Kevin Shea was there the first time terror came to New York.
In February 1993, a terrorist bomb exploded in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center towers, blowing a massive crater into the structure. Shea's elite Rescue One squad rushed into the fire and smoke.
"We were told it was a transformer fire, transformer explosion. It turned out it was a car bomb parked on the B-2 level," Shea said.
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While trying to save a trapped man, Shea fell more than 4 stories into the crater left by the bomb and was critically injured. He eventually retired from the job, his efforts earning praise from the president.
Then, eight years later, when America came under attack again on September 11, 2001, he went right back in.
"I was on the phone with a friend. A plane just hit the Trade Center. I gotta go. He hung up on me as soon as he realized the 2nd plane hit, I just headed into the city," Shea said.
Shea's father, who was also a a firefighter called him that day. "He says firemen are going to get killed today. That was after just the first one hit, and we knew nothing about buildings collapsing like that, just people don't understand the volume of fire, how high it was up, what's involved with fighting a fire like that."
Shea said.
He described how firefighters organized themselves amid the chaos.
"What we did was we just made small teams of 4 or 5 guys and went to work, find a spot, start digging, looking through, looking for rubble. People might call, hey, over here, over there, and you just, that's what you did. They say, Well, why wasn't the leadership? The leadership's dead. Like, you know, what do you want? You know what I mean? And, and that was hard," Shea said.
The scale of the destruction was unlike anything Shea had encountered.
"I remember the first day was silent, like all the air was shut down. Now when you're in this, it was like several acres of devastation. You can't see out of it. You had no idea, are we at war? Who are we at war with? Are there more missiles coming, you know, if it's a missile, more planes, like you had no idea," Shea said.
Among the countless stories from the rubble, Shea recalled one of the first firefighters killed that day.
"One of, if not the first firemen killed was Danny Suhr. He was killed by a jumper. A jumper hit him. Danny was a big guy. It took the other 4 guys in the company to carry him out. That saved their lives. The building came down, so we lost Danny, but Danny saved the rest of the company by dying and they had a lift to carry him out," Shea said.
Many of the firefighters Shea served with during the 1993 attack did not survive September 11th.
On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Shea said it may be time to reframe how people think about what happened that day.
"When people think of an act of heroism, it's because they saved somebody. There's plenty of acts of heroism that work or don't work doesn't mean they weren't heroic. What I saw some of the men doing, what we tried to do with that pile, the guys are risking their lives all the time like crazy. Why doesn't anybody look at that as the world's greatest rescue? H ow many people did they evacuate? They were there. It could have been 50,000 people. So why not call it the world's greatest rescue," Shea said.
Shea now lives in the Flathead and will be speaking at the dedication of the new Whitefish 9/11 memorial Friday at 11:00 a.m. at the Emergency Services Center in Whitefish.
