CG Compass - Remembering 9/11, nine years later by CDR. Michael Day

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Remembering 9/11, Nine Years Later –
CDR Michael Day
Friday, September 10, 2010
Written by: LT Connie Braesch

As the nation reflects on the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we bring you the story of a Coast Guardsmen who helped organize one of the largest mass evacuations in U.S. history.


(Left) Coast Guard Petty officer Billy Bashaw, from Station Fire Island, bows his head in sorrow onboard his rescue boat.  (Left Middle) A Coast Guard 41-foot patrol boat patrols the river.  (Right Middle)  CDR Michael Day was a LT back in 2001.  (Right)  Both towers are down and dust engulfs the city.   

On September 11, 2001, Lieutenant Michael Day was working at Coast Guard Activities New York preparing to leave for a meeting at Tower One of the World Trade Center when the command center alert came in. A plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. Then another hit.

As Day rushed out the door to head to the waterfront, Andrew McGovern, pilot of the 100-foot pilot boat NEW YORK, showed up for the meeting. They grabbed a bunch of extra lifejackets, the OPSAIL plan, a Coast Guard Ensign and headed for the pilot boat.

“I remember listening to the radio because by this time we were underway on the boat and it was just… chaos. Every channel you clicked to people were screaming, ‘Help, people are here… I’ve got someone hurt here’,” he said.

With a front row seat to the collapsing buildings, frightened people and distressing devastation, Day only momentarily worried about his own safety. With thousands of citizens needing help, he didn’t have time to stop and think about what was happening.

Despite poor radio communication and unreliable cellular reception, Day began dispatching Coast Guardsmen with handheld radios to the piers to help coordinate a more organized evacuation effort. Meanwhile, he hoisted the Coast Guard Ensign on the pilot boat and began broadcasting to all available boats willing to help with the evacuation to assemble off the tip of Governors Island and await further assignment.

“We were unable to get any reports from lower Manhattan since all the communications systems failed. It was chaotic. People from multiple agencies were responding to the scene without any unity of purpose,” he said. “There wasn’t a pre-planned response; there was no CONOP for how to respond to two planes crashing into the Towers.”


(Left)  The 100-foot pilot boat New York.  (Right)  A team from the buoy tender Katherine Walker help out at ground zero.

Not having a specific response plan for this situation, Day grabbed the closest thing he could think of to help – the OPSAIL 2000 plan.

“I knew it had a lot of ambulance staging areas. We had a lot of evacuation points identified. Although it wasn’t necessarily a full-scale evacuation plan, it had information,” he said.

The process of transporting the crowds of people from Manhattan to safety, one boat load at a time, continued into the evening. With the pilot boat docked in lower Manhattan, still flying the Coast Guard Ensign, first responders began asking them for help.

Establishing communications with the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management, he was able to start getting some supplies brought over to the pier… first water, then ice and meals. Soon, more specific items like tools, equipment and fuel began to arrive.

“We were quickly overrun with relief supplies,” he said. “It was just such a ‘can do’ effort. Everyone wanted to help.”

In what he called, “hands-on VTS,” Day and a Chief Boatswain’s Mate managed the hundreds of vessels bringing supplies to the pier.

“We set up three different staging areas because the supplies were coming in so fast and furious that we were running out of room, and we couldn’t distribute them fast enough,” he added.


(L)  New Yorkers rushed to the Lower Manhattan water front to try to escape the collapse of the World Trade Center towers September 11. They were later evacuated by ferries and tugboats from all over New York harbor.  (USCG photo by Chief Brandon Brewer)  (R)   A Coast Guard rescue team from Sandy Hook, NJ, races to the scene of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. (USCG photo by PA2 Tom Sperduto)

The pure scope of the event and lack of communication with his superiors meant making decisions wasn’t always easy for Day, nor were his actions always by the book, but he looks at the response as great example of initiative and teamwork. Getting more than one hundred boats and dozens of response crews to work together cohesively is not an easy task. But for Day, it just sort of happened under what he describes as a “common purpose.”

