Jeffrey Coniglio is dressed in white down to his shoes, his daughter Giada in a flowing pale green gown. They are twirling across the dance floor to music from “The Great Showman” when, suddenly, Giada flips, then swings into a sweeping finale. Guests at the Sweet 16 whoop and cheer. Father and daughter embrace.
“I’m a 62-year-old man with a 16-year-old daughter,” Coniglio says. “I always tell her she is my greatest achievement.”
It’s a touching moment between father and daughter, captured on a video Coniglio keeps on his phone and proudly shares.
And it would never have happened had Coniglio not stepped into a stairwell as the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, while he and fellow New York City firefighters went
back in to search for a member of their team.
They were among 14 in the building who survived the collapse.
Like Coniglio, Ron Bucca Jr.’s life was on a different path before 9/11.
The Tuckahoe High School grad was a senior in college when his father was killed evacuating workers from the floors directly below where United Flight 175 slammed into the south tower. He would enlist in the Army and join the Green Berets, the same elite fighting regiment in which his father served before joining the New York City Fire Department.
Hunting down “the bad guys” wasn’t an option for Alison Crowther of Upper Nyack. So, after her son Welles was killed, she dedicated herself to telling the story of the “The man in the red bandana” — her son — who gave his life on 9/11 so others might live. “My weapon would be to bring good into the world somehow,” she said.
Death was indiscriminate on 9/11.
The attacks that began at 8:46 a.m. when United Flight 11 slammed into the north tower at 450 mph, claimed office workers, firefighters, cops, a priest. When it fell 102 minutes later, a half hour after the south tower came down, 2,753 were dead.
The deaths didn’t end at 10:28 a.m. that day 25 years ago. Thousands more have died since from the toxic air they were exposed to during a recovery effort that lasted months. In 2023, the number of firefighters killed on 9/11 — 343 — equaled the number that have died from illnesses linked to the recovery, a total that has continued to grow.
And a whole other set of victims — those who survived and loved ones of those that didn’t — were thrust on a journey through sadness, rage, fear, desperation, even joy, as they adjusted to lives whose narrative was rewritten in an instant by the murderous acts of terrorists. Coniglio and the rest of his team from Manhattan’s Engine Company 39, Bucca and Crowther cycled through them all.
Their stories are different. There is no playbook for dealing with grief and fear, what to say, how to live, how to honor those that are gone, what to do next. There is only resilience.
When the towers fell
At the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, water spills into a square basin 30 feet below before dropping another 20 feet. “Absence made visible,” is how architect Michael Arad has described his creation.
“Although water flows into the voids, they can never be filled,” is how the museum’s curators describe the effect. The twin pools share the towers’ footprint and are the largest man-made waterfalls in North America. Last year, some 14 million visited the 16-acre site as well as a museum of artifacts recovered from Ground Zero.
On a steamy August afternoon recently, Coniglio and fellow firefighters from Engine 39 are standing at the edge of the south pool, uncomfortable in dress blues they haven’t worn much since retiring from the FDNY. Visitors ask if they can take their picture and quiz them about their story.
They have come here separately for 9/11 memorial services through the years. This is the first time since 9/11 that they’ve all been together — Coniglio, James Efthimiades, Bob Bacon, John Drumm and their lieutenant on 9/11, James "Jim" McGlynn.
That morning they were dispatched from their firehouse on the upper East Side and, once downtown, were tasked with getting people out of the north tower. They busied themselves evacuating civilians, guiding people to safety as debris rained down and bodies fell like missiles from the flaming towers.
They had made it up to the 30th floor when the south tower, the second to be hit, came down. It was shortly after 10 a.m. Mayday calls rang through the building. It was time to leave.
In Stairwell B they assisted fellow firefighters helping people out of the building. But as they got to the lobby, they realized one of their team was missing. In the chaos, Drumm had passed them in the stairwell and headed down to the lobby to help with the evacuation.
