BLOOMFIELD — Twenty-five years ago, 30 Bloomfield Fire Department personnel were deployed to various sites in the New York City-metro area in response to the World Trade Center attacks on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. Retirement and death have whittled that number to four and two of these men, Philip Malia and Robert Griffin, currently a senior firefighter and battalion chief, respectively, recently discussed, at Fire Station No. 4, Broad Street, that experience. Like most people living in this area with the recollection, Malia remembered the day was beautiful and the sky crystal clear.
“I had gotten off work and went to see a friend,” he said. “When I was talking to her, in a parking lot, someone said they heard a plane hit the World Trade Center. I thought it was a little plane.”
“Like a Cessna,” Griffin said, interjecting the name of a small, personal plane.
“My uncle worked in the towers, but he was off that day,” Malia continued. “After I saw the second plane hit, I went to Station No. 3.”
Malia was ordinarily assigned to headquarters, in Municipal Plaza. But Station No. 3, which is near St. Valentine’s Church on an elevated portion of the township, has a clear sightline to New York City.
“I went to the roof,” Malia said. “I saw the first tower go down and asked what we were going to do? I told them to put me on the list to go over to the city. I remember jet planes, fighter jets, flying over.”
Griffin, who was assigned to Fire Station No. 3, on Watsessing Avenue, was at headquarters when he got the news.
“Somebody said the World Trade center was on fire,” he said. “But our department had a working fire that day. No one had said it was hit by a plane. We watched it on TV. My wife, my girlfriend at the time, was working in the city, in Rockefeller Center. She got stuck in the city for three days.”
Griffin said a friend of his, an NYFD fire fighter, responding to the WTC site, arrived late, while his fire station colleagues, who got there as quickly as possible, perished.
He remembers worrying about his girlfriend. But when he heard from her that she was out of her Rockefeller Center office building, he felt better. He was sent over to the city a few days after the attacks.
Malia was sent over early the next day, Sept. 12. The Holland and Lincoln tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge, were closed. He and the other firefighters with him were sent to the city through Staten Island and then Brooklyn. The city was so quiet it was “creepy,” he said. Once in Manhattan, he was told to go back to Brooklyn, to the Dean Street Firehouse. They had lost seven personnel.
Griffin went over Thursday, Sept. 13.
“I was about to go to my side job and got the call,” he said. “Instead of going to Dean Street, we went to Coney Island, on Neptune Avenue. We were there for an hour and then sent to Dean Street. I was only there for a day, Coney Island and Dean Street. As we’re driving through Brooklyn, the New York guys we were bringing to Dean Street from Coney Island, they were telling us about the guys they lost and how many kids they had. They were telling us everybody as we were riding through the neighborhood. Then we got to Dean Street. We were shifted around a lot. That’s pretty much how it still is.”
Malia, who was deployed for four days, said he thought many of the firehouses needed firefighting rigs because theirs had been destroyed. Other New Jersey firefighters at Dean Street were from Montclair and West Caldwell departments.
“One of the hardest things that happened at the Dean Street Fire Station, they had lost seven guys,” Malia said. “Their families came to the fire house looking for them. A New York Fire Department guy, you saw it, had to tell them, console them, that the person had died and they just fell to the ground, crying.”
He also said the firefighters at Dean Street, from New Jersey, were about to be dispatched to Ground Zero to relieve the NYPD personnel already there. But the New York guys refused to leave, so Malia and the others did not have to go.
“Maybe I dodged a bullet that day,” he said, “the way the guys are getting sick now.”
Every year, Griffin tells himself he will attend the 9/11 commemoration at the Dean Street station, but never does. Malia said it is a tough day.
“I may go to Dean Street this year,” Griffin said. “It took me years to go back downtown, to Chinatown.”
“The world completely changed that day,” Malia said. “I think America realized that terrorism is
100 percent real. It can happen here.”
“We’re not untouchable,” Griffin said.
“That’s a good way to put it,” Malia concurred.
“But you should be able to trust people,” said Griffin.
Photo by Daniel Jackovino
About the Author
