- April 23, 2024
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The smoke blackened New York detective Jay Maher’s white paper mask in minutes, searing his eyes and throat and turning the clear September morning sky an oily, acrid slate.
“It was horrible,” Maher said. “You couldn’t breathe. Your eyes were bleeding.”
Maher, a former FBI Joint Task Force member and now Palm Coast’s business tax supervisor, spent weeks working in the reeking haze that covered Ground Zero after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
With other first responders, he climbed the shifting mountain of rubble, pulling away what he could of the thousands of tons of concrete and metal debris, gathering anything that could be used to identify the missing, and hoping to find someone alive under it all.
For years afterward, Maher didn’t talk about his experience as a 9/11 rescuer, avoiding annual remembrance ceremonies and taking a day a day off to go to the beach on Sept. 11 to get away from the news coverage. But he plans to attend the ceremony at the Fallen Heroes Memorial organized by the city of Palm Coast this Sept. 11, and said it's important to recall the attacks yearly. "If we forget that, we're just going to repreat it," he said.
'All hell breaking loose'
Maher had been in his police car that morning when the first plane struck the Trade Center, and he had his FBI and New York Police Department radios on.
“I could hear all hell breaking loose,” he said. The emergency operations center was in the towers.
Maher and his team of seven officers piled into two cars and followed a caravan of ambulances racing downtown. They’d gotten out of their cars and were on foot when the second tower collapsed.
“The smoke and the dust and just everything was overwhelming,” he said. “You couldn’t see anything. Your eyes were burning, and you couldn’t see anything.”
Blocks from the crash, a jet engine lay in the road near fire truck, half-buried under rubble.
Firefighters dashed out of WTC-5 carrying a wounded man, and the policemen helped pull the debris off the fire truck and place the man inside.
Two more wounded people staggered out of the building, and they were placed on the truck’s floor.
The officers worked past midnight. They found the city streets they knew by heart suddenly hard to navigate.
“The landscape was just unrecognizable,” Maher said.
'You dig with everything you’ve got'
Maher and the other Joint Task Force officers were assigned to search and rescue and began sifting through the rubble.
“You make your way to the top of the pile and you dig,” Maher said, “and you dig with everything you’ve got.”
Climbing to the top was dangerous because stepping in the wrong place could mean breaking through and falling several stories into the jagged rubble.
Maher and his fellow officers were later assigned to assist the city’s overworked morgue, and when they got a day off, they often spent it at a memorial service for a former colleague.
Overwhelming
But in the city, when Maher drove in a marked car or wore a uniform, he noticed a change.
Many of the areas he worked in hadn’t trusted cops before, but after 9/11 the people there treated police officers like heroes.
“Every time you stopped for a light, people would come out and offer you food,” he said. “The amount of people that really kicked in from the community was overwhelming.”
Maher retired from law enforcement the next February, after a stint with the Terrorism Task Force, and moved to Palm Coast.
In July, he got as close as he’s ever been to returning to Ground Zero. On the Hudson River in his brother-in-law’s 38-foot Sea Ray motorboat, he saw the Freedom Tower for the first time.
“It was beautiful, the way the sun was shining off it,” he said. “I just hope it’s not a target. I just hope something like that never happens again on our land.”
Palm Coast’s remembrance ceremony for emergency responders killed in the 9/11 attacks will be held at 8:30 a.m. Sept. 11, at the Fallen Heroes Memorial, Heroes Park, at 2860 Palm Coast Parkway N.W.