McGlynn headed back up the stairs. Bacon joined him. Coniglio and Efthimiades — best friends who bonded over chess games at the firehouse — stayed together.
Rescue personnel were streaming down the stairs carrying someone on a stretcher. So Coniglio tied off a door that led to a basement garage with a hose line to create room. It’s then they heard the groaning of steel. And then it fell. One hundred and ten floors dropping down on top of one another, gaining speed.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.
Efthimiades remembers thinking: “Shit, my wife is not going to be able to handle this.” He envisioned his parents standing at the front of a funeral home while he watched from the back. He figured death would come quickly. “Relax, God is not going to let this happen,” Coniglio assured him.
When the pounding subsided, they were in a dark cavern at the bottom of the stairwell covered with dust and debris, near a door that led into a lobby that had been demolished. McGlynn and Bacon were a few levels above.
“If Jeffrey didn’t open the door going to the lower staircase the landing above would have come down on us,” Efthimiades, 60, of Whitestone, said in August during a gathering at a restaurant steps from the reflecting pools.
Death was all around them. People outside the building running from the collapse were killed. A fire chief who’d been in the lobby was covered in rubble and couldn’t budge.
Drumm, meanwhile, had made his way out of the building, unaware that his brother firefighters went back to look for him. In the haze of the moment, he believed McGlynn acknowledged him as they got to the lobby.
Outside, firefighters were urging him to run. “Don’t look back!”
“Have you ever had anybody tell you don’t look back and not look back?” Drumm said. “I looked back and I could see the building pancaking…Well I guess those guys are right. It’s time to run.”
He was near the Verizon Building when the north tower came down. “I want to kiss that telephone building forever,” said Drumm, 59, of Pine Bush in Orange County, New York. “The telephone building saved my life.”
Blinded by dust, he dropped to his hands and knees and, using the center median on the West Side Highway as a guide, made his way to Stuyvesant High School.
The decision to go back and search for Drumm had saved the lives of the firefighters of Engine 39. But they were trapped.
In his father's footsteps
Ron Bucca Jr. was just starting his senior year at Tulane University in New Orleans, when he got a call from a fire marshal. His father hadn’t checked in. He might want to come home. With air traffic grounded, he and a roommate drove 17 hours back to Tuckahoe.
He’d spend days at home with his family and at night, using one of his father’s duplicate badges and a borrowed windbreaker, he’d sneak in to help with the recovery effort.
A month passed. “Me and my mom had the discussion,” Bucca recalls. “There probably wasn’t going to be any survivors so I went back down to school.”
Two weeks later, on Oct. 23, 2001, his father’s body was found. Ron Bucca Sr., 47, was the first fire marshal to die in the line of duty in the FDNY, a veteran of 23 years.
Bucca finished out the school year and worked in finance for a few months. At the end of 2002, he enlisted in the Army, eventually becoming a Special Forces Green Beret like his father.
“I wanted to be able to still kind of connect with him even though he wasn’t there and have that shared experience and then, probably deliver a little bit of payback, being at the tip of the spear with special forces,” he said.
Between tours in the MIddle East and Africa, Bucca got a master’s degree in Globalization from Dartmouth and an MBA from Columbia. He retired from the National Guard last year. Today, he heads an environmental drilling company.
At 46, he's raising a family and understands the sacrifice his parents made to raise him and his sister, working multiple jobs. In 1986, his father was dubbed "The Flying Fireman" after he plunged five stories while trying to rescue a fellow firefighter with Rescue 1. “With his injuries in ’86, waking up and getting after it every day…,” Bucca says.
His father investigated the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center that killed six and, according to his family, harbored suspicions that terrorists were not finished targeting the buildings for an attack. His son suspects that as he made his way to the upper floors of the south tower — higher than all but a few firefighters made it that day — that was probably on his mind.
