Former Phoenix fire chief remembers ‘numbing’ experience at Ground Zero after 9/11

Bob Khan was an assistant chief for the Phoenix Fire Department when the World Trade Center’s twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001.

He was part of a task force that went to New York a few days later to help with the effort to find survivors after the deadliest terrorist attack in history.

Khan, who later became the department’s chief and retired in 2014, shared his memories of his “numbing” experience with KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Arizona’s Morning News on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

“We were among the first commercial flights that went out. And so as we came in, there was very little air traffic, if any,” he said.

What struck former Phoenix fire chief when he arrived at Ground Zero?

Khan and the other Arizona Task Force 1 members were not able to comprehend the true magnitude of how the attack affected the city until they made their way to Ground Zero.

“We’re going through Wall Street with the bear and the bull, and it looked like somebody had taken a bag of flour and thrown [it] on that,” he said. “Everything was crushed. There were Humvees with .50-caliber machine guns, fire trucks, crumpled metal. It looked like a car had run over a kid’s toy.”

Once they arrived at the World Trade Center, which had multiple underground levels and a subway beneath it, an escort showed them around the site.

“It looked like the Grand Canyon looking down in the hole that they had made. It was 100 feet down,” Khan said.

Smaller details about the scene also stuck with the retired fire chief.

“So many moving parts, so much pain, so many shoes. I remember the shoes were everywhere. It was numbing, is the only way I could describe it,” he said.

World Trade Center site was ‘like a war zone’

When they got to work, task force members rappelled through voids as part of the effort to find survivors.

“We had equipment, we had dogs that … were trained to find live people. They were struggling because they couldn’t find anybody alive. There were so many people that were killed on the site, it was just … like a war zone there,” Khan said.

It turned out that the force of two 110-story buildings collapsing was too powerful for anybody inside to survive.

“The concrete was just like talcum powder, and then all the fire escapes were shoved with papers from the force of that explosion. … It was a heck of a scene,” Khan said.

Khan praised the efforts of the New York City Fire Department and marveled at how the community came together.

“But it was just tragic. It was just horrible,” he said.

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