Fire Company Finds Long Journey Back

The men of Ladder No. 5 need a good fire.

They need to climb aboard the truck again in their heavy jackets and boots and roar through lower Manhattan to a burning building.

No one wants the destruction; they just need a reminder of who they are and what they do. But there hasn’t been a big fire since Sept. 11, and now the men spend their days trying to rebuild a company badly broken when it lost a third of its members in one brutal day.

It is not the grief so much that gets in the way, or the faces of 16 fatherless children at the Christmas party that haunts them. It is that No. 5 cannot recapture its routine, the day-to-dayness that seemed to vanish under the falling World Trade Center towers.

The men did recover most of their dead brethren’s bodies. They were stacked in a stairwell of Tower 1. And because their brand-new truck was crushed under the rubble, the old rig was brought out of retirement from the training academy and back to the firehouse. That put No. 5 back in business within days of the Sept. 11 attacks--and gave great comfort.

But rebuilding the company, housed in a brick building on 6th Avenue at West Houston Street, has been near impossible.

From the big things--like recruiting eight replacements--to the little ones--like figuring out where to get metal chocks--life at the firehouse is a struggle.

Who would have thought a small metal doohickey used during fires to keep doors open would be another reminder of what was lost?

Johnny Santore, one of the most devoted and now deified of the dead firefighters, used to weld the metal chocks by hand in the back of the station. He’d paint them Day-Glo green, hand one to each guy, and throw the rest in a giant Maxwell House coffee can. Now the big firefighter with the mustache is gone and a few weeks ago on Monday, the can was empty.

More difficult was finding enough guys who could steer the back of the truck. Only 20 of the thousands of firetrucks in New York City require a tiller man; No. 5 has one because the firehouse covers an area of narrow streets and alleyways in Chinatown, Little Italy, Greenwich Village and SoHo. But not enough of the surviving firefighters know how to fill the job.

“You don’t want to have someone from another company come in to be your tiller man or chauffeur for any shifts,” says John Maurer, who was being trained last summer to handle the job but had never done it on a run. Burly and young, the firefighter squints and tenses up his shoulders describing his first time at the tiller after Sept. 11: “ ‘OK, I’m doing it,’ I thought. ‘Barely.’ ”

Several guys had to take a crash course on spinning the tiller to the right when the 65-foot truck was turning left, and turning left when the chauffeur, driving up front, veered the truck right.

“There were no accidents but quite a few near misses,” says Lt. Tim O’Neill, one of the officers charged with putting the company back together.

O’Neill has been with the department 20 years and knows the intricacies of its bureaucracy and of the profession. He understands the importance of ventilation during a fire--when to saw, tear or puncture a roof--and he knows how to crawl through an apartment hallway looking for survivors amid black smoke and flames.

But the last few months have tested his understanding of his role in the firehouse in ways he never could have imagined.

He and the other officers are scheduling recruits on shifts even though they are unsure of their skills. They are now talking regularly to reporters, politicians and celebrities. They are handling delicate matters for the dead men’s families; they also are handling unbelievable amounts of cash because of all the donations pouring into the firehouse.

“I’m doing things I was never trained to do,” says the no-nonsense O’Neill, 43. He has remained steady, but the pressure never stops, even when he gets home.

Like many of the men, he now has a family newly concerned about his job. His 15-year-old son, Tom, who never had much of an interest in what he does, now asks his father routinely where he is going, when he is coming home and what he is doing.

“There is still the same everyday garbage to do around here and at home, but too often someone says something here or there and it’s ‘click’--and you think about [Sept. 11] and the guys who are gone,” O’Neill says.

Uneasy in the Spotlight

In the last four months little has been normal, and the men seem tense because of it, even when the so-called fun stuff happens. The relentless firehouse joking--”busting chops”--has slowed, and the men are surprisingly sensitive about the new national fascination with New York’s firefighters.

When it comes up that Ivana Trump va va va voomed one of the most down-to-earth guys in the company at a fund-raiser and playfully offered her phone number, it is made clear that the name of the married subject of her attention should not appear in the newspaper.

“It’s stupid stuff,” says one of the guys. “Where were all these people, all this attention, three years or even six months ago?”

Mostly, every 24-hour shift has been frantic, with Sept. 11 business competing with ordinary business.

One minute Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears are sauntering into the place to pay condolences; then three University of Texas students walk off the street and beg to buy lunch for the whole firehouse.

