Harbor Heroes

 
After the World Trade Center attacks, the waters of New York Harbor were filled with goodwill and brave actions.

By Jim Gorant
Photos By Dan Nerney

Tuesday, September 11, 8:40 a.m.

One of NY Waterway’s high-speed catamaran ferries pushes off from a marina in Weehawken, N.J., with about 100 passengers on board. The 78-footer accelerates up to its 26-knot cruise speed and makes for Pier 11 on the southeastern tip of Manhattan.

On the bridge, Peter Johansen, the company’s director of marine operations and a 17-year veteran of the maritime industry, settles in for the 18-minute crossing. As he heads for downtown in the morning’s golden sunshine, Johansen, for some inexplicable reason, looks up. At that moment he sees a plane disappear into the north tower of the World Trade Center. "Did I just see what I think I saw?" he says to himself. "Was that an accident?"

Across the harbor on Bay Street in Staten Island is Coast Guard Station New York. From this office, there’s an uninterrupted view of the water, the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline. Inside, Petty Officer Jason Moberly presides over a daily operations meeting. As Officer of the Day, Moberly runs the show when the Commanding Officer is off the premises, giving him charge over personnel, equipment and operations. At 8:50 a.m., he gets up to refresh his cup of coffee and spots smoke rising from one of the Twin Towers.

Moments later an alarm sounds and the phone rings. Moberly receives word that a plane has struck the north tower. He has two rigid inflatable boats and a 41-footer at his disposal. "I wasn’t sure what we would need," he says, "but I knew we would need to respond." He launches all three boats toward the scene.

Peter Johansen and his team carried 150,000 people off the island.

At Pier 11, Johansen’s ferry drops its passengers and backs into the East River. By phone and radio, Johansen alerts the rest of the staff about the incident and directs additional boats to the ferry barge at North Cove Marina, which sits across the street from the towers. Anticipating a spike in traffic exiting lower Manhattan, he heads there as well.

Back at Coast Guard Station New York, Moberly awaits an update from his crews as they approach the scene. He’s not prepared for the three words he hears when at last the radio crackles to life: "It’s gonna hit, it’s gonna hit, it’s gonna hit."

He looks out across the harbor just as Johansen’s ferry pulls into North Cove. Overhead, United Flight 175 strikes the south tower and the sky erupts into a ball of fire. At that moment, Moberly, Johansen and the rest of the world realize this is no accident. "After that," Johansen recalls, "there was a very somber sense of emergency and that people were going to do what they could to help."

At 10:00 a.m., thousands of people are lined up at the ferry terminal trying to get off the island. Johansen, along with much of the senior management from NY Waterway, is on the ground doing crowd control. Twenty of the company’s 23 ferries, ranging in capacity from 200 to 400 passengers, are cycling through the marina, picking up full loads and taking them across the river. By his running tally, Johansen figures almost 9,000 people have already been delivered out of harm’s way.

Suddenly he hears a screeching, rumbling sound and the ground starts to shake. The south tower is collapsing. A huge cloud of dust rushes toward him. People are running in full retreat ahead of it. In an instant he’s swallowed up in complete whiteout conditions. "I was worried about people getting trampled, then you just forget about everything and you’re overcome by this sense that you have to protect your breathing and find fresh air."

On boats all around the southern tip of the island, captains race to fire up their radar units as they’re shrouded in instant fog. Adam Sciano, one of the few NY Waterway captains who is working farther upriver, sees the cloud stretch across the water and begins calling his friends and coworkers on the radio. For what seems like forever, there’s complete silence. Sciano veers toward panic. At last the speaker erupts in controlled chaos, "Get a boat here, get a boat hereŠ."

A north wind pushes the ash and smoke south, so instinctively Johansen and the thousands of people who have been waiting at the ferry barge begin moving north along the seawall. Luckily, the NY Waterway ferries are front-loaders, so they need no dock or gangway to take on passengers. As people emerge from the dust, the boats move north too, pressing their bows to the seawall and continuing the evacuation.

