On the 25th anniversary of September 11, Frederick County's dispatch channel is the reminder: the people who ran up the stairs in 2001 are the same people who ran into the debris field at mile marker 310 on Thursday night, and they do it every shift, for nominal pay, until they retire or they do not.
Every September 11, the country says the names. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven of them, and among them 343 firefighters, 23 New York City police officers, and 37 Port Authority officers who went up the stairs while everyone else came down. Twenty-five years later, that number is still growing, because the people who dug through the pile for months afterward are still dying of what they breathed there.
This piece is about them, and about the ones who did the same job Thursday night on Interstate 81 in Frederick County, Virginia, while the rest of us were watching a bystander’s video of fireballs and wondering what blew up.
I obtained the dispatch audio. It starts like an ordinary night, because for them every night starts ordinary. A status check. A dark red Altima parked against the trees behind a business on Double Church Road, nobody in it, the phone on the seat. A man on South Loudoun Street whose smoke detector will not stop chirping after he changed the batteries; Wagon 5 goes anyway. That is the job too, and it is the part nobody films.
At 20:09, the tone changes. “Vehicle crash, 81 in the area of the 310, a vehicle hit a semi, vehicles are exploding.” The first deputy on the radio says he is south of 81 and can start that way. Dispatch answers, “Our lines are lighting up, so I have no idea if anybody’s trapped.”
Here is what the next twenty minutes sounded like from inside it. A tractor-trailer rolled in the median and on fire. A caller relaying that it “blew up again after the driver got out.” A unit reporting “projectiles coming up off the tractor-trailers.” Then the cargo: “Trucker advised that he was hauling oxygen tanks,” and a minute later, to every unit responding, “Tanks are still exploding, throwing debris into the roadway. Caution.”
Into that, deputies went to a man on the ground. Unit 314 started CPR. Another deputy on the radio: “They’re trying to move the patient; they’re dodging debris.” The patient was in cardiac arrest in the southbound lane in front of the police vehicles, and the police vehicles were on fire. A unit confirmed it to command: “It appears that their cruisers are on fire at this time.” The command officer’s reply is the whole profession in one sentence. “I’m not worried about the cruiser; I want accountability for the deputies.”
They kept working. Rescue Engine 11 took the patient toward the hospital about twenty minutes in, priority one, CPR still in progress, and left Engine 18’s unit sitting on the interstate to do it. I do not know who that patient was, and the radio does not say. What the radio says is that the men doing chest compressions on him did it while metal fell around them and their own cars burned behind them, and that when command asked for a count an hour later, every officer answered.
Then the water ran out. Engine 18 called it first: out. Rescue Engine 11 at a quarter tank. Engine 12 dry. The chief called for tankers from both ends of the county and mutual aid from Clarke, and then had to find a way to get them there, because the ramps at Route 37 were packed solid with the stopped traffic that every crash on 81 creates. Trucks were routed in off Fairfax Pike, up Route 11 from Stephens City, and down the northbound lanes through a crossover at mile 313. On the radio, calm as a grocery list, the chief made the decision that separates a fire officer from everyone else on the planet: “Let’s just keep the fire in check. Not worry about full extinguishment. And protect any additional exposures.” Hold it. Do not lose anyone. Wait for water.
The water came from Ops 10, who had driven the southbound side and remembered the hydrant on Tasker Road next to Frederick Water. Winchester Engine 4 and Wagon 4 went to it, and they stretched a supply line across the road, with deputies holding traffic. That hydrant is across from the spot where, 79 days earlier, a southbound tractor-trailer crossed the median into a northbound one and a driver died at the scene. Same companies. Same water plant. Different night.
And in the middle of all of it, at 20:20, dispatch sent a rescue company to a 71-year-old woman who had fallen and hurt her hip. At 20:56, two deputies were sent to a house on Indian Hollow Road where a basement door was open that should have been closed. Nobody on the interstate said a word about it. The county did not stop being the county because 81 was burning.
That is the part of September 11 that the memorials get right and the rest of the year forgets. The people who went into the towers weren't doing anything unusual. They were doing Tuesday. What made it different was the scale, and what the scale revealed was the ordinary thing: a firefighter’s default setting is toward the fire, and a police officer’s is toward the person on the ground. Frederick County runs a combination system, career staff and volunteer companies, and the volunteers on that radio Thursday night left dinner tables to drive tankers into a debris field for nothing. The career staff did it for a salary that would embarrass most of the freight brokers whose loads roll past that mile marker every hour.
They see everything. Twenty-five years on the road taught me what a crash scene looks like at 2 a.m., and I was there to reconstruct it, not to pull someone out of it. They pull people out of it. Then they go home, and then they come back the next shift, and the next, for twenty or twenty-five years, and if they are lucky, they retire with a pension and knees that still work. Too many of them retire with the other thing, the thing the 9/11 responders are still dying of, the thing nobody puts on the plaque.
There are men and women doing this in every county in the country tonight. Rockbridge County worked a ten-vehicle pileup on 81 last fall. Washington County worked one last week. Somewhere in Ohio, a trooper worked the shoulder of U.S. 68 where Brenda Watson died on September 2. None of it made national news. All of it was somebody’s worst night, and all of it had a first responder standing in it.
So today, when the names are read, add the ones that will not be. The deputy doing compressions between two burning cruisers. The chief who decided to hold the fire because he had no water and wouldn't lose a firefighter to get it. The engineer who remembered where the hydrant was. The crew that went to the 71-year-old with the hip. The two deputies who checked the basement door.
Last night it was I-81. Tonight it will be something else. It is always the first responders.