“I’m pretty grateful that I got to spend 21 years with my dad, got to have him involved in my life as a father, going to all the sports games, being able to mentor me and set an example for me,” he said. “I try to follow that every day and do the right thing and treat people fairly and make every day a little better for myself and those around me.”
The man in the red bandana
At 77, Alison Crowther, shows few signs of slowing down as she spreads the story of her son Welles. Except, perhaps, when it comes to mosh pits.
When the punk band Dropkick Murphys played their tribute to Welles — “A Hero Among Many” — at a March concert in Boston, she donned a band t-shirt but skipped the full-contact dancing and tossed red bandanas to the crowd.
There are stacks of letters in her Upper Nyack home from people who write to share their thoughts about Welles, a 24-year-old equities trader with Sandler O’Neill and Partners with offices on the 104th floor. How, instead of making it out of the building when Flight 175 struck the tower, he helped others find their way out.
With her husband Jefferson, who died in 2019, Crowther established the Welles Remy Crowther Charitable Trust. The Red Bandanna Project assists students from kindergarten through college learn social awareness and responsible decision making.
Books and documentaries tell Welles’ story. Teams at his Boston College alma mater, where he played lacrosse, sport the red bandana he carried through the towers on their uniforms. Parents have named their children after him.
The days after Welles’ death were not easy. But, Crowther says, it’s helped to look ahead, exposing others to the selfless example Welles set that day 25 years ago.
“It isn’t easy,” Crowther said. “People have said to me ‘how do you do it?’ It’s because I keep looking forward and I just keep knowing this is how I travel the world with Welles now as my partner. And he’s shown me plenty of signs that he’s still with me. So, that gives me strength.”
'Mayday, Mayday'
When the north tower came down, Efthimiades and Coniglio were thrown near a door that opened onto the north tower lobby. Stairs and steel created a tepee above them.
McGlynn and Bacon, 53, of New City, were two floors above. They shouted Maydays into their radio.
“Generally, when you give a Mayday in the fire department, you give a description of where you are, were you hurt, you need anything,” said McGlynn, 72, of Greenburgh. “And it’s generally just a quick 10-4. There was no acknowledgement. There was a pause.”
They had no idea the entire building had collapsed until the smoke and dust cleared and light burst through.
“You look around and you started to put the pieces together,” said McGlynn, who retired as a battalion chief in 2019 after 34 years with the FDNY. “OK, there is no building above us. This is it. It was a relief of sorts since in a collapse you always worry about the secondary collapse.”
They kept radio contact with Chief Richard Prunty, who was trapped under rubble in the lobby, letting him know help was coming.
McGlynn and Bacon managed to get out first, pushing debris out of the way and making their way above the pile where they stepped into a moonscape. “When you walk in there’s two trade centers, arguably the most expensive real estate in the country or in the world,” McGlynn said. “When you walk out it’s like a scene from post-World War II Europe. Devastation and rubble.”
In their cramped space, Coniglio and Efthimiades were staying put, fearing any movement could trigger another collapse.
Efthimiades had a soda in his pocket an office worker handed him as they made their way up stairwell B. He never opened it, thinking they could be there for days. Coniglio suggested they break open a fire extinguisher for water. “He said, ‘Go get it,’ and I said I don’t know if that’s stable or not,” Efthimiades said. “I’m not going over there.”
Hours passed before help would come.
From moonscape to modern marvel
Etched into the bronze parapets ringing the north and south pools are the names of the 2,983 who died in the 9/11 attacks and the Feb. 26, 1993 trade center bombing.
The north pool has the names of those killed in the north tower, the passengers and crew of Flight 11 and the six killed in 1993. At the south pool, those killed in the south tower, first responders, the passengers and crew of Flight 175, as well 184 killed in the attacks on the Pentagon and 40 others on Flight 93 when it crashed near Shanksville, Pa.
Over 1,200 requests from families who wanted their loved ones’ names to be near relatives, friends and colleagues were honored as so-called “meaningful adjacencies.”
