The first responders on 9/11 included thousands of firefighters, police officers, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, Port Authority officers, and civilian volunteers who converged on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In New York City alone, the response involved more than 10,000 emergency personnel from dozens of agencies within the first hours, making it the largest emergency mobilization in American history.
FDNY Firefighters
The Fire Department of New York bore the heaviest losses of any single agency. Firefighters began arriving at the World Trade Center within minutes of the first plane striking the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. They climbed dozens of flights of stairs in full gear, carrying hoses and equipment, to reach trapped civilians on the upper floors. Division Chief Peter Hayden, responsible for Lower Manhattan, later described the calculus that drove them upward: estimates suggested 25,000 to 50,000 civilians were inside the towers, and firefighters had to try to reach them despite knowing they were in serious danger.
The FDNY’s chief of department, the sole five-star chief in the department, arrived at about 9:00 a.m. and established the overall incident command post on the West Side Highway. Additional command posts were set up in the North Tower lobby, the Marriott hotel lobby, and a staging area on West Street south of Liberty Street. When the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., all of those posts ceased to function. A total of 343 FDNY members died that day, the single greatest loss of life for any emergency response agency in U.S. history.
NYPD and Port Authority Police
The New York City Police Department mobilized at an extraordinary scale. The NYPD chief of department raised the department’s mobilization to Level 4 almost immediately, sending roughly 22 lieutenants, 100 sergeants, and 800 police officers to the scene. A second Level 4 mobilization followed, bringing the total number of NYPD officers responding to close to 2,000. The NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit, a specialized tactical and rescue team, set up its own command post at Church and Vesey Streets to coordinate rescue operations.
The NYPD Aviation Unit also played a critical role, providing aerial observation of the towers. Helicopter crews relayed information about conditions on the upper floors and rooftops, details that were difficult or impossible to gather from the ground.
The Port Authority Police Department had a unique responsibility: they were the primary law enforcement agency for the World Trade Center complex itself. PAPD officers were already on site when the first plane hit and immediately began evacuating civilians. The PAPD superintendent and chief of department both arrived separately and entered the North Tower. Thirty-seven PAPD officers died on September 11. In the years since, additional officers have died from illnesses linked to their exposure at the site, bringing the total to 56.
Paramedics and EMTs
New York City’s emergency medical system deployed roughly 30 percent of the 354 ambulances available that morning. The breakdown included 14 municipal and 23 voluntary advanced life support units (staffed by paramedics) and 51 municipal and 18 voluntary basic life support units (staffed by EMTs). Twenty-four out of 31 EMS lieutenants and captains on duty responded. The sheer number of responders overwhelmed normal command structures. In some cases, a single supervising officer was managing 20 EMTs or paramedics at once, nearly three times the ratio that EMS leadership considered workable.
Adding to the chaos, a large number of ambulances that were not part of the city’s 911 system self-deployed to the scene without coordination from EMS dispatch. Private ambulance operators and off-duty medics arrived on their own, which strained the ability of commanders to track resources and maintain organized triage. While their intentions were to help, the uncoordinated influx made an already overwhelming situation harder to manage.
Civilian Boat Operators
One of the lesser-known groups of first responders were the civilian mariners who carried out the largest waterborne evacuation in history. With bridges and tunnels closed and Manhattan’s streets choked with debris and fleeing crowds, boats became the primary way off the southern tip of the island. More than 150 vessels and 600 sailors participated, ranging from Staten Island ferries capable of holding 6,000 passengers to rubber dinghies carrying two or three people at a time.
NY Waterway, a private ferry company with a fleet of 24 boats, moved nearly 150,000 people by itself. Tugboats, merchant ships, and other commercial vessels in the harbor responded to radio calls for help. Early reports estimated that between 500,000 and one million people were evacuated by water, though later analysis put the more likely figure at about 270,000. The entire effort was largely spontaneous, organized through marine radio channels rather than any formal emergency plan.
Search and Rescue Dogs and Handlers
An estimated 250 to 300 search and rescue dogs were deployed to the World Trade Center site and related locations in the days and weeks after the attacks. FEMA sent 80 dogs as part of 20 certified urban search and rescue teams, with about 61 of those dogs working directly at Ground Zero, 23 at the Pentagon, and 12 at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where debris was transported for further searching.
The most common breeds were German Shepherds and Labrador Retrievers, followed by Golden Retrievers, Border Collies, and Australian Shepherds. Most dogs were trained to detect live victims, and about 60 percent were also trained to locate human remains. The grim reality of Ground Zero meant that 73 percent of dogs made cadaver finds, while only 4 percent alerted for live victims. Handlers and their dogs worked grueling shifts in toxic dust and unstable rubble, and many of the animals later developed respiratory and other health problems similar to those seen in their human counterparts.
Ironworkers and Construction Crews
Within hours of the collapses, ironworkers, welders, and heavy equipment operators from union halls across New York arrived at Ground Zero and began the dangerous work of cutting through twisted steel beams and clearing debris. These workers were essential to the rescue and recovery effort in ways that uniformed responders could not be. They operated cranes, torches, and heavy machinery to lift steel columns that weighed tons, opening pathways for rescue teams to search for survivors and, eventually, to recover remains.
Many of these workers stayed for the entire duration of the cleanup, which lasted until May 2002. Ironworkers like Larry Keating, Danny Doyle, Mike Emerson, and Bobby Graves were at the site from the first day to the last, cutting steel and carefully picking through wreckage for human remains. Their work was physically punishing and emotionally devastating, carried out in conditions that would later be linked to cancers, respiratory diseases, and other chronic illnesses affecting tens of thousands of Ground Zero workers.
The Office of Emergency Management
New York City’s Office of Emergency Management was supposed to coordinate the multi-agency response, but its headquarters was located at 7 World Trade Center, which was damaged by debris from the tower collapses and itself collapsed later that afternoon. With the OEM’s Emergency Operations Center destroyed, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, along with the police and fire commissioners and the OEM director, relocated north and established a temporary command post at the Police Academy. The loss of the OEM headquarters in the early hours contributed to the communication breakdowns between agencies that were later examined by the 9/11 Commission.
Long-Term Health Toll
The term “9/11 first responder” has expanded well beyond the people who arrived on the morning of September 11. Federal health programs now recognize more than 400,000 people as having been exposed to the toxic environment at Ground Zero, including residents, office workers, and students in lower Manhattan. But the health consequences have hit first responders hardest. The dust cloud contained pulverized concrete, asbestos, lead, and hundreds of other contaminants. Respiratory diseases, cancers, and post-traumatic stress disorder have affected thousands of those who worked at the site. The World Trade Center Health Program, established by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, provides medical monitoring and treatment for responders and survivors dealing with more than 68 types of cancers and other conditions linked to their exposure.