4 September 2002

Virginia L. Thorndike: 9/11 -- A tugboat answers the call

There's one New York firefighter who perhaps has gotten less press here in Maine than she deserved. This old girl had retired from regular duty in 1995, but on Sept. 11, 2001, when the call came, the former New York City fireboat John J. Harvey answered.

When the 130-foot Harvey was commissioned in 1931, she was the most modern and capable fireboat built to date, due to her internal combustion engine which allowed her to pump at the same time she traveled through the water. In 1957 she was converted to diesel electric and given five 600-horse engines, each with pumps on one end and a generator on the other; her propellers actually run on electricity.

She could travel at 20 knots and she could pump 18,000 gallons per minute that's 80 tons of water a minute, the equivalent of 20 fire engines today and she had an unlimited supply of water, since she just pulled it from her surroundings. She had eight monitors water cannons -- the largest of which by itself could pump 3,000 gallons a minute, and she also had reels with 4,500 feet of varying sizes of hose and 24 connections for external hoses.

During her working career, the Harveywas called on to pump water at all kinds of disasters, perhaps most notably at the fire that destroyed the huge and supremely luxurious ocean liner Normandie in 1942. Over the years, she was involved with hundreds of other situations including many pier fires in the 1960s and '70s.

The Harveywas taken from regular duty in 1995, over the seriously expressed displeasure of Bob Lenney, her pilot for 16 years. When the department retired the boat, he retired too.

When she was put up for auction in 1999, her current owners bought her.

"She was just too cool a boat not to buy," says Huntley Gill, the leader of the group. "By the time we realized what we'd gotten into, it was too late." They found her in surprisingly good condition after so many years, and with some yard time but primarily the application of many man-hours of work, they brought her back to fully-operational shape. They were lucky to have found Chief Engineer Tim Ivory. His instantaneous understanding of the complex machinery aboard the boat is a gift from God, Huntley says, and he would rather fix an old piece of equipment than replace it. Tim began as an employee, but the owners "gave him a hunk of the boat." Huntley describes him as an addict to the boat, now, though he's still paid for the work he does.

Bob Lenney withheld his enthusiasm for this miscellaneous group of unknowns who had his boat until he saw her in drydock at the Caddell yard, which Huntley describes as the best shipyard and the most expensive in New York Harbor. Bob knew then that the boat was going to be well cared for. At least once a week now, he's down at the boat.

"We bought a boat, and it turned into a whole volunteer-based thing none of us expected." The Harveyparticipated in Op Sail 2000, spraying water and giving rides, and her owners continue to give free rides to the public frequently. There've been some odd friendships made on the Harvey, says Huntley, people who in the ordinary course of things might never have crossed paths at all. Old Irish, dot-commers, lesbians and gays, colorful New Yorkers of many descriptions have come together on the boat.

And on September 11, while myriad tugs converged along the southern end of Manhattan to take refugees to safety, many of the Harvey's friends scrambled to take the boat to the Battery to see how they could help.

As they drew up to the sea wall, 150 people jumped aboard, and the Harvey headed north. Soon, the Fire Department radioed the boat. Would they put their passengers ashore as soon as they could, and come back to help the city boats pump?

That morning, water was hard to come by; mains were broken and hydrants were buried. West of the disaster site, there was no water at all for the firefighters, but as soon as they could get into place on the North River, the two big City fireboats McKean and Firefighter went to work; one was in place before the towers fell. For several days without stopping, they pumped water into the maze of hoses on the ground.

At about 11 o'clock, the Harvey took her place on the Battery alongside her newer cousins.

The Harvey's engineer, Tim Ivory, describes the scene when they tied up. The first impression was the extraordinary quiet. Normally, there's a single-tone roar in the city, cars and airplanes making a constant white noise over the city, but there were no automobiles, no horns, no planes flying. "You never realize how much noise there is till it's not there," says Tim. The only traffic was on the river, but even tugboats don't make much sound as they go by.

A few hours later, Tim walked inland. "Once in a while you'd hear a bird it was out of place. You saw groups of people standing, not talking, just waiting for something to happen." He said work crews were picking up cars and stacking them like a deck of cards.

"There was no definition to anything, it was all dust. It was like a black and white dream, with an inch of dust everywhere. The wind would kick up once in a while and it would be like a fog had come in, except you couldn't breathe. There was no color, just black and white and gray. Except people's eyes would show, blood-shot from the dust."

Tim found that everything had stopped in its tracks. All the fire fighting equipment that had pulled in during the first hour after the attack, many millions of dollars worth of fire trucks and ladders and engines, were all abandoned; either the people were gone dead or the equipment was destroyed, flattened by the falling buildings. Hoses were still attached, but all dry. Buildings were burning, and cars. Seeing fire trucks running hoses but no one using them, passersby grabbed the hoses off the trucks and started putting car fires out. No one said anything.

In the quiet, all into the next day, papers kept dropping out of the sky, says Tim, papers blowing from building tops like big flakes of snow. "Where we were, there was an even layer of dust and paper."

On Wednesday, the Harvey's retired pilot, Bob Lenney, hitched a ride across the river to do what he'd done all his life. Huntley Gill says that the hardest part for Bob was the people that kept stopping by to tell him of one firefighter after another that was dead, all people Bob knew, or sons of people he knew. Bob didn't say much, but his face showed how much more intense it all was for him than for the rest of the gang.

He was glad he was there, though. He'd fought for the boat, and this was his redemption. It was kind of a "Screw you, guys, I was right and you were wrong, you needed this old boat, but I'm glad we could be here when you needed us."

The boats were attached to trees using toggles, pipes running through eyes in the lines, so that if nearby buildings started to fall, they'd be able to yank the pipes out and free themselves quickly and take off. Tim describes a moment when two or three thousand people were running toward them. What was happening? Was it panic, or was something big happening?

Should they cut loose? But whom would they leave hanging if they did that? They looked to Bob, who quietly said, "We'll wait." For 36 hours, the Harveypumped. After 30 hours, Tim's Assistant Engineer Jessica DuLong managed to get across the river to the boat, relieving him for the first time. He strung a hammock on deck, but he didn't get much rest.

"Fifteen minutes of sleep is about as good as it got I was constantly worrying what was happening in the engine room. We did repack a pump and change out a fuel injector, but we were able to change the engines around so it was no problem."

The Harveyis technically a pleasure boat today; nobody ever thought she'd have to do this work again. But she and her people were ready when they were needed.

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