118’s truck raced across the Brooklyn Bridge toward the twin towers of the World Trade Center as thick black smoke poured out of their upper floors on the otherwise bright, clear morning of September 11, 2001.
Less than 90 minutes later, they were among the 343 hero firefighters killed in the al Qaeda terror attack that would reduce the towers to piles of rubble, blanket lower Manhattan in an inches-thick ash of concrete, asbestos, glass and remains — and claim the lives of 2,743 innocent people. Afterwards, an eerie silence fell over the usually bustling financial hub of New York City.
It was “quiet as a church,” recalled Ladder 118 veteran John Sorrentino, speaking to The Independent at his Staten Island home last month. “The one thing that haunts me to this day is the sound of the PASS alarms,” says Sorrentino, who was off duty that day but raced to Ground Zero when he realized what was happening. The Personal Alert Safety System, or PASS, devices are automatically triggered when firefighters stop moving for more than a minute while using their oxygen tanks.
“It starts beeping, and then you have to shake a little bit to turn the alarm off,” Sorrentino explained. “If you're in a fire, and God forbid there's a collapse, you get knocked unconscious, or you're trapped and you can't move ... it's gonna start beeping, and that's going to alert all the guys in the area, ‘Hey, somebody's in trouble,’ and you can follow the sound of the PASS alarm.
“All we heard was hundreds of PASS alarms going off underneath us, and we knew what that sound was,” he mournfully recalls. “And there was nothing we could do about it, you know ... how many tons of steel were these guys buried under?”
“And over the course of the next hour, two, or three, the batteries started fading in those PASS alarms and, you know, one by one, the PASS alarms just died out.”
The feeling of helplessness that washed over him, Sorrentino says, is “the one thing that really sticks in my mind about 9/11.”
Sorrentino, a former city police officer who served 16 years as a firefighter with Ladder 118, was showering in his apartment in Brooklyn’s Bergen Beach neighborhood when he got a call around 9 am from a friend who was worried about him and “told me what was going on.”
“I turned on the TV. I saw what everybody else saw,” he said.
Sorrentino immediately got dressed and went out to his car, where he “could see the two towers burning” in the distance before driving to his firehouse on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, about 10 miles due north on the opposite end of the borough.
There, he collected his gear and got a neighborhood resident to give him a ride across the Brooklyn Bridge — the same route traveled by the Ladder 118 crew, as captured by amateur photographer Aaron McLamb, whose iconic image later appeared on the front page of New York's Daily News.
“Not a cloud in the sky. It was a perfect fall day. But leaving Brooklyn, entering Manhattan, it — it turned into a science fiction movie, you know? It was dark, you know. It was dusty,” Sorrentino said. “You didn't hear a sound.”
Sorrentino walked toward the World Trade Center site and was about half a block away when he ran into Richie Murray, another firefighter from the Middagh Street firehouse.
“And he looks at me, he goes, ‘The whole truck is gone,’” Sorrentino recalled. “And I — I was like, ‘What do you mean, the whole truck is gone?’ He said, ‘They're all gone.’”
Murray was holding a two-way radio and told him, “I've been calling these guys for the last 45 minutes. They're not answering the radio. I'm telling you, they're gone.”
There was initially some confusion about which firefighters were on the Ladder 118 truck because the terrorists struck around the shift change in the firehouse, which is also home to Engine 205, Sorrentino said, but it soon became clear who they were.
“So when he told me who was working, you know, my, my heart was broken just thinking about who these guys were, you know, who had kids,” Sorrentino said.
Sorrentino, who in the aftermath of 9/11 became the firehouse's de facto spokesperson, said he delivered about 20 eulogies in the next few months.
During his interview with The Independent, Sorrentino easily recalled memories of his fallen comrades, who all died while evacuating people from the Marriott Hotel when the adjacent South Tower collapsed.
Lt. Robert Regan, he said, was a father of two from Queens and a “big sports guy” and “great athlete” who coached his son's Little League team and played left field and batted clean-up for the Middagh Street firehouse’s softball team.
Although he was an officer, Regan “was just another one of the guys” and a “sweetheart” who “fit right in” with the rank-and-file firefighters, Sorrentino said.
Unlike in most firehouses, Sorrentino said, everyone at Middagh Street “stayed in the kitchen — morning, noon and night.”
“Guys didn't disappear down to the TV room,” he said, adding that “even the officers would hang out in the kitchen.”
