Thomas Naples

An Interview With My Father, Rich Naples
This article originally appeared in the 9/14/11 issue of the Warwick Valley Dispatch 

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 FDNY Lieutenant Rich Naples helped his wife Jane get their two youngest children on the schoolbus and then set to work fixing Jane’s vacuum cleaner. “The biggest event in history is going on in Ladder 18’s response are and I’m fixing a vacuum,” he mused. He was not, as he usually was, listening to New York’s WABC radio station. If he was he probably would have made it down to New York City in time for the World Trade Center towers’ collapse. “I turned on the radio around 9:30 and it was all doomsday stuff. Then I turned on the TV and there was this big smokin’ hole,” Rich said in an interview on Wed., Aug. 24, 2011. The ticker on the bottom of the screen told of a “full recall for all rescue workers.”

Rich, packing his car with water and canned food, “emergency stuff,” phoned Jane at work to say goodbye and then called around to firefighters in the area who he thought might also be home, looking for someone to drive downstate with from Warwick, NY to New York City. He got hold of a friend, Firefighter Jack Kenny, and picked him up in neighboring Florida, NY, and they took the Palisades Parkway downstate with “the speedometer buried and my right knee shaking.” All traffic was headed away from the city, Rich recalled, “the oddest thing I’d ever seen.” As he and Jack crossed the Tappan-Zee Bridge they looked to their right and didn’t see the iconic World Trade Center ‘Twin Towers,’ “just smoke.” Rich dropped Jack off at his firehouse around 11 a.m. and called his own firehouse, Ladder 18/Battalion 4. His Battalion Chief told him to come to the firehouse and greeted him there around 11:30, telling him that the city was expecting more attacks and he and others were ordered to stay at the firehouse, ready to respond.

Rich spent the day “giving first aid to people walking uptown from the Trade Center,” unable to contact his wife until around 8 p.m. “We couldn’t get through,” recalls Jane, “we were worried; Was he down in the rubble? Did he fall through a hole? Was he at the firehouse? We didn’t know. People were calling me to check on him and I didn’t have answers.” Rich remembers friends and family members calling him before leaving Warwick, all of whom told him not to go. “Reason told me not to,” he said, “but my duty was to go.” Around 8 p.m. Rich was able to get through to Jane, which was the time firefighters who were at the Trade Center began to file back into the firehouse, after walking about two miles. “We thought they were all dead,” he recalls.

The following day, Wednesday, Rich went down to the site, searching for bodies. “We found many bodies, and many body parts. A list came out of all the guys that were missing and they wanted anyone who had seen them alive to contact management,” he said. “They were trying to narrow this list down—it was huge. It took a couple of days to get it down to 343.” Most of the deceased were from his Division, 1^st, which covers lower Manhattan. Rich recalled how the National Guard came in to set up road blocks and mess tents with “piles of food and water bottles 20 feet high.” He said it was “weird to see Hum-Vees driving around Lower Manhattan with .50 Caliber machine guns on them.” For months after 9/11, every explosion or call for odor of gas brought with it fears of another attack. Rumors of saran nerve gas and dirty bombs circulated.

On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday the men were on rescue duty, but by Friday they turned to recovery. Ladder 18’s fire truck was crushed in the collapse, but when the men returned from Ground Zero on Thursday there was a brand new rig waiting for them. “Everything was replaced within days,” Rich remembered. Pallets of new breathing apparatus were delivered and Seagrave, the company that makes tower ladder trucks, turned around all deliveries and headed them toward New York City. “They put us on 24-hour on, 24-hours off. The first week I didn’t come home,” Rich recalled. “One of the more difficult things,” recalled Rich, “was I had to fill in at firehouses where as much as one third of the members were killed. Their family members would come in to talk.” Ladder 18 lost Matty Ryan, a covering chief whose brother, an NYPD officer, “came in to gather gear and personnel to go down and look for his brother—he got better access that way.”

Ladder 18 spent six hours each tour for the next five months at the site, washing it down and searching for human remains. After working at the site, many firefighters contracted respiratory issues and other health problems. Also, Rich believes “the whole incident had a negative effect on us as a family. How did people who live closer to the city deal with that kind of stress?” Jane recalls “not knowing if he was coming back. On the TV they said they were expecting another attack.” Rich said he “went to about 21 funerals in my time off. I probably knew well 5 or 6 guys who were killed, and I worked alongside at least 100 others.” He still marvels at the sense of duty and need to help others that allowed him to leave Warwick on a beautiful sunny day to go to a “warzone.” Today, he says, “the politics of everything [to do with Ground Zero] are disgusting.”