To the north is One World Trade Center, best known as The Freedom Tower. At 1,776 feet, it’s the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. A 47-second elevator ride delivers visitors to an observatory with sweeping views of the New York City skyline and beyond.
It opened in 2014, the same year the 9/11 Museum opened to visitors. There, mounted on a wall in the Memorial Hall is artwork titled “Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning,” its 2,983 hand-painted tile squares each a shade of blue. Below that is a quote from the Aeneid: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”
Exhibits chronicle the day as it unfolded — 911 calls to dispatchers as the planes hit, the metal handle of a squeegee used to pry open an elevator door, rusted hulks of fire trucks destroyed when the towers fell.
And the aftermath. Missing signs posted across the city for loved ones who hadn’t returned home. The hand-painted sign a Brooklyn woman put in her front yard, tallying the days from 9/11 that the mastermind of the attacks remained free. “WHERE IS OSAMA BIN LADEN?,” it reads. On May 2, 2011, someone affixed a yellow note to the bottom. “DEAD.”
In all, there are some 83,000 digital and physical artifacts in the museum’s full collection.
Among them is the black leather helmet worn by Lieutenant Mickey Kross of Engine Company 16 who, with Coniglio and the firefighters of Engine 39, were among the 14 to survive the collapse of the north tower.
There’s a Memorial Card for Ron Bucca. On the front Bucca, dressed in bunker gear, looks down from a fire escape. And on the back a photo of Bucca in his Green Beret uniform provides the backdrop for a list of Army Values, including one for Selfless Service: “Put the welfare of the nation, the Army and your subordinates before your own.”
Since its opening, the museum has hosted some 25 million visitors and nearly 18,000 field trips. Ticket sales provide the bulk of revenue. In 2024, the museum tallied $93 million in revenue, $69 million from tickets sales and tours, the rest from government grants and donations.
In June, the museum kicked off a campaign for its Never Forget fund, timed to the 25th anniversary, with a goal to educate those who didn’t live through 9/11.
“Today, 100 million Americans understand 9/11 as a moment in history — not a lived experience,” Beth Hillman, who heads the 9/11 Memorial & Museum said. “That’s why the work we do to commemorate, educate, and inspire is more important than ever, and why we must continue to reach new visitors, learners, and supporters with our mission.”
Help is on the way
Lt. Glenn Rohan and his team from Ladder 43 in East Harlem were watching events unfold on TV, figuring it was just a matter of time before they’d get called downtown. Nothing. They were dispatched to free a man stuck in a turnstile at Grand Central Terminal.
They were lingering around 41st Street, on their way back uptown to their firehouse when the south tower came down. Rohan radioed in, letting dispatchers know he could be there in minutes. He was assigned Box 8087, the ticket for the World Trade Center.
They were south of Liberty Street, about four blocks from the towers, when the north tower came down. They sprinted north up the West Side Highway. “I said to myself if this building is leaning, we’re dead,” said Rohan, 69, of Cortlandt. “But it came straight down.”
Dust snaked through the streets from every direction. As it cleared, Rohan and a team from Ladder 43 headed south where a chief told them there were guys trapped in the north tower, Stairway B.
“We really don’t know where the north tower is and we’re right next to it,” Rohan said. “We’re Bronx, Harlem guys. We’re not downtown guys.”
They scaled I-beams and debris, what was left of the north tower. First, they helped free a team from Ladder 6 that had stopped in the stairwell to aid a woman named Josephine Harris who was struggling to make it out of the building.
Then Rohan ran into McGlynn, who told him two of his guys were still in the hole.
From the top of the pile, they could slide down a standpipe that led to the first floor. “We could just see this little hole where these guys were talking to us,” Rohan said. They tossed down Halligan bars, tools Efthimades and Coniglio would use to break away sheetrock, then a rope.