Huntley Gill brought his fire tug (above) out of retirement to aid N.Y.C.

At Coast Guard Station New York, Moberly calls in the Auxiliary. His three boats, along with a number of other Coast Guard vessels, have been evacuating people, particularly those who are badly injured, from the island farther south, where there’s no escape from the debris. "We have to get dust masks out to our guys so they can breathe," he explains to the civilian volunteers before sending them out on a delivery run.

Chased by rumors of gas leaks and more collapses, the NY Waterway operation and the thousands of scared and stranded people continue to move north, eventually settling in at Pier 26. Now the anxious are joined by the injured—banged up, bloodied and in semi-shock. Firefighters also appear out of the murk, but they don’t get on the boats. They simply ask crews for water, rinse their faces and turn back into the chaos.

"It’s weird," says Johansen, "my wife kept calling me on the cell phone to ask when I was getting out of there. I don’t know why that wasn’t in my mind. You’re just so busy trying to deal with what you’re doing, you don’t think about it. Afterwards I thought about it, but not at the time."

At 10:29 a.m., the second tower collapses.

Real estate consultant Huntley Gill arrives at Pier 63 just after 10:30 a.m. to board the John J. Harvey. Gill and a group of friends own the fire tug, which had served the New York City Fire Department for 65 years before she was decommissioned in ’95. The boat was headed for the scrap heap when Huntley and 12 co-owners acquired her at auction with plans to restore her. On this day, Gill hopes to get the 110-footer out on the water to offer assistance, but the boat—which is placed on the National Register of Historic Places—can’t move without chief engineer Tim Ivory, who lives in New Jersey. Ivory typically travels to the city by car, and no one is sure if he’s made it through one of the tunnels or across the bridge before they were shut down. All the crew can do is wait and hope.

Greg Hanchrow’s dinner boat served 20,000 meals a day to the workers at Ground Zero.

About 15 miles upriver, in Rockland County, N.Y., Gregory Hanchrow is also caught on the west side of the Hudson River. The port captain for Spirit Cruise Lines, Hanchrow had been a ferry captain during the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center. He knows that people will need to get off the island and that his three large dinner boats can help them.

In New Jersey, Ivory finds a recreational boater at a local marina and convinces the guy to take him to Pier 63 at Chelsea Piers. Within minutes of his arrival, the Harvey roars to life and begins making its way downriver. On the radio, the Coast Guard requests all boats in the area to head for the Battery to help with evacuations. Gill is bewildered by the organized madness as some 30 vessels converge on the tip of Manhattan. "Six or seven seagoing tugs come steaming up to the Battery and nose up to the seawall," says Gill, "and people just start pouring on."

The Harvey also lays up against the seawall and about 150 people fling themselves on board. "People were calm but clearly freaked," says Gill. "Hell, I was freaked." On the way back upriver, Gill receives a call from the fire department: All the hydrants are out and the city’s two current fireboats are already pumping at full capacity; would the Harvey tie up next to them and help pump? They unload and then the crew steams south again to join the other fireboats. Six years into retirement, the Harvey is once again putting out fires.

Hanchrow finally takes to the water. Borrowing a 19-footer from a local marina, he heads for the city and arrives at Chelsea Piers before noon. By now, thousands of people from lower Manhattan have swarmed up the west side of the island, joining the thousands more from other parts of the city who are also looking to evacuate.

Hanchrow’s Spirit Cruise boats and the three large dinner boats of VIP/Horizon Yacht Charters take people across the Hudson River. Downtown, most of the people have left or been taken from the area, so NY Waterway redistributes its boats, sending some to 38th Street and some into the East River to bring people to Brooklyn and the Bronx. Johansen relocates to Hoboken, N.J., to help with crowd control there. Uptown, at 42nd Street, the Circle Line, a sightseeing cruise line, runs four boats in a steady stream across the Hudson.

A NEW YORK WATERWAY ferry framed by the wrecked structure of one of the Twin Towers.

