Twenty Years on, the 9/11 Boatlift is Ripe for Recognition
Frank Fiumano, a retired U.S. Coast Guard commander, sat in a morning briefing on Staten Island on Sept. 11, 2001. When the news from the World Trade Center broke, he remembers running up the hill to stare out at what was typically a pristine Manhattan skyline. “We could actually see the devastation that was unfolding before us,” Fiumano recalls.
People stacked up along the shore, many covered in soot or debris. When Fiumano arrived in Battery Park to check on the Coast Guard base, he couldn’t tell who was a potential threat and who was running for their lives.
Back on Staten Island, Capt. Andrew McGovern hopped aboard a pilot boat. Then an active Sandy Hook Pilot, Capt. McGovern was part of a specialized group named for New Jersey bay, which board and guide ships through the harbor. He was joined by Rear Admiral Michael Day, who in the moments after the attacks sent out a call for “all available boats” to make their way to lower Manhattan, from North Cove to Battery Park to Pier 11.
Fiumano saw them coming, even pleasure boats and dinner cruises. The mariners began hauling wheelchairs and baby carriages aboard. “They saw those boats as a safe haven,” Fiumano said, “You knew, ‘I’ll step on that platform, and I’ll be getting out of harm’s way. And maybe I’ll see my children tonight, or maybe I’ll see my wife tonight.’”
Over the next nine hours, the Coast Guard and a flotilla of ferries, water taxis, tugboats and private ships transported an estimated 500,000 people from lower Manhattan to Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Staten Island. It would be the largest impromptu maritime evacuation in U.S. history.
In the months that followed, however, the Coast Guard largely remained silent about the evacuation. “We didn’t ring the bell,” says Day, given the mourning that followed. “You do your job, you compartmentalize, and then you go on and do something else.”
Carolina Salguero, a photojournalist at the time, remembers a frustrating gap in media attention toward the role of mariners on 9/11. She, too, was there, steering a powerboat while snapping photos of the scene. “Why did the media not report much on the boatlift at the time?” she asks. “Why is this story still under-reported?” Even as she advised the filming of Boatlift, the oft-cited documentary on the maritime evacuation in 2011, the filmmakers found themselves short of archival material.
According to Salguero, the documentary brought more acclaim to this forgotten piece of history, but it was not until 2021 that the boatlift found a spotlight. It’s clear that the magnitude of the accomplishment is edging into public awareness. Smithsonian Magazine, The Intelligencer, and NJ.com all published features, and the New York Post included an excerpt of a 9/11 memoir, Saved at the Seawall. Salguero herself founded PortSide in 2005, and the nonprofit hosts an expansive multimedia archive of the boatlift. The New York Navy Council recognized the occasion this year with ceremonial tribute and flotilla on the water by Battery Park.
In 2002, Congress passed the Maritime Transportation Security Act, which raised the bar for worker credentials and coordination among local, state, and federal agencies. The Coast Guard has not formalized a maritime evacuation plan, says Day. He referred instead to the plans the Coast Guard regularly develops, for oil spills or ferry accidents. He used one such plan on 9/11, which mapped out the depths of the water, staging areas, and emergency points of contact. “There may not be an exact plan,” Day said in remarks to a remembrance ceremony at the Staten Island base, “But there’s one that’s close enough.”
McGovern attributes much of the success of that day to the trust that has been built across the maritime industry in New York and New Jersey over years. The boatlift “would happen again tomorrow,” he says, “Everyone knew each other, and so everyone trusted each other.”
And in the week after 9/11, McGovern and Day camped out on the pilot boat, overseeing shipments of rubble, food, oxygen acetylene (for cutting metal), and new boots — because the rubble was so hot, workers’ shoes were melting.
“I hope the next generation who comes behind me will have this same tremendous dedication that those of us that served in 9/11 and post-9/11 [had],” says Fiumano, who assisted for months with the restoration. “If I take nothing away, I keep stressing to my crew now: Always be ready.”