An older couple appear with a $350 check raised in pennies by first-graders in a small Arkansas town. The couple, visiting New York for an anniversary, don’t even know what firehouse they are in. They simply went to the one closest to their hotel.

The guy at the front office graciously accepts their check, is photographed with the couple and is hugged.

A short while later a neighbor drops off a brand-new Sony sound system “for one of the kids of the dead guys.” She cries as she signs a 508-page ledger of names of donors and lingers to talk. The firefighter, who has work to do, patiently listens and also accepts a hug.

The day before, one of the widows had stopped by to pick something up and asked to see the bed upstairs where her husband used to sleep. The guys showed her around. They also did a building inspection that day and answered a call about a restaurant kitchen fire. In between, it was chow time and they chopped up a salad and meat for tacos.

This is the new “routine”--an ordinary post-Sept. 11 Tuesday.

‘Killed With Kindness’

By no means are the men ungrateful for all the outside attention. They’re simply overwhelmed. They crave the old mind-numbing days of the firehouse--24 hours on duty, 72 hours off, cat up a tree, fights over the TV remote control, and the luxury of washing the truck and thinking about nothing else.

“Frankly, we’re being killed with kindness,” says Jeff Anstead, a 12-year veteran who, like Santore, represents the soul of No. 5. He has replaced Santore as a chauffeur during his shifts.

“I take my chauffeur position very seriously as a way to remember John,” Anstead says. “I expect a lot of people around here and especially of myself.”

Anstead is a fit 39-year-old with blue-gray eyes and a slightly grown-out buzz cut. He is talkative, a little jumpy and often angry these days. Things bother him. Like why aren’t they having the typical, elaborate funerals at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for each of the 343 firefighters who died Sept. 11? He knows the answer: There are just too many dead. But he still is angry.

Sometimes, all the attention from the outside world gets to be too much and the men pull down the heavy metal doors of the firehouse and lock them. They also lock the side door and go to the very back of the house or upstairs to sit around together. Sometimes they drill or take apart a complicated emergency scenario to keep their skills fresh. But more often they just sit around and try to talk about something else, anything other than Sept. 11: sports, gossip, more sports, their kids--anything.

“This is the closest-knit job you can ever have with people who literally go to battle together,” Anstead says. “Sept. 11 pulled apart our routine, but it can’t pull us apart.”

He interrupts himself to bark an order over the microphone: “Remember, I don’t want to see white wine vinegar on the slaw. Only balsamic!” He is half busting the chops of the guys in the kitchen, half serious.

Anstead, like others, is concerned that new men who fill vacant jobs at No. 5 understand its history and traditions--that they should take chauffeuring seriously and never use anything but balsamic on the slaw.

Other Firefighters Fill In

In late September, the city set up a rotation for experienced firefighters to fill in for 90-day tours at companies that lost personnel.

About 100 firefighters from all over the city volunteered. No. 5, which shares space with Engine No. 24 and the 2nd Battalion command, attracted many volunteers. Some came because they were friends with the lost firefighters. Others were attracted to the firehouse because it is a “premier door.”

Why? No. 5 is in a lively, safe Manhattan neighborhood, the kind of place where on a hot night the men can leave the door open without worrying about drive-by shooters. They also fight fires as varied as the housing stock--from high-rises to tenements, from lofts to waterfront piers.

Getting permanently assigned there, however, takes some doing--sort of like getting into a prime college fraternity but with a milder hazing process.

“We have to like the guys and know they don’t have an attitude,” says Anstead, who was relieved when one particularly cocky recruit moved on in December.

John Maurer only joined No. 5 in June and remembers last spring how Mike Warchola, who died Sept. 11, let him know he would make it in.

“Mike was about to retire, and I didn’t know if he cared,” Maurer recalls. “But one day he just took me aside and said, ‘John, I heard you put your papers in. I’ll do what I can.’ That was it. No big deal.”

That’s the way it goes. But it is a big deal nowadays. No. 5 still is testing recruits, watching them work and mix it up with the others. A few have been tapped, but who will stay still is not clear.

The rhythms will return to No. 5 the more calls they take, the more they get to fight a raging enemy to help people.

“When something is frightening you, you want to get back in,” O’Neill says. “It’s like a football player who blows out his knee. He wants to play again.

“We want to play again.”

They need a good fire.