Over the years, the firefighters of Manhattan’s Engine Company 39 have gotten together to share their story of surviving the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. At memorial services, for media interviews, a documentary.
Absent was John Drumm, the fellow firefighter they went back into the north tower to save that day.
Drumm didn’t want to stand in the way of what he considered their story — going back in the north tower to save a brother firefighter only to have the 110-story building collapse on top of them. Had they died, Drumm isn’t sure he could have coped. And there are the 343 other FDNY firefighters who died that day while he lived. Survivor’s guilt.
But after 25 years, it was time. When James "Jim" McGlynn, who led the
Engine 39 team on 9/11, reached out to let him know they would be getting together to take pictures at the 9/11 Memorial and talk about the day, he pulled out his dress blues with the 343 pin on the lapel and made the trip to Lower Manhattan from Pine Bush in Orange County, N.Y.
“They’ve always done things — on my saying — without me because I wouldn’t let myself be included with them,” Drumm, 59, said a few days later. “So being included last week helped cross another bridge, I guess. I allowed myself to be part of them.”
Escaping north on hands and knees
Drumm has his own survival story.
Shortly after the south tower collapsed, the team made their way down Stairwell B of the north tower where they were aiding the evacuation. After getting to the lobby, Drumm thought McGlynn noticed him as they made their way into the lobby. But in the dust and confusion, McGlynn missed him.
McGlynn and Bob Bacon went back up the stairs to look for Drumm. James Efthimiades and Jeffrey Coniglio waited at the bottom of the stairwell. Drumm made his way through the broken glass lobby doors where they’d entered. A few minutes later, fellow firefighters were telling him to run. The north tower was coming down.
He pressed himself against the Verizon Building as the floors pancaked on top of one and another and then, on hands and knees and using the West Side Highway median as his guide, he made his way north to Stuyvesant High School.
It’s not a story he’s eager to tell. When a woman visiting the memorial’s reflecting pool asked if he was at the towers on 9/11, he hesitated.
“I don’t talk about it unless I’m with really dear friends,” Drumm said as the group gathered later at a restaurant. “I appreciate that there are people who are willing to ask, instead of not ask, but for me to talk about it isn’t easy. I don’t know why I’m so relaxed right now.”
The others have assured him that had they not gone back in that day, it’s likely they would have been killed when the buildings came down. “So 6 Truck had Josephine as a Guardian Angel and we have you,” McGlynn joked.
“Yeah, I guess,” Drumm said.
It was a reference to Josephine Harris, the Port Authority worker aided by firefighters from Manhattan’s Ladder 6 in Stairwell B. Together with the team from Engine 39, they were among 14 to survive the collapse.
“He (Drumm) said he felt guilty, but I’ve always told him ‘you don’t know what would happen if it went the other way’,” said Coniglio. “I truly believe that God provides. And if we went the other way and we went out with him maybe some of us would have been killed or all of us killed or all of us saved. We don’t know what the outcome would have been.”
It’s enough that they’re alive, here to remind others of the sacrifices others made that day — firefighters who sat next to them at the fire academy or worked besides them on fires — and the others who died in the years afterward. Voices catch as they recall their names.
Recalling a friend
But smiles crease their faces when they remember Arthur Myers. On 9/11, Myers drove the truck, Coniglio the high-rise, that delivered them to the trade center and, as required, remained outside in the truck.
“Put your gloves on, put your hood on and just be careful,” Myers advised them, according to an interview with investigators a month after the attacks. Looking out the driver’s side window he saw bodies dropping down. As the tower came down, he ran north and jumped into an emergency services van. He embraced Drumm when he saw him. “Can I look for the guys?,” Drumm asked. “No, you’re not going to look for the guys.”
He bear-hugged each of them after they came out. “It was like seeing my own kids being lost and then I found them,” Myers said.
Myers died a few months after retiring. Coniglio wears an Engine 39 pin that Myers gave him.
Today, in retirement, they each bear scars from 9/11.
“I don’t like crowds,” said Bacon, of New City, who, at 53, is the youngest of the crew. “My wife wants to go to a concert. Yeah, I’m out.”
Efthimiades, 60, of Queens, retired earlier than he wanted to after a shoulder injury and respiratory issues linked to his time at Ground Zero. He watched what happened when coworkers retired. “And then all of a sudden you hear them getting sick and dying within two, three years,” he said. “You know what, I want to get a good run, five or six years. Otherwise, I would have stayed until they kicked me out.”
He busies himself with construction projects, spending more time fixing others houses than he does his own.
Drumm, raised on Staten Island, retired as a lieutenant with the FDNY in 2022 and is a deacon at his Lutheran church in Middletown, near where he and his wife Dawn raised two children. Ever since 9/11, whenever he leaves them, it is never goodbye.
“The last thing we say is ‘I love you,’ knowing that if this is the last time we see each other, I don’t want the last words to be remembered that we shared were goodbye,” he said.
A note to brother firefighters
Drumm volunteers at an overnight shelter, with Meals on Wheels and visits the elderly at home. Before joining the fire department, he’d considered joining the priesthood but decided he wanted to raise a family.
Years after the attacks, he bought each member of Engine 39 a copy of the book "Brotherhood," a collection of photographs of firefighters taken after 9/11. Inside, he left notes for each of them, telling them what it meant that they went back for him.
“I’m extremely grateful to the two Jims, Jeff and Bobby for what they risked,” Drumm said. “I know we all have that instinct of no one left behind, like a marine or military person. It’s true in the fire department also.”
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: FDNY firefighter tells 9/11 survival story 25 years later | Exclusive