At each location, captains and crews report strikingly similar scenes. There are long lines filled with anxious but understanding people. The injured or frail are moved to the front and loaded onboard first without question. Sometimes the crowds on board cheer as they pull away from the dock, but otherwise the rides are somber and eerily quiet. "There were a lot of thousand-yard stares," says one boat operator, "and the people who were at the scene, the ones covered in white ash, they couldn’t look back."

By 5:00 p.m., the evacuations slow to a trickle. NY Waterway has carried almost 150,000 people off the island; Circle Line about 28,000; Spirit and VIP/Horizon about 8,500 each. Including the Coast Guard, police, various tugs and the Staten Island Ferry, the marine community has moved approximately 250,000 people in eight hours, without any preplanning and also without incident. "It doesn’t matter what else is going on," says Circle Line Vice President Mark Davidoff, "people on the water are always ready, willing and able to help and assist others in need. It’s great. It’s an obligation that everyone on a boat understands, and I’m proud to be a part of that."

At 10:00 p.m. on the evening of September 11, Coast Guard crews have been on duty for 14 hours and Moberly knows they need relief. In addition to evacuations, these crews have been overseeing and executing all major operations in and around New York Harbor, from patrolling and restricting traffic to organizing the refueling of fireboats. As reservists arrive, Auxiliary boats deliver them to Coast Guard vessels to stand in for exhausted servicemen, many of whom must be pulled off their posts. "There are still a lot of injured and missing out there, and that’s very hard for our guys to walk away from," says Moberly. The 270-foot cutter Tahoma will arrive four hours later and assume command of New York Harbor as the Coast Guard switches from search-and-rescue mode to Homeland Defense.

Over on the Harvey, relief is not as easy to arrange. The crew has been joined by Bob Lenny, a retired firefighter who was the ship’s former pilot. Conditions on the ground are still confused and there’s no food, no drinking water and no way in or out of the immediate area. Enter Darren Vigilant, a friend of the crew who keeps his 23-foot Chris-Craft across the pier from the Harvey.

Vigilant had spent most of the day on the water, even making six or seven evacuation trips across the river with 18 people loaded onto his boat. Late in the afternoon, he brings Pamela Hepburn to the Harvey so she can help out. A retired tug captain and native New Yorker, it’s not in Hepburn’s nature to sit back and watch. "The boat gives us a chance to participate and I’m grateful for that," she says. "Otherwise it would have been harder to deal with." For the next four days, Vigilant and his Chris-Craft will be the Harvey’s only link to the outside world, making four trips a day laden with supplies and personnel.

Pamela Hepburn volunteered her years of knowledge as a local tug captain to aid the evacuation efforts.

Wednesday, September 12, 8:00 a.m.

Hanchrow receives calls from local chefs. Their restaurants are shut down but full of food that’s going to go bad; how can they donate it? He makes a few calls to the Coast Guard and then brings the Spirit of New York, a triple-deck dinner boat with a huge galley, into North Cove Marina. Sean Kennedy, who owns another harbor tour boat called the Chelsea Screamer, collects the donations and delivers them. By nightfall, the Spirit of New York becomes a respite for the workers at Ground Zero, putting out 20,000 hot meals a day. The top deck will be converted to a flophouse with 60 or so mattresses spread on the sole.

Eventually, the Red Cross steps in to supply the food and offers to recompense the vessels for their operating expenses, but until October 6th, the Spirit of New York and the Screamer will continue to feed and comfort the men and women on the front line.

"It’s nothing anyone wouldn’t do," says Hanchrow. "You see this humanity come together. People who wouldn’t say two words to each other in the street are just doing stuff for each other. It’s inspiring. We had a bunch of guys from the Fire Department eating near the cargo door, and they saw us humping food onto the boat. These guys put their forks down and started helping us. With everyone bonding in this country like that, how can we not prevail, you know? If every American steps up at once to do something, no matter how trivial or small, we got it. We win."

©Motor Boating Magazine, December 2001

Features Archive

• More Motor Boating features from past issues.