9/11 all too real as firefighters meet

Stephen Curran

Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2002 | 11:10 a.m.

While thousands were dying at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, firefighter Paul Medeiros was witnessing a new life being brought into the world.

The 15-year veteran of the Hyannis, Mass., Fire Department was returning from a Boston hospital with a colleague whose wife had just given birth to twins when he heard the news on the radio.

"The reality didn't sink in until later," he said. "It took weeks for it to sink it. We're still dusting ourselves off."

Nearly a year later, however, the reality of last September's terrorist attacks has finally sunk in. And nowhere has it sunk in more than at this year's biennial International Association of Fire Fighters convention at Mandalay Bay, where a standing-room only crowd of more than 2,300 firefighters flooded the corridors outside the hotel's largest ballroom Monday.

The attendance at this year's week-long convention marks a 25 percent increase since the last convention held two years ago in Anaheim, Calif., said IAFF spokesman George Burke.

The day began with a montage and laser show dedicated to the men and women who died and a tribute to fallen firefighters from the FDNY Emerald Society Bagpipe and Drum Band. Las Vegas performer Clint Holmes sang the national anthem and "Who Will Stand," a song he wrote in tribute to victims of the attacks.

"The opening ceremonies are always dramatic, but even more so this year," Burke said.

Within the convention hall, the events of Sept. 11 cast a somber shadow on an ordinarily bright event. IAFF General President Harold A. Schaitberger sounded like a cross between an old-school union leader and an evangelical preacher as he took the stage during the opening ceremony for the group's customary State of the Union address.

Schaitberger called the attacks "the darkest day of our union" but said the events helped focus on issues facing the profession.

On that dark day, John J. Cosmo, firefighter and president of the Hyannis chapter of the IAFF, was at work and, like Medeiros, said he did not fully grasp the events he saw unfold on the station's television.

"It was just incomprehensible," Cosmo said, at a loss for words to describe the event. "There's nothing ... you can't compare it to anything."

For the two men, Sept. 11 was not the first time they watched fellow firefighters die. Cosmo and Medeiros saw six of their "brothers" die in a 1999 warehouse fire in Worcester, Mass., one of the worst such fires in history.

The two fought the blaze for nine days, during which time they saw unrivaled unity between those fighting the fire, a unity which keeps the two from being able to imagine any other profession -- even as threats of bioterrorism and weapons of mass destruction make their job more complicated than just putting out fires.

"There is no stronger brotherhood," Cosmo said. "There is no stronger union."

These new roles have helped shape the focus of this year's convention, Burke said, as an estimated two-thirds of the nation's fire departments remain understaffed.

"Now the business is charting the course of our union," he said. "We take it very seriously. Our work has just begun."

And, much like the union battles of decades past, a unified front is crucial to getting added funding and benefits the IAFF needs, Schaitberger said.

"We'll stand against the local government bureaucrats who try and balance their budgets on our backs," he said in Monday's speech.

"In this era of corporate greed and offshore tax shelters, working men and women and most importantly firefighters and paramedics, our members, need and deserve collective bargaining rights and job security and we will have it no matter what it takes."

But for Cosmo and Medeiros, both union veterans, the new challenges have simply put a new face on the danger firefighters deal with every day.

"It's always been a dangerous job but terrorism and weapons of mass destruction put it in a new perspective," Cosmo said. "The job is about saving lives. That's what firefighters do."