by Michael Daly
Fourteen members of his firehouse had been killed in his time with Ladder 5, and Firefighter Craig Monahan had come to consider himself bad luck when he retired this month.
"I thought they'd be safe once I retired," Monahan said.
Late Saturday afternoon, Monahan got a call from the scene of the Deutsche Bank fire informing him that two firefighters from his firehouse had been killed. He rushed to the quarters of Engine 24/Ladder 5 and once again sought to comfort the loved ones of a fallen comrade.
"You'd think by now I would have figured out something, but I don't know what to say," Monahan later reported.
He had no words when he stepped over to the girlfriend of Firefighter Robert Beddia, who had been killed along with Firefighter Joe Graffagnino.
"I just gave her a hug," Monahan said. "I can't believe this is happening again."
Monahan looked over at some of the newer members, who were going through this for the first time. He remembered how he felt back on that night in 1994 when three members of the house were badly burned in a fire on Watts St.
Firefighter Jimmy Young had been killed outright. Capt. John Drennan and Firefighter Chris Siedenburg were still conscious when they were rushed to the hospital.
"I don't care, this is still the greatest job in the world," Siedenburg said.
At the firehouse, a hurried hand chalked a message on a blackboard in the kitchen.
"Be strong. Be you. Be firefighters."
Fire Chaplain Mychal Judge arrived at midnight and gathered Monahan and Beddia and the other survivors in an upstairs room.
"This firehouse is a holy place," Judge said. "It will always be holy ground for you."
The firefighters clung to those words when Siedenburg died the next day. Drennan struggled on and Beddia often drove his family in from Staten Island to the burn unit at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.
Along with Monahan and Firefighter Tommy Hannafin, Beddia became a kind of guardian angel for the captain's 14-year-old son, also named John Drennan. Beddia went quiet when the younger Drennan asked him a question.
"I said, 'You know, do you wish it was you in the fire?'" the younger Drennan remembered on Sunday. "He thought about it for a second. He looks at me and says, 'Yep, I think I do.'"
After a biblical 40 days, the captain died. The funeral was at St. Patrick's Cathedral and Judge gave the homily.
"Life will go on now and Ladder 5/Engine 24, the great men there will carry on his spirit," Judge told the mourners.
The spirit of pure but assuming bravery rode with them on 9/11. Eleven from Engine 24/Ladder 5 died, including one of the guardian angels, Hannafin.
Monahan survived and he could have considered himself extraordinarily lucky when he retired, but he measured such things in the way of a firefighter, that is by how others fared.
"I figured I was like bad luck," Monahan said.
The three dead at Watts St. had been less the result of anybody's bad luck than a pizza box carelessly left on a pilot light in an apartment with no smoke detectors. The attack on 9/11 might not have proved so deadly if the towers' builders had relinquished rentable space to provide more fireproofing and less vulnerable escape routes.
And, Saturday's tragedy at the very edge of The Pit can almost certainly be attributed to the absence of a working standpipe in a building that should have been torn down years ago.
Water that might have made quick work of the fire instead rose 6 feet deep in the basement. Maybe a connection was broken. Maybe the water was shut off by a wheel valve that was later found to be closed. Certainly no worker should have been smoking up there.
We are quick to knock firefighters from pedestal to pillory when one of them commits even a relatively minor infraction. But we are criminally lax with those whose carelessness and indifference regarding fire puts them at risk.
Meanwhile, Engine 24/Ladder 5 will bury two more comrades. And firefighters from all the firehouses will continue to respond to every alarm with the spirit that makes us uncommonly lucky to have them.
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