“It was constant ball-breaking and, you know, a lot of noise in our kitchen. But Bobby was very quiet, very laid back. He just took it all in,” he said. “He was like our quiet leader.”
Firefighter Vernon Cherry was Ladder 118's “senior guy,” with nearly 30 years' experience and a side job as a court stenographer, Sorrentino said.
“We weren't far from the courthouses ... and he would come from the courthouse to the firehouse, and he'd be sitting in the kitchen, with all the chaos going around, with the two earphones in his ears and he's, you know, doing his work, you know, transcribing his notes,” he said.
Cherry was also an accomplished singer who fronted a wedding band, sang the National Anthem at fire department events and was involved with the Queens-based Songs of Love Foundation, which records personalized songs for children, teens and seniors struggling with medical and emotional challenges, Sorrentino said.
Cherry once recruited about 10 firefighters from the Middagh Street firehouse to sing backup for him on a song for a girl with leukemia, but only two, including Sorrentino, showed up for the recording session at a Manhattan studio, he said.
"So, Vernon goes, ‘Give me 10 minutes. I'll be right back,’” Sorrentino said. “There was a firehouse a couple of blocks away. [He] told the guys what was going on. Ten minutes later, two fire trucks show up. All the guys get out of their rigs in their full firefighting gear.
“They came into the recording studio. We recorded the song in, like, a half an hour, and they left, and that was that.”
Sorrentino said that Cherry was also a “big junk collector” who acquired a pair of old-fashioned, strap-on metal roller skates that still hang in the firehouse, and that he often punctuated his speech with “mo” — including by calling the lasagna he made with sharp cheddar cheese “Vernonmo Lasagmo.”
“It was actually delicious,” Sorrentino said.
Firefighter Leon Smith was another “senior guy” who was born and raised in Brooklyn and “was like our Superman,” Sorrentino said.
“He had to be six-four. He was a monster,” he said. “His nickname was 'Physical Lee.”
Smith was also the firehouse's “resident mechanic,” who “worked on everybody's car in the neighborhood,” Sorrentino said.
“Great, great attitude. He was always in a good mood, always laughing,” he said. “Everybody loved him.”
Sorrentino also recalled a time when “we went out after work, and we went to a club in Manhattan.”
“He wore his life-saving harness. It's like a belt ... that goes around you with a — with a big metal thing hanging off,” he said. “It was like, ‘What are you doing, Leon?’ He goes, ‘Oh, it's Manhattan. Anything goes.’ And he was right. Anything went.”
Firefighter Joey Agnello transferred to Ladder 118 from the Engine 205 company, located in the same firehouse, because he “was always thirsting for knowledge” and “wanted to get experience doing everything,” Sorrentino said.
“He was very into the job, you know. He wanted to be the best,” he said. “But he was also like a sweetheart ... When school trips would come to the firehouse, Joey would be the guy spending an hour on his hands and knees, in full bunker gear, crawling around, teaching kids about fire safety and then taking them into the kitchen for cookies.”
And “if he did it in the morning and a class came in the afternoon, he'd wanna do it again. That's the type of guy he was,” Sorrentino added.
Agnello had passed the lieutenant's exam and was on the department's promotion list on 9/11, so he was promoted posthumously, Sorrentino said.
Firefighter Peter Vega was born in Puerto Rico and was an Air Force veteran who was employed as an ironworker before becoming a firefighter, with Sorrentino describing him as a “walking encyclopedia.”
“He was super smart,” Sorrentino said, adding that if Google had been more widely used at the time, it would have been Vega's nickname.
Vega was knowledgeable about bout politics, trivia, firefighting, the military and construction, he recalled.
“Anything you needed to know, you could talk to Pete,” he said. “We always teased him 'cause he had a big head...but he needed that big head 'cause he had to store a lot in that big brain.”
Firefighter Scott Davidson is the father of Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson, who was 7 years old when his dad died was killed on 9/11 — an event that’s echoed in the plot of Pete’s 2020 Judd Apatow-directed movie The King of Staten Island.
In a recent interview with the New York Post, Pete — who, at 33, is two years younger than his father when he died —said he planned to spend this Sept. 11 with his baby daughter, born in December to model Elsie Hewitt.
Although the couple split up shortly after the birth, Pete said they’d both agreed to name her after his late father.
