‘We Did Something Here’: An FDNY Responder Recalls 9/11

Editor’s note: An excerpted version of this article appeared in the September 2021 issue of EMS World.

Carlos Lopez is a retired lieutenant paramedic from FDNY EMS. On Wednesday, September 12, 2001, after working all day and all night at the site, he, some firefighters, and some other FDNY EMS staff formed an impromptu team with an NYPD canine officer and his dog in the area now known to America as Ground Zero. In this area debris from the collapsed South Tower—felled the previous day in America’s most infamous terror attack—perched in precarious piles of rebar, girders, furniture, building materials, and dust—tons of dust.

Around 9 a.m. Lopez heard someone yell, “We found one!” An NYPD canine had alerted to a scent. Lopez and dozens of EMS, police, and fire personnel converged on the area where the dog alerted. Digging with their hands, they found the body of Yamel Merino, 24. 

Merino, an EMT with MetroCare EMS in New York City, was among the first EMS responders killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers as she helped evacuate civilians. Lopez and his team placed Merino’s body in a Stokes basket. Someone found an American flag and covered her body. They handed her off to a team from the medical examiner’s office.

“That really knocked the wind out of my sails,” Lopez remembers. “I realized at that moment that we were not going to find anyone else alive, and this was going to be my job for the foreseeable future: body recovery.”

Getting Started

After graduating high school in 1980, Lopez enlisted in the Air Force. After basic training he became a medical services specialist. He says the training and scope of practice at that time, in the early 1980s, was similar to that of an LPN today.

Assigned to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Lopez worked at a research hospital. “I worked with a lot of great people: Vietnam vet medics and other really well-trained people,” he says. “They taught me so much about good medicine and caring for your people.”

After several years in the Air Force, Lopez was honorably discharged. His training in medicine led him to Illinois, where he first became certified as an EMT. In 1986 he moved to New York City and began working for a private ambulance company. In January 1989 he became an EMT with New York City EMS. At that time EMS in New York City was provided by a third service under the auspices of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, a public nonprofit that dispatched both its own and hospital ambulances.

After graduating from the FDNY EMS Academy, Lopez worked in several areas in Queens, including South Jamaica, Astoria, and Elmhurst. In 1996 New York City EMS merged with the Fire Department of New York (FDNY). Employees of the newly formed Bureau of EMS were considered FDNY employees and became eligible to transfer to firefighting positions within the department. As a result of the merger, the FDNY Bureau of EMS became the largest fire department-based EMS system in the country.

Personal Struggles

In the mid-1990s Lopez endured a period of personal struggles: “I was an alcoholic and an addict. It affected my work and affected my marriage, which later ended in divorce.”

He had an intervention. “In 1997 I got sober,” Lopez says. “I went to a 28-day residential rehab. I went through Alcoholics Anonymous. I went through a 12-step program. I got clean.” He reembraced his life and reimmersed himself in his work.

In 1999 he had an opportunity to transfer to the Medical Equipment Unit (MEU). In this assignment Lopez and his team were biomedical repair technicians. They would diagnose and repair equipment carried by ALS and BLS units, including oxygen regulators, ambulance equipment, materials carried in jump bags, and even helmets.

‘I Don’t Think I Can Stay for Therapy Today’

On September 11, 2001, Lopez had the day off. He was using it to go to a therapy session with his counselor out on Long Island.

“After my experience with addiction, I was working on getting my alcohol and substance abuse counselor certification. I was in the internship portion of my program. I figured if I was going to be a counselor, I probably needed to get some counseling,” he recalls. Driving a little after 9 a.m., he heard on the radio that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. “I figured it was a Cessna, you know?” Lopez says.

Lopez called his boss, MEU Deputy Director Richie Kemp, but Kemp hadn’t heard anything yet. Lopez called back a few minutes later, and Kemp’s tone had changed. “I don’t have time! I’m getting stuff ready!” he told Lopez and hung up.

Lopez arrived at his therapist’s office a few minutes later and asked to turn on the TV. As they watched the unfolding scene on the news, Lopez said, “I don’t think I can stay for therapy today.” He left and drove quickly, grabbed a uniform and his body armor, and headed into Woodside, Queens, where his station was.

The second tower was hit on his drive in.

“As I got to Woodside, an EMS box truck filled with equipment was pulling out and headed to downtown Manhattan. I missed the truck, and I was [mad]!” Lopez remembers.

Senior tech Dave Teague was then in charge, and he, Lopez, and others started getting another vehicle ready and stocking it with stretchers, Lifepaks, oxygen, assembled airway rolls, and other equipment.

