9/11 hero shares the lessons learned at Ground Zero
John Moran was taking a bike ride with his wife on the boardwalk on the Jersey Shore when the call came.Have you seen the news? Come back to New York City (NYC) immediately.
The normal 2 1/2 hour drive stretched to 13 hours as Moran fought his way through the sea of cars fleeing NYC. After a few hours of rest, he was at Ground Zero, where he would be every day for the next nine months.
Moran, a retired New York City Police Department (NYPD) lieutenant, shared the lessons he and his fellow law enforcement officials learned, as they worked their way through the tumultuous days following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, with members of the Northeast District of the Buckeye State Sheriff’s Association during their annual meeting on Sept. 21 at the Wayne County Fairgrounds.
Hosted by Wayne County Sheriff Tom Maurer, the annual gathering of sheriff’s department officials from throughout northeast Ohio provides members of the association with the opportunity to meet with their peers to share information and to celebrate the important role law enforcement officials play in keeping our communities safe. As the evening’s guest speaker, Moran highlighted both the critical role law enforcement officials played and the lessons that they learned during the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
Moran, who served as night shift commander at Ground Zero for the elite Emergency Service Unit of the NYPD, described the challenges of coordinating the efforts of the tens of thousands of officers, from 12 different agencies that turned out in the hours after the attack, in what he described as “one of the biggest personnel issues ever handled in the world.”
“We had to account for these folks, assign these folks, to secure their safety…because we didn’t know whether there would be multiple attacks during the day,” said Moran.
Perhaps the most important lesson learned in the early hours after the attacks was the importance of being “adaptable to whatever situation you encounter,” said Moran, who went on to describe how the unit’s mission shifted drastically from search and rescue to crime scene evidence collection to recovery within just a few weeks.
He spoke of the initial challenges of evacuating Manhattan Island, which was quickly sealed off from the rest of the city, without a fully functional transportation system, power or normal communications capabilities.
With so many of the city’s resources committed to the efforts at Ground Zero, Moran noted that it was still important to maintain normal patrols throughout the city, even in the midst of the crisis. “It was in the public’s best interest to try and get normalcy back into Lower Manhattan as quickly as we could.”
He described the unsuccessful search of the airliners’ black boxes, which unexpectedly began transmitting a signal due to the incredible volume of water used to put out the fires, and the intensity of the heat at the site. Moran noted that at its height the fire burned at more than 25,000 degrees, turning steel beams into lava and melting pole-mounted cameras used to search for victims in voids.
But one of the most difficult parts of the job was interacting with the families of the victims. “We had to deal with family members on a daily basis. They would come down and monitor our progress. They would want to know how we were doing and whether we were getting near to their loved ones,” said Moran. “That was probably the toughest part of the day.”