How I came to understand and appreciate the FDNY
One day in late May of this year I made my way down to an old firehouse along Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I had passed the building many times before but had never known what was inside. I finally Googled the banner on the outside — Friends of Firefighters — and was fascinated by what I found. I wrote to them and set up a meeting.
I have never had any reason to connect with the firefighting community of any city I’ve lived in. It doesn’t run in my family. I don’t know anyone who became a firefighter and knock on wood, I’ve never been involved in a fire but when I moved to New York City in 2011 I became fascinated, first with the architecture of the firehouses around the city. Often colorful, sometimes austere and ocasionally elaborate and extremely beautiful, they provoked something in me, perhaps because the FDNY seemed to me to be deeply entwined with the history of this great city. Of course, 9/11 brought that into even greater focus — the scale of loss and devastation, the brave men and women who showed up to help that day, these things touched people far beyond the tight community of the fire department.
Outside almost every firehouse in the city there is a plaque to commemorate their fallen brothers, some a memorial to 9/11 and others to firefighters lost in other events. I always stop to read those plaques if I pass a firehouse, and along the way I picked up a little understanding of the danger and sacrifice that firefighters face in their daily life. But it wasn’t until I visited that old firehouse in Red Hook that I began to properly grasp what the New York firefighting community is all about.
My first taste was sitting down with the founder of the Friends of Firefighters organization, Nancy Carbone. A native and lifelong resident of the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, Nancy now lives and breathes firefighting. Her connection to the department was almost nothing before 9/11 — a great uncle had been a firefighter who was killed in action in the 1930s — but otherwise her own life had been going in a different direction until that day. When the towers fell and it started to become apparent that there had been huge loss of life on the ground as well as from the towers, like many people, her first instinct was to reach out and help. She went to a nearby firehouse in Brooklyn Heights, then one in Red Hook, and finally one in the Bronx, offering to help — to do anything to ease the burden on the firefighters searching The Pile (the firefighters’ name for Ground Zero) for their fallen brothers.
In those chaotic days immediately after September 11th, the firefighting community worked around the clock, many were away from their families for days and weeks, and all their other daily tasks and needs had to be ignored. Despite being an outsider, Nancy was able to gain the trust of the houses she visited — at first she was told there was nothing she could do, but when she came back and was asked if she could find bunting to put up outside the firehouse (an FDNY tradition when any of the active members of the house have been killed), then to find a bugler for a funeral (they were in short supply), and then to help a firefighter sort out insurance for his car that he’d driven to the towers that morning and had become buried in the debris. Small things, but nonetheless important when the one and only thought of the firefighters was to be at The Pile, to try to find their brothers.
A few days after the attacks, one of the firefighters came to Nancy and asked her if she knew anyone who was a therapist because he needed to talk to someone about what had happened. Nancy found one and introduced them, and soon several members of the firehouse were seeing the therapist. She quickly realized that the trauma had opened up deep wounds that needed tending to, and Friends of Firefighters was born. An organization where firefighters could come, talk about their thoughts away from the tight knit community of other firefighters — each of whom were going through their own trauma.
9/11 was a cataclysmic event, the repercussions of which are still being felt in the fire department today. 343 brothers fell that day, many of them experienced officers, some of them young recruits. It wiped out a generation of knowledge, a generation of stories, a generation of characters. Those left behind were picking up the pieces for years afterwards. 89 firefighters have passed away since 9/11 of illnesses related to their time in The Pile, while many more were forced into early retirement after accruing so much overtime in the weeks following the disaster that they could no longer be kept on. There has been bitterness and betrayal, but the community of firefighters have always found strength in each other. The bonds that were already strong, tightened in that time, and are now unbreakable.
Following my first meeting at Friends of Firefighters, I resolved to work on a new project that highlighted not only the great work the organziation still does today, 13 years on from the event that helped create it, but also to highlight why the community of firefighters need support from the outside. While their community is rock solid, the horrors they can face on an ongoing basis are just as strong as they always were, and the traumas are felt just as keenly as ever. While 9/11 introduced the idea of therapy to many firefighters and made it, over time, an acceptable part of the job, first and foremost these people are here to save others — not to be saved themselves. There is a beauty in that, but there is also a responsibility — that in order for us to feel safe in our homes and work places, we need to look out for those who will be there when we need them most. Friends of Firefighters provides counseling, yoga, acupuncture, meditation and biofeedback sessions all tailored specifically for active and retired firefighters and their families. It provides a safe haven in the comfort of familiar surroundings, amongst people who understand what it is to be a firefighter. Many volunteers are retired members of the department. They come in from across the city to work on the firehouse (which was a mess when they moved in 5 years ago and they are still restoring it today after Hurricane Sandy filled it with 3 feet of water), building a replica fireman’s pole and The Watch are just as it was a hundred years ago. There is life and warmth in the building that just exists natrurally. Nothing is forced or pushed on people — they are just there if they are needed. And they are busy — very busy.
In order to continue their crucial work, Friends of Firefighters not only needs help, it needs to continue to grow. At this point they help firefighters from across the city, but Nancy hopes to also provide them with a base in the different boroughs, to make it easier for firefighters to get help if they need to. For such a tightly bonded community to ask outwards for help is almost unheard of, so its up to the rest of us to recognize their needs and do what we can. That what Nancy’s philosophy was 13 years ago, and that’s what drove her to create this wonderful organization from nothing. Now it’s our turn. Please watch the film we made as a result of our collaboration with FoF below, and to donate, go to: t.co/epPpEnJQgj