“I really didn’t know Manhattan very well, having done all my EMS time in Queens,” Lopez says. “I had one of those Hagstrom maps I kept referencing. I remember making some copies and giving them to out-of-borough units that came to help.”

Lopez was directed to go to Chelsea Piers, which was becoming a staging area. Both towers had already collapsed. “I was by myself, and on the way I remember stopping at a gas station to get some cigarettes and buying one of those disposable cameras,” he recalls.

As he headed in, Lopez felt a growing sense of anxiety. “I was worried that they might blow up a tunnel or a bridge. I went through the Queens Midtown Tunnel anyway—strange, because there was zero traffic except for emergency vehicles.” As he headed downtown in Manhattan, he had chills as he saw people on the streets making the sign of the cross as emergency vehicles whizzed by.

‘Please Make This Fast’

Once he arrived at Chelsea Piers and handed off his equipment cache to a lieutenant, he called Kemp on the radio and was told to head to the Staten Island Ferry. “As I headed that way, I couldn’t get any further south, and I was told to wait, and Richie would meet me.”

While waiting in the area of Vesey Street, Lopez started taking photos. He then noticed dozens of firefighters, EMTs, and police officers sprinting toward him. “It reminded me of the old Wild Kingdom videos where antelope and other animals would be in a panicked run from a crocodile in the water,” recalls Lopez. Carlton Smith, a FDNY EMT and friend, “ran up to me, shook me, and yelled, ‘Carlos, run!’”

Lopez started running north with the first responders. No. 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story office building, was collapsing. “I was angry at myself,” Lopez remembers. “Why did I need to make myself be here? I thought I was [going to be killed]. I thought, God, please make this fast.” The building fell, but Lopez and the others he was with were far enough away and safe.

A $400 Pillow

With much of the FDNY’s EMS command and control in disarray because of the collapse, many units moved ahead doing the best they could with the resources they had. Lopez and three fellow MEU members tried to figure out where they could best help. That evening the team stopped into a Brooks Brothers clothing store downtown to rest. “I was looking to take a quick nap,” Lopez says. “A man gave me a $400 Brooks Brothers trench coat as a pillow.”

Around 2 a.m. on September 12, the MEU team picked up other first responders who had been heading north. Later that day they formed up with an NYPD canine officer, his dog, and three firefighters and found Merino.

Working on ‘the Pile’

Ground Zero became known to first responders in the early recovery effort as “the pile.” Lopez and his colleagues in the MEU were part of the bucket brigades searching for victims on September 12. “If they thought some debris was going to collapse, they would sound a horn, and we’d have to run off the pile,” Lopez says. “That happened many times every hour.”

Lopez recalls many people coming out to help. “There was a guy in a chef’s hat making sandwiches for us,” he says. “Chicken heroes and meatball heroes. The chef apologized because the sandwiches weren’t labeled. Can you imagine? We were just happy to have some chow.”

He remembers not thinking about the dust much at that time. “I was wearing one of those paper dust masks,” he says. “Some young lady came up to me handing out Gatorade, and she was wearing one of those P100 respirators. I asked where she got it, and she said the feds were giving them out a few blocks over. She took her mask off and gave it to me, saying she could get another one.”

At 4 p.m. on September 12, after working over 36 hours, Lopez and his MEU team were relieved. They returned back to Queens to rest and shower. The next two weeks were a blur. “We worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off,” he recalls.

Family Near-Misses

Lopez says it’s a miracle his family members weren’t victims that day. His oldest brother was an NYPD officer, 112th Precinct. He was driving the duty captain around when the towers collapsed and was not on the scene, though he was detailed to the Trade Center later. Lopez’s other brother was a delivery driver who dropped off muffins at the towers at 4:30 a.m. on the 11th. Lopez’s father was a courier at Lehman Brothers who was in and out of the towers often but had gotten laid off the week prior. He was told to come back to the office at 10 a.m. on September 11th. He was watching the news when the towers collapsed and thankful he missed the appointment. Lopez’s niece Angela was at NYU at the time and walked from NYU to Queens, taking several hours. With all these near-misses, the Lopez family was very fortunate.

Recovery Duty

FDNY paramedics and EMTs were needed on the site for a recovery that would take months. Lopez kept working his regular EMS job at MEU Monday through Friday but picked up overtime shifts at the pile every weekend and on weeknights. There were 12-hour tours staffed by four ALS ambulances, four BLS ambulances, four Gator teams, two EMTs in the morgue, plus two EMS lieutenants and a captain. “Lt. Steve Russo, Capt. Walter Odinokow, Capt. Billy ‘Black Cloud’ Olsen, Lt. Steve Cuevas, Lt. Pete Jakubowski, and Capt. Kevin Connolly were some of the great bosses I worked with,” Lopez says. “We worked with them, not for them.”

