A Gloucester fire captain aided New York at Ground Zero. 25 years later, he recalls what it was like

I'm Lisa Mullins in Boston. This week marks 25 years since the September 11th terrorist attacks. Miles Schlichte remembers it well. He was a Gloucester fire captain then, and he was among the hundreds of first responders who dug through the rubble at Ground Zero in the days after the attack. They looked for bodies or belongings. After it was apparent there wouldn't be any more survivors. Schlichte was part of the Massachusetts Emergency Response Team, the first outside team to make it to New York. Schlichte is now retired. He shared his story with WBOR's Sharon Brody. I had never been to Manhattan before that day. Everything was closed because, as you know, the city had been shut down. And all we saw was just this Armageddon-type looking pillar of smoke rising out of Manhattan. And everybody, I would ride it on a school bus. Most of us were on the buses. It was just this overwhelming, just, oh my God, what are we getting into here? As a first responder, you are used to compartmentalizing. But were there moments that sort of stopped you in your tracks, items you saw, a fragment of a scene? The first thing we were greeted with was a completely destroyed fire engine from the city of New York that had been towed away from where it got destroyed. And then the feeling was, when you saw that, the first thing is like, oh, well, there's the crew. The crew's missing. They were in the tower when it came down. And then the first couple of days, the scene was so chaotic, there was really no scene security. National Guard hadn't arrived yet. New York police was overwhelmed. So there were civilians all over the rubble pile while we were trying to work. And people would be coming up to us with a picture and say, hey, here's my brother, here's my sister. Excuse me. Have you seen him? And it was stuff like that that was really hard to deal with. Oh, I'm sure. That's a memory that does not go away. No. You can't, you can't brush them off. You can't be cruel. But you don't have any answers. So our task was to politely try to redirect them in another direction so we could continue doing what we were trying to do. Many people who worked at Ground Zero did become sick in the years that followed. Yes. How are you now, 25 years since your work there? Well, I'm sitting at a wooden table and I'm going to knock on it. So far, I've been lucky. I haven't had any illnesses or things that could be traced to 9-11. I actually haven't had any kind of cancerous stuff for anything that whether it be 9-11 or my fire department career. Unfortunately, there are numerous members of the task force that I went down with that have either already passed away, a percentage of those were determined to be 9-11 related, and there are another percentage of people that I went down with that are currently sick. When we do get together as a group, you know, we, we remiss about, hey, you know, so-and-so has passed and they had this and so-and-so is sick. And it's like, yeah, you know, you know, guys, we got to get together more often because you never know when it's going to come grab another one of us. Do you think that disaster planning in the U.S. has changed after 9-11? I would hope so. For quite a few years after 9-11, I kept waiting for another 9-11 type incident to occur. And I got to give credit to all the people who are behind the scenes that you don't hear about them because nothing bad happens. So I would only like to think that, you know, the reason we haven't had another 9-11 size incident since 9-11 is because those unspoken people are doing their jobs behind the scenes. I am concerned there will be another 9-11 level incident based on our actions around the globe and how this administration is reducing the people who are actually preventing that stuff. That was Miles Schlichte talking with WBUR Sharon Brody. Schlichte helped clean up Ground Zero in the days after the September 11th attacks. He's a nearly 30-year veteran of the Gloucester Fire Department.