Efthimiades was first, Coniglio next. “Lieu,” Efthimiades told Rohan, using firehouse shorthand for his rank. “He’s one of the biggest guys. It’s Jeffrey.”
Coniglio remembers joking: “There’s no way the fattest man in the fire department is going to fit through that hole.”
“He was kind of a big kid,” said Rohan. “And when we pulled him up that hole he was scraping on all four sides. That’s all I can say. And when he came out, I’m like how are these freakin’ guys ok? It really is miraculous. You expect broken hand, broken arm, broken leg. Anything.”
There was more to do. From their stairwell crevice, Coniglio and Efthimiades had been speaking to someone, possibly a chief, stuck in the rubble. It was Chief Richard Prunty, who was in the lobby when the tower came down.
A member of Rohan’s team, James Lanza, climbed down to see if Prunty was still alive. “This is a hellhole,” Rohan said. “This is a place you’re not supposed to put people and they did not hesitate to go down there.”
(Lanza would later die from an illness said to be linked to his work at Ground Zero.)
Rohan climbed into the hole to see if Prunty was alive.
“I could get my fingers on his neck and I knew he was passed,” Rohan said. “He was gone. So I said well, we’ve got to get him out. We don’t leave anybody.”
For the next two hours they tried to clear debris to get to him while chiefs were telling them they had to leave. Building 7 of the World Trade Center was on fire. It would collapse at 5:20 p.m. They couldn’t move the debris off the chief. “We said a short prayer and we left and we said we’ll go back and get him later,” Rohan said.
Prunty’s last words to McGlynn and the others had been: “Tell my wife and kids I love them.”
Rohan had assumed when his team was tasked to rescue firefighters there would be plenty more jobs before the day was out.
“But honestly it just wasn’t happening,” Rohan said. “Like, why just this one stairway offered some kind of refuge? It’s something that’ll be studied by engineers for 100 decades. Why this one stairway gave them a little place to survive.”
Rohan survived a bout with cancer that was linked to his work at Ground Zero. A son who shares his name recently joined the fire department and is assigned to the same firehouse in the Bronx where he started. “It’s exciting, like I’m starting over, you know,” he said.
Finding a way out
For years afterward, Coniglio was overcome with fear whenever he walked into a dark room. “There were times when I visualized where he (Efthimiades) and I were and I see the stairs are not there anymore, the emblem on the wall that glowed,” he said.
He tried counseling but it never seemed to click. It seemed all anyone wanted to do was find a way to make him happy. Then, a new therapist urged him to tell him the whole story of that day beginning to end. He talked for two hours.
“I was able to tell the story,” he said. “So now when people ask me I’m not afraid to tell the story. It was truly therapeutic for me to get through the story.”
He made some life changes, too. He’s trimmed down. While a firefighter, he had a busy side gig organizing parties and events. “Doing events, I couldn’t deal with the happiness,” said Coniglio, of Patchogue. “Music would come on I’d start crying.”
The side hustle helped support what he calls an “opulent” lifestyle, shopping on Madison Avenue, hanging out at the hottest clubs.
Then he got married. “It was more important about my wife and family not just what I was wearing, what I was eating, where we were going,” he said. He and his wife CarrieAnn celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary in June. He retired in 2007.
For Giada’s Sweet 16, he recorded his own version of “Never Enough,” changing the words to make it a love song for the girl who came into his life as he was approaching 50, into a life that looked different from the one he led before 9/11.
“Truly, my greatest blessing was getting out,” he said.
Staff Writer Nancy Cutler contributed reporting for this story.
Thomas C. Zambito covers energy, transportation and economic growth for the USA TODAY Network’s New York State team. He’s won dozens of state and national writing awards from the Associated Press, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Deadline Club and others during a decades-long career that’s included stops at the New York Daily News, The Star-Ledger of Newark and The Record of Hackensack. He can be reached at tzambito@lohud.com
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: The 'miraculous' story of 5 firefighters who survived 9/11 | Exclusive