Lopez was typically assigned to Gator duty. Their job was to respond to anyone who was injured or sick on the site and take them to the DMAT tents for treatment. Critical patients were transported to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

“The DMAT teams were from all over the country, and no one really talks about them,” Lopez says. “They set up field hospitals with doctors, nurses, medics, pharmacists, and techs and worked two-week shifts. The U.S. Forest Service was there with issued equipment like gloves, shovels, and hand tools. The Department of Corrections would be there in full PPE with hand tools. All these groups were unsung heroes a lot of people don’t know about.” Other EMS, fire, and recovery personnel came from all over the U.S. and around the world.

EMS workers met a lot of celebrities who wanted to see the site. “I remember seeing James Gandolfini from The Sopranos on the site. I remember him sitting in stunned silence,” Lopez recalls. He also met New York Yankees great Lou Piniella and saw then-President George W. Bush. U.S. Special Forces operators came by for tours after they returned from Afghanistan—“They would want to see firsthand what they were fighting for.”

In November the DMAT teams stood down and a private company, MedCorps, took over. The FDNY EMS job evolved to include helping remove remains in a respectful way. They worked seven days a week, even holidays.

Lopez recalls Christmas 2001: “I usually worked with 2–3 steady partners—Jack Carlson, Jim Connors, and Elizabeth Reeves. If it weren’t for Jack, I don’t think I could have made it through.

“That day I was detailed with Lorna O’Farrell, who is half-Jewish on her mom’s side. We attended mass that day under a cross at the site, and rosary beads were handed out. I remember Lorna asking me what she should do with the beads, and I told her to stick them in her pocket. It was a cold day, and a little while later a mother of a Port Authority police officer was there, still waiting for her son’s body to be recovered—the World Trade Center was a major station for the Port Authority Police. The mother asked Lorna and me if we were cold. We said we could work through the cold, and we were there for her and her son. Lorna gave that mother her beads, and the mother held onto them like they were gold.”

Realizing he was pretty wound up after months of seven-days-a-week work at the site and spurred by an insistent friend from the Oregon DMAT team, Lopez took a week’s break to vacation in Oregon. That trip helped him decompress and restore before he returned to work on the pile.

Flags at the Ready

By January 2002 a ramp had been built to facilitate removal of debris as the search continued. Lopez remembers an urgency to find the body of colleague Carlos Lillo, an FDNY paramedic. “They found him on the day I had off,” remembers Lopez.

Whenever a body of a police officer, firefighter, EMT, or paramedic was found, they would call in members of the individual’s unit to salute and escort out the body. “We always had flags at the ready,” says Lopez. The unit would carry the remains in a Stokes basket and place them into an FDNY ambulance. Family members were often relieved at the closure.

Lopez recalls a story Carlson shared with him. Carlson told Lopez that one day when Lopez wasn’t working, they had to quickly evacuate the area because someone thought they’d found a bomb. Upon inspection by the NYPD bomb squad, it was found to be a training device from one of the federal law enforcement agencies that had offices at the World Trade Center.

In March they found the body of Keith Fairben, a paramedic from New York Presbyterian Hospital. Lopez recalls waiting for the ambulance from Fairben’s unit to come and take the body to a morgue set up outside Bellevue Hospital. “I always kept religious items with me to put with the bodies, and chaplains were on site to help us too.” Honors were rendered as the body was led to the ambulance with silence and salutes. Every time a member of service was placed in an ambulance to be returned to their family, Lopez remembers thinking to himself, We did something here.

“To me, it was worthwhile,” he says. “We [the pile detail] became very dedicated to what we did, all the EMTs and medics who were assigned to this. We took our roles very seriously—almost like a calling. It wasn’t medicine anymore—it was identifying remains and getting people home in a respectful and honorable way.” This unit worked at the pile for nine months.

Demobilization

In April 2002 Lopez and the unit found out all recovery operations would conclude at the end of May. EMS continued its role there the whole time, especially with all the construction equipment. “There were so many unions there,” remembers Lopez. “We did our primary job of responding to sick or injured workers on the site. The ironworkers, carpenters, operating engineers, electricians—all the unions worked so hard, and the job wouldn’t have gotten done without them.”

