Book Review: Last Man Down: A Firefighter's Story of Survival and Escape from the World Trade Center

 

Last Man Down is partly a memoir and mostly a telling of events on 9/11 as experienced by Battalion Chief Richard Picciotto, who at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was nearly a 30-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department. He was the highest-ranking firefighter in the North Tower of the World Trade Center at the time the building collapsed. The book starts out with the collapse of the South Tower and Picciotto's decision to start evacuating the people in the North Tower, then discusses the timeline of the day as he experienced it, and how he got to be on the 35th floor of the North Tower (where he was when the South Tower collapsed) and then his trek down the stairs making sweeps of the floors and trying to get everyone out, and where he was when the North Tower collapsed and the story of how he, and the group of people that were near him, got out. Interestingly, Picciotto's company was actually not dispatched to the Trade Center, but he called dispatch asking to go down because he had coordinated the evacuation of the buildings after the 93 bombing, and knew the buildings well. 

The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the details about how the group of trapped firefighters, who were located in the only section of the stairwell to survive the collapse of the North Tower, were trying to communicate their location to the rescuers on the outside, and the ordeal it was to get them down and to safety because of the fires that were raging throughout the World Trade Center complex after the collapse of the buildings.

It should be noted that he has been criticized for embellishing part of the narrative in the book, specifically that he directed Ladder Company 6 to help Josephine Harris, who was the only civilian trapped with the group of firefighters in the stairwell when he found her with a group of disabled and otherwise non-ambulatory people on the 12th floor as they were evacuating the building. Also, details like when he left his firehouse for the Trade Center have changed over the years. In the book, he says it was after the second plane hit, and in more recent talks he has given he said that the second plane hit as he was on his way to the trade center. But, it could just be that those details have been lost to time. The title is also a bit misleading as there were a group of Port Authority workers on the 64th floor of the North Tower (which was a floor that the firefighters never got to) that were coming down behind Picciotto, only one of whom survived the collapse of the building, basically landing on top of the pile of debris under which Picciotto and the others were buried.

The book is not long, about 240 pages, and is a fairly quick read. If you are a fast reader you can easily finish it in a day or two. Picciotto most definitely has a brash style and swears a lot, which will likely turn a lot of people off. But, it is an interesting story that I had only heard part of from the Inside 9/11 documentary which Picciotto was interviewed for a couple of years after 9/11. It is definitely worth reading.