by PATRICE O'SHAUGHNESSY
The voice is clear, demanding, urgent; the words wrenching and all-too-human.
"Listen, I want a roll call, do we have a roll call finished up there? I don't give a s--- about the building, I give a s--- about the guys. Do we know who's missing?"
It is the voice of Assistant Chief Thomas Galvin, the commander at the Deutsche Bank building fire who desperately tried to get all the firefighters out of the building when it became clear they were caught in a dangerous maze.
His commands over the FDNY radio crystallize the tragedy in the toxic tower.
Two firefighters, Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino, could not escape from the 14th floor, a warren of boarded-up staircases. They ran out of air and died in the thick smoke.
The loss of life would have been even worse had Galvin not quickly shifted gears to pull everyone out, sources said.
"Let's get everybody down below this fire and we'll start all over again. I wanna make sure we have everybody accounted for," Galvin said, shortly before a firefighter shouted, "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!"
"He is the man you would want there if you were in the Deutsche building," said a fire officer who worked with him.
Galvin is head of the FDNY's Bureau of Training, a survivor of the World Trade Center catastrophe and, in its aftermath, an instrumental force in rebuilding the Fire Department.
"Those words are exactly what I would expect him to say," the officer added.
That's because Galvin is not only a well-liked veteran officer, he is an expert in fighting fires amid unexpected structural hazards. Firefighter safety has been his focus since he was put in charge of training three years ago.
Only last February he said he was enhancing training for rookies because firefighters often become trapped in mazes in illegally altered buildings.
Galvin, 49, a bull of a man with close-cropped, reddish-gray hair, has more than 25 years with the department and was at the World Trade Center on 9/11 as a deputy chief of Division 3. He was an incident commander at the towers, steps away from the Deutsche building, another star-crossed skyscraper.
In an oral history he provided to the FDNY, he spoke of not being aware that the Marriott hotel was connected to the north tower until someone told him how to get there.
"I don't think at that time I realized I was in the north tower. I just said something's wrong here. It just doesn't seem right. I remember coming back and there was more debris that's falling down into the ... open area," Galvin recounted.
"I would say from that time, maybe one minute later, two minutes later, is when the hotel just started shaking. Everything came down. I ran south down the lobby and that's when I got caught in debris in the lobby there. There was just dust, debris coming down all over. I got knocked to the floor with lots of people."
He guided several people out using a safety rope.
After the Deutsche Bank fire, some questioned whether firefighters should have been sent into the contaminated hulk, which was being demolished floor by floor and had not been inspected for safety despite several government agencies' oversight of the long-troubled tower.
"You had to put out that fire, there were workers in there, and if that building was allowed to burn it would have collapsed," a fire official said.
As head of training, Galvin has overseen the creation of training for weapons of mass destruction and incident management teams that handle large-scale urban disasters.
Dangerous structural issues in fires are among his main focuses. He has noted that most of the 25 firefighter deaths in recent years have come in buildings with unexpected structural issues, such as the 2005 Bronx fire that trapped firefighters and forced two to jump to their deaths.
After that fire, Galvin helped develop new lightweight safety ropes and train all firefighters to use them to escape.
As for the Deutsche fire, where he faced the awful, unique situation of a cut standpipe - crippling firefighters' ability to get water to upper floors quickly - Galvin's colleague predicted the chief will try to find a way to handle that next time.
"He will not let this go unanswered," the fire officer said.
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