In May the team was downsized to two ALS units, two BLS units, and two Gators. “One unintended result of the attacks was that it really brought FDNY firefighters and EMS closer,” Lopez says. “There was always some tension after the merger in ’96 [when the city’s EMS merged into the FDNY], but after 9/11 and the months afterward, there was definitely a level of greater respect. We got closer after working side-by-side for months.”

After the Pile

After his time at the pile, Lopez continued at the MEU. He says that while the FDNY took a “major hit,” with multiple deaths in its leadership, EMS didn’t have a leadership loss—at first. In subsequent years, however, many EMS providers would get sick, promoted to fire suppression, or retire, leaving an experience void.

In May 2003 Lopez requested to go back into the field as an EMT. After doing this for almost a year, he was assigned to the EMS Academy to teach defensive driving. In 2005 he went through the academy’s paramedic program. “It was the hardest I’ve ever had to study,” he remembers. “I was the old guy.”

In 2006 he was assigned as a paramedic in Queens and worked in Astoria, Rockaway, and Woodside. In 2008 he hurt his back and was out for several months. In 2010, after returning to full duty, Lopez was promoted to lieutenant. He was assigned to Harlem as the “midnight boss.” “I wanted to make sure people were taken care of and got home at the end of their tours,” he says. In 2012 Lopez was reassigned back to Queens, where he finished his FDNY career and retired in 2018.

Five years earlier, after taking several classes there as a student, Lopez was hired as a subject matter expert instructor at the National Center for Security and Preparedness in Oriskany, N.Y. where he taught active-shooter, EMS special situations, and rescue task force classes. “There has been a huge mind-set shift in our training and teaching,” he says. “There is a difference between preparing to respond to an accident and preparing to respond to an attack. You try to develop a mental checklist, watch out for your partners more, and listen to that voice in your head that might tell you something is not right. I wanted to continue to make sure EMS takes care of its own.” He worked at the NCSP until just before the COVID pandemic in January 2020.

Health Concerns

Lopez admits he suffered from mental health issues after his time at Ground Zero.

“I had depression, but because of my prior addiction issues, I didn’t want to take antidepressants,” he says. He thought he could be strong and get through it himself, but that was “a dangerous way of thinking.” Eventually, with the encouragement of friends and partners, Lopez sought counseling and took antidepressants and improved.

Now Lopez encourages anyone who needs it to get help. “You can’t handle all the stuff we see alone, you know? [Getting help] doesn’t make you weak. It makes you stronger, resilient. It is a real show of character.” He credits several people from the DMAT teams, especially Colleen Grunow from the Oregon DMAT, who encouraged him to avail himself of mental health opportunities. Brent Kinsey from the Oklahoma DMAT also pulled Lopez aside and said, “Don’t make the same mistake I did—get some help immediately for your mental health!”

Beyond the mental health concerns were physical concerns. “There were colors in the smoke those first few days that were not right,” recalls Lopez. “We were breathing it. It was on our clothes. Our boots. FDNY took good care of us and encouraged us to get physicals each year.”

Lopez was diagnosed with acid reflux, GERD, and sinusitis in addition to the mental health issues. Later, during one of the physicals, doctors found a stomach tumor. “It was a sarcoma—very rare. On endoscopy the doctor said it was the biggest tumor he had ever seen.”

At first they thought it was benign—it wasn’t. In January 2020 Lopez had surgery to remove part of his stomach. Now he has ongoing monitoring through the World Trade Center medical program. He has been treated with chemotherapy ever since.

“I’m doing OK—I still have issues when I eat, and I have to be medically monitored often,” he says. “I’ll be on chemo for the next few years. I encourage anyone who was there on 9/11 and in the months afterward to make sure they are in the medical monitoring program.”

Final Thoughts

Lopez has recovered from the surgery and continues to be treated for his cancer. He feels good. But these days, with the 20th anniversary of the attacks coming, the memories are more vivid.

“I think about how many things were arbitrary that day. In some cases people lived or died because of a choice to turn right or left in a given moment. I look at photos and remember friends, partners, and the work we did. There are names and photos up at the academy today of people who died on that day and in the years afterward. When watching the recent condo collapse in Florida on TV, it reminded me a bit of what we did at the towers. The work we did was special, and I wouldn’t change a thing…except maybe getting some help for mental health sooner. I encourage anyone in EMS—or any first responder, for that matter—to get help even if you think you’re OK. We can’t do this job alone.”

Barry Bachenheimer, EdD, NREMT/FF, is a frequent contributor to EMS world and has been involved in EMS and fire for over 35 years. He responded to New York City after the attacks of September 11, 2001 as part of an EMS task force from New Jersey.