9/11: On the Waterfront, On the Streets, On the Pile

Jefferson Township is 30 miles as the crow flies from Jersey City and Lake Hopatcong is 914 feet above tidewater, but the events of Sept 11, 2001, proved time and distance and elevation don’t really mean too much.

On a day when many people jumped in their cars and drove as far as they were allowed,  emergency workers from Jefferson were among them.

Cheryl Wood, Chief of the Milton Rescue Squad remembers getting a call from Morris County to report to the squad building for a possible mass casualty.

“We were dispatched as soon as the first tower was hit,” she said. “It was a county dispatch and we were told to wait.”

The squad members knew what had happened in New York City, but they didn’t know where they would be sent.

“The county and state decided that,” she said of their assignment to Liberty State Park. “It was really quite coordinated.”

Milton sent one ambulance and the Jefferson Squad sent two, she recalled.

Wood didn’t get any closer than the park, directly across the river from the Trade Center site.

“When we got there, the two towers were already down. We watched Tower 7 burning and then it toppled,” she said. “We wouldn’t have known what building it was until somebody told us.”

One of the three squad volunteers who was with her, Ken Littleheels, had been an iron worker on the towers. And was very moved by what he saw. 

“He left the squad about a year later and moved away from town after that. I don’t even have an email address for him,” she said.

“Mostly, we saw the columns of smoke,” she said. “It was eerie, the sky was yellow. It was like clouds, but yellow. We never realized what we might be breathing in.”

She said no one from the squad reported any harmful effects from the air, but she believes there might have been some.

The emergency service workers at Liberty State Park waited for each ferry to come across the Hudson.

“When the ferry would come, we didn’t know if there would be casualties on it,” she said. “But there would be firemen. We’d make sure they got something to eat and drink.”

They remained there until about midnight when they used their rig to take firemen back to their stations and then returned to Jefferson.

Jefferson Township Police officers Eric Wilsusen and Rich Geib went to Ground Zero three weeks after the attacks.

“It had nothing to do with us as police in Jefferson,” Wilsusen said, “We were answering a call from the state PBA.”

“Some of us met at the state PBA office and went down to relieve a team that was there,” said Geib.

“The pile was still burning,” Geib said. “We provided support for the workers. There was a base camp set up to provide supplies. ATVs carried food and supplies to the pile.”

The out-of-town police also relieved NYPD officers on traffic patrol, Geib said. Their unfamiliarity with the patterns of the roads in lower Manhattan was not much worse than that of police from the outer boroughs who sometimes replied to questions with a smile and a vague pointed finger, a woman who made deliveries in the area said.