Day also learned valuable leadership lessons.

“One is the value of partnering and partnerships, and building your bridges before you need them,” he said. “Two, making your people feel empowered. I really felt when I worked for Admiral Bennis that I was totally empowered to do the right thing. And three, to have faith in your people and the power of the concept of unity of purpose.”

After four days of responding with only about three hours of sleep total, Day finally had some time to reflect on what had happened.

“And it’s when I had quiet time, you know, a little bit alone to myself that it really, really struck home,” he said. “I think being in the Coast Guard we kind of shut things off at times of stress; it’s like a defense mechanism.”

Nine years later, Commander Day’s career and 9/11 experience have come full circle as a National Security Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

Original Article

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David Helvarg
President, Blue Frontier Campaign
Posted: September 9, 2010 02:34 PM

The Coast Guard Heroes of 9/11

Five years ago the U.S. Coast Guard were the first responders after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, saving over 33,500 lives when other parts of government seemed immobilized. They were dubbed 'the New Orleans Saints.'

Still, their role as the lead federal agency responding to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has strained this smallest of the armed services (41,000 active duty members) to its limits.

A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General notes that the Coast Guard has reduced its commitment to most of its environmental missions since 9/11, when it took on new and expanded duties guarding America's ports and coastline from potential terrorist attacks (and later guarding Iraqi offshore oil terminals from insurgent attacks).

While the service was transformed by the events of 9/11, few recall the critical role it played on that day when Al-Qaeda attacked the United States.

Its first effort proved futile when the commander of the Air Station in Cape Cod saw the second plane strike the north tower of the World Trade Center and, on his own authority, sent two HH-60 Jayhawk helicopters to try and rescue people stranded on the roofs. The south tower collapsed before they arrived but they thought they could still save people on the north tower had air traffic control not ordered them to land on Long Island saying that Air Force F-15s would shoot down any aircraft encountered over Manhattan. "We're the rescue helicopter!" one of the pilots pointed out. As they landed and got back on the radio to continue arguing their case the second tower collapsed.

By then, the Coast Guard's Vessel Traffic System (VTS) in New York had shut down the port. But, as the smoke cloud from the towers enveloped lower Manhattan, pushing tens and then hundreds of thousands of panicked citizens towards the southern point of the island, VTS issued a new directive, calling for all available boats in the harbor to go to Battery Park and begin evacuating people.

As the tugs, fast ferries, police launches, fireboats and other working and recreational watercraft pulled up to the foot of Manhattan, their crews would hang handmade signs on their railings saying where they were headed -- to Sandy Hook or Hoboken, Brooklyn or Staten Island. Teams of Coast Guard inspectors, cops and firemen ashore organized the crowds into boarding lines and helped them over the seawall. This also helped to stem the panic. Offshore, other Coast Guard personnel aboard the pilot boat 'New York' and harbor tug 'Hawser' directed the growing boat traffic through the smoke. With the subway system closed down some half million New Yorkers would be taken off Manhattan by boat this way (while tens of thousands of others fled by foot across the Brooklyn Bridge).

In Washington D.C., where the Pentagon was also under attack, Coast Guard Commandant Jim Loy received a call from the chief of naval operations asking what the Navy could do to assist the Coast Guard. It was decided that placing Coast Guard cutters in New York Harbor would reassure the public in a way that putting Navy ships of war there would not. By the next morning a flotilla of armed Coast Guard vessels were patrolling the harbor including the 110-foot Cutter 'Bainbridge Island' flaying an oversized American flag as its battle ensign.

On maps showing the location of Coast Guard cutters on September 10 and September 12, 2001, you see what looks like a belt being cinched tight around the continental United States as the service quickly shifted from a peacetime to a wartime footing.

While the firemen and policemen of New York rightly deserve the honors they earned on 9/11, both with their sacrifice and willingness to, we ought also to remember the Coast Guard and all the working mariners they helped mobilize that day for what would prove to be, though few people know it, the largest maritime evacuation in world history.

Original Article