Mountain Brook firefighter shares experience as 9/11 volunteer

Sgt. Patrick Weeks remembers the sights and sounds as if it happened yesterday.

Standing on top of “the pile” at Ground Zero in Manhattan 15 years ago, Weeks recalls the hand. 

“It was sticking straight up,” he said. “The fingers were cold to the touch and weren’t moving.” 

Weeks, who has been a firefighter and paramedic for more than 20 years, said he has seen his share of tragedy, car wrecks and dead bodies. Something about that man’s hand, however, stopped him in his tracks and stayed with him forever.

“He had a wedding ring on,” Weeks said. “I don’t know why, but that sight disturbed me so badly.”

As Weeks and other firefighters worked to uncover the man’s remains, he spotted his blue jacket. The man had been a Port Authority officer. 

“I knew there were families everywhere thinking, ‘Where’s my husband, my dad, my brother?’ And there I was right by this gentleman knowing I couldn’t call his family to let them know,” he said.

Weeks, who celebrated 18 years with the Mountain Brook Fire Department this August, had at the time also been working with the Warrior Fire Department. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Weeks had returned home from a shift with Warrior to an empty house. Newly married and with a newborn son, Weeks nestled on the couch while his wife and son were at the daycare where she worked. 

“I didn’t turn the TV on or anything,” he said. “It was quiet, so I just closed my eyes.”

Weeks said he wasn’t asleep for long before his phone rang. It was his mother, frantically sobbing on the other end.

“I thought someone had a heart attack or had died,” Weeks said. “My mom asked what I thought about what was happening.”

When Weeks told her he didn’t know what she meant, she told him to turn on the TV. 

“She said it didn’t matter what channel I turned it to, just to cut it on,” he said.

As the images focused on the scene, Weeks realized one of the World Trade Center towers had been hit by an airplane. At first, like most everyone else, Weeks believed it to be a tragic accident.

He watched as the second plane hit.

“That sunk in real slow,” he said. “I can’t explain what it was like to see that. It was impossible to believe that something that big had just happened.” 

As the news continued to trickle in, Weeks, along with the rest of the world, began to piece everything together. Sitting is his Alabama home, he watched as different screens popped up: The Pentagon had been hit. A plane had gone down in Pennsylvania. 

On the phone with his mother, Weeks discussed the events. 

“It was terrorism,” he said. “They are coming for us on our dirt.”

As Weeks watched the first tower collapse, he at first had trouble processing it.

“That tower was built to withstand hurricanes, strong winds,” he said. “We thought it was indestructible.”

As the cloud of rubble, dust and debris crumbled, Weeks shifted his thoughts to those inside.

“The first thing that popped into my mind were my firefighter brothers,” he said. “As firefighters, we have a bond that is unknown to anyone else. It doesn’t matter if we’ve never met; we have each other’s backs.”

Thinking logically, like he is trained to do, Weeks said he knew right away the odds were not in their favor.

“I immediately thought of how many firefighters had died when the towers collapsed,” he said. “It’s mathematically impossible to survive that.” 

As he collected his thoughts, the firefighter in him took over. Weeks made a call to his chief in Warrior, Fire Chief Clay Neely, and asked what could be done.

“Before I could even finish getting the words out, chief said he was already working on a plan,” Weeks said. 

Days later, Weeks, along with firefighters Nick Burns, Chris Hardin and Chief Neely, were on their way to New York in a van donated by locals and filled to the top with what firefighting equipment they could fit. 

“We didn’t know what they would ask us to do when we arrived,” Weeks said. “But we wanted to do what we could — from handing out water [and] cooking for the other firemen to helping locate bodies.”

The van, full of Alabama men and equipment, pulled up to the roped off area in the early morning hours of Sept. 13, Weeks said. 

“All you could do is look over and see this amazing ball of smoke traveling for miles,” he said. “I got the sickest feeling because I knew that’s where I was headed. At the time, no one knew what was going to happen, what else would happen, but we couldn’t worry about those things then.”

Less than 45 minutes after pulling up to the scene, Weeks said he and his men were whisked through the crowd of others who had gathered to volunteer.

“I can’t explain why they chose us,” he said. “But it was like God had a purpose for us.”

When Weeks saw “the pile” for the first time, reality hit.

“I was only about 23 years old at that point,” he said. “I was a relatively young buck. I was scared to death, but ready to get started. I wanted so badly to help find people and pull them out of that rubble.” 

For five days, Weeks helped with search and rescue, lifting and moving pieces of debris one-by-one so as to not further injure anyone who might still be alive. 

“It looked like a giant ant hill,” he said. “People were all over it, but looked so small in comparison to the rubble. I never saw the other half of it.”

The size of the debris meant some recovery efforts were not immediately possible. Worried that large machinery could further injure survivors, Weeks and the others were asked to paint an orange letter “X” in a spot where they had found a complete body that was unrecoverable at that time. They painted a green “X” when they found a body part. 

“You think, as a fireman, you’d be ready to see that type of thing,” Weeks said. “But it was hard to swallow, difficult to fathom what we saw.”

When he first started digging, Weeks said he had illusions of finding person after person. 

“I’d like to say it was that way, but I can’t,” he said. 

When they did find someone, however, Weeks said everything went silent. 

“They would send the body bag over, drape an American flag over it and pass it down the line ever so gently,” he said. “It was an amazingly honorable thing to witness. Time stood still.”

Weeks said he and the men he was with worked for as long as they could before it was time to head home. Hearing the announcement that the search-and-rescue mission had become a recovery-only mission cemented that reality for them, he said. 

Throughout the five days, Weeks said he encountered wives of firefighters draped in their husbands’ backup uniforms desperate for answers. He held a retired firefighter who had worked his way to Ground Zero in an effort to find his missing firefighter son. He saw giant fire engines smashed like beer cans and too many missing persons posters to count.

But above all, Weeks said he saw the spirit of the American people like he had never seen before. 

“America pulled together that day,” he said, “and won.”