December, 2001

Born-Again Hero

by Roy Attaway
freelance writer and photographer

Part 1:
A 70-year-old veteran comes out of retirement to help in the World Trade Center disaster.

From the deck of the John J. Harvey, southern Manhattan looked oddly gap-toothed. Gone were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, replaced by a pall of dense smoke. The Harvey is a fireboat, and she was about to participate in one of the greatest fire and rescue operations in American history. The difference was that the Harvey was officially retired, her crew entirely amateur.

The waters on that bright, warm September morning were a maelstrom churned by heavy traffic, requiring absolute concentration on the part of her pilot, Huntley Gill. Beside him stood Chase Welles and Tomas Cavallero. Below decks, in the engine room, were Tim Ivory and Andrew Furber. As they approached the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, they saw thousands crowding the verge as watercraft ranging from heavily bearded tugs to party boats butted the seawall and took on evacuees. It was a modern-day Dunkirk.

To firemen who had survived the terrorist attacks, the Harvey must have seemed an apparition, an old warrior coming out of the mists of memory to do battle one more time. That she was there at all is a credit to devotion, luck, and determination.

Based on the naval architecture of Henry J. Gielow, the John J. Harvey was launched on October 6, 1931, at the Todd Shipbuilding and Drydock Corporation in Brooklyn. She had been commissioned by the City of New York and was named for the pilot of the fireboat Thomas Willett, killed when the liner Muenchen exploded at North River Pier 42 on February 11, 1930. She is 130 feet overall with a beam of 28 feet and a draft of 9'0". Able to exceed 18 knots, she weighs 268 gross tons and cost $594,000 to build.

Her design is classic: a plumb-bowed steamboat-like steel hull with graceful sheer sweeping back to an elliptical stern, surmounted by an upright pilothouse. She carries eight deck pipes (“monitors” or water cannons): one at the bow, two above the pilothouse, two on a platform abaft the boat deck, and three on a platform aft. The largest deck pipes have a capacity of 3,000 gpm. Together all eight can discharge 18,000 gpm, equal to 24 fire engines. The pressure is sufficient to send water over the roadway of the George Washington Bridge.

Part 2:
A hero on the waterfront for decades

Originally powered by gasoline engines, the Harvey was refitted in 1957 with five Fairbanks-Morse diesels, each with 16 pistons opposed in eight cylinders and rated at 600 hp. The four outboard engines are hooked to LeCourtenay centrifugal pumps drawing water through individual sea chests and to a generator; the fifth centerline engine powers two generators. Propulsion is provided by two electric motors turning three-bladed props six feet in diameter.

The Harvey had been a hero of the waterfront for decades. She was called to a five-alarm fire on February 9, 1942, that destroyed Pier 54 when the Normandie, one of the most opulent cruise liners of her day, caught fire while undergoing conversion to a troop carrier. The Normandie capsized at her berth and was later scrapped. She also fought fires aboard the munitions ship El Estero in 1943 and tankers Alva Cape and Texaco Massachusetts, when the two collided in 1966, for which action her crew was cited for valor.

Eventually the grand old boat became superannuated, and in 1994 the Harvey was officially retired. In 1999 she was put on the auction block, the expectation being that she would be dismantled for scrap.

Enter Gill and Welles, both smitten with the water and with a particular fondness for older watercraft. Encouraged by John Krevey, owner of Pier 63 Maritime and the retired lightship Frying Pan, Gill and Welles, together with restaurateur Florent Morrelet, formed a corporation and bought the fireboat for $27,010 at auction. The deal was consummated on Feb. 11, 1999-69 years to the day after John J. Harvey was killed. There are now about a dozen shareholders, and nearly $200,000 has been poured into her restoration.

For several years the Harvey has been a floating museum (she is listed with the National Register of Historic Places), making weekend excursions and hiring out occasionally to supply celebratory water displays. Passengers are welcome. The trip is free-under Coast Guard regulations she is licensed for private use-although donations are welcome.

Then came September 11.

Welles was on his way to work in White Plains, New York, when he heard radio accounts of an airplane slamming into the World Trade Center. He called the office of the fire commissioner in New York City. Would it be helpful if they brought the Harvey down? The answer was yes.

Welles began calling Gill, who had turned off his telephone. Finally he called a friend who rushed over to Gill's West Side apartment. Gill was awake, watching television. Welles also called Ivory, a diesel mechanic and Harvey's chief engineer. The three converged on Harvey's berth at Pier 63 Maritime at the end of West 23rd Street, were joined by Cavallero (an artist and art dealer) and Furber (an ex-dot-commer and welder), and were underway shortly. They arrived at the Battery less than 10 minutes after both towers had collapsed. Already on station were the NYFD fireboats Fire Fighter and McKean.

Part 3:
Marine Two

In addition to the “determined but calm” (as Gill describes it) crowd, there was the smell, an acrid stench of civilization burning. The Harvey immediately pulled up to the seawall at Pier A, south of the World Financial Center, and took on about 150 survivors. No sooner was the crew headed north than the fire department radioed them to quickly discharge passengers and return downtown to help pump water. They were now officially Marine Two, Harvey's old designation. She was back in active service.

There were problems. Although the owners had used the deck pipes many times for amusement, much of the old fire-fighting gear was inoperable. But Ivory hooked the fire hoses directly to the deck pipes, and the Harvey was soon doing her share to replace water mains crushed in the collapse of the buildings. Furber went ashore with his welding gear and spent the day and that night cutting people and corpses out of wrecked vehicles. Welles went ashore, too, and then came back for Gill. Later in the afternoon, Ivory also walked inland. He recalls: “Everybody was quiet. There was no traffic making noise. You could hear some generators and firetrucks running, but that was about all. The ash that had come from the buildings blanketed everything, so there was no dimension to it. Everything was the same shade of gray, so it was like a large black-and-white scene. Even the people were totally covered except where their sweat or tears made creases.”

The Harvey stayed on station until Friday. Welles returned to his family Tuesday night; Gill stayed until Wednesday (regulations require a pilot to be onboard at all times), when he was relieved by Bob Lenney, a retired FDNY pilot who had served on Harvey. By then Jessica DuLong, the boat's assistant engineer, was aboard, allowing Ivory to get some sleep.

“I got on my bike about five,” Gill recalls, “and went from this surreal world to the real one. It was like going through the looking glass. People were staring at me as if I were some monster that had crawled out of the sewers, and it was there that I lost it. I burst into tears. It all came home. When you're down there, it was its own world. When you get out, you suddenly have a perspective on it.”

The Harvey spent more than 40 hours pumping water until the street hydrants were restored, and then she quietly slipped back into retirement. But she is not forgotten. The National Trust for Historic Preservation bestowed on her a special Preservation Honor Award for her involvement in the WTC disaster. On October 6 past, she turned 70 years old; she remains open to visitors at Pier 63.

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