“My dad’s name was Scott, but his nickname was Scotty. When she arrived, we both looked at her and were like, ‘She looks like a Scottie.’ It’s nice to keep that name alive,’” Davidson told the outlet.
Scott Davidson “came to the firehouse like he had 20 years on the job” because he’d been born and raised on Staten Island, Sorrentino said.
“A lot of cops and firemen live out here, so he knew a lot of firemen before he even got on the job,” Sorrentino said.
Davidson was nicknamed “The Dog,” both because he seemed like the sort of experienced sailor known in the Navy as a “salty dog” and because “he wasn't the cleanest guy in the world.”
“Scotty was well-known for wearing everybody's clothes but his own,” Sorrentino said. “He avoided one of the guys for like a month because he ... borrowed his work shoes and he didn't wanna give them back.”
That habit paid off on one occasion, when a “by-the-book” deputy chief unexpectedly showed up to observe Ladder 118's daily evening drill, which ran from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., Sorrentino recalled.
“And, 8 o'clock on the dot, Scotty gets up; he goes, ‘OK, that's it. Drill's over. Thanks for coming, chief,’” he recalled.
As he walked the deputy chief to the door, Davidson told him, “I don't understand why the guys don't like you. I think you're OK,” Sorrentino said.
The deputy chief was dumbfounded and asked Davidson for his name, to which he replied, “Eddie Green,” which was written on his shirt.
“And the chief never came back to one of our drills ever again,” Sorrentino said.
Davidson, he said, “was the biggest ball-breaker you ever met, but he had a way. He had a way of insulting you, but you were almost flattered by it.”
“It was like the expression, like, he would tell you to go to hell, and you kind of looked forward to the journey,” he said. “But he was a great fireman. We always said if you were gonna build a fireman from scratch, he would be the prototype. You know, he had the build for it. He was fearless.”
Sorrentino said his “favorite Scotty story” involved finding a note on his locker that said, “IOU $100. Scott.”
When Sorrentino confronted Davidson for going into his locker without asking, Davidson told him, “I showed your money a good time,” and promised to pay him back.
Later that day, the crew put out a small fire, and while everyone was putting away their tools afterward, Davidson suggested they go out after work, saying, “First round's on me.”
“So, we all get back on the fire truck, and he looks at me, he goes, ‘Dude, you gotta lend me money, I'm broke,’” Sorrentino said. “That's who he was, though. You could never get mad at him.”
In addition to the six Ladder 118 crew members, the Middagh Street firehouse lost two others at Ground Zero: Capt. Martin Egan, who'd been recently promoted and was undergoing training at Division 15 headquarters in Brooklyn, and Engine 205 Lt. Robert Wallace, who was working a shift with Brooklyn’s Engine 226 to make up for a previous day off.
As a Ladder 118 lieutenant, Sorrentino said. Egan was a “great teacher” and a “great officer.”
“He hung out with us all the time. He went out after work. He was like one of the guys,” he said.
Egan was also the “one guy” who could keep Davidson in check, Sorrentino said, recalling how Davidson once washed the Ladder 118 truck and cleaned its ladders to prevent Egan from ordering him to do it when Egan arrived at work that night.
“So, somebody who was working that day called Marty at home and told him what Scott was doing,” he said.
At the last minute, Sorrentino said, Egan took off that night, “so Scotty did all that for nothing.”
No one in the firehouse knew Wallace was working on Sept. 11 because he was “just coming off vacation” but had arranged to work a shift with Engine 226 at another Brooklyn firehouse, Sorrentino said.
Wallace was known to blast rock music in the morning and was a “big coffee guy,” for whom firefighters had to go to Starbucks every morning and get him a cup, Sorrentino said.
He also got the nickname “Wacky Wallace” for his habit of pranking onlookers by pointing up to random spots on buildings while talking to firefighters when they were out working.
“Everybody's looking up, and like, ‘What's this? What is it?’” Sorrentino said.
But instead of talking about the building, Wallace would be saying things like, “Hey, what do you guys wanna do for lunch?” he said.
There are several memorials inside the Middagh Street firehouse, including a display with framed photos of the slain firefighters, and a chalkboard that still shows the Ladder 118 crew's September 11 assignments, now preserved behind glass.
A commemorative mural was also painted on the garage door, showing a large American flag fluttering in front of the Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan, with eight stars shining in the sky.
It's since been relocated to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum at Ground Zero, surrounded by a replica of the firehouse facade.
