Last Man Down – Richard Picciotto

Richard ‘Pitch’ Picciotto was about to start a rare 9 to 5 shift as Commander of Battalion 11 of the Fire Department of New York on the fateful day of 11 September  2001, when the first plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. The resultant fire is not on his patch but he and his men are raring to go and help, and when the second plane hits the north tower he just gets in his fire chief’s car and heads on over to the disaster.

Amidst the understandable chaos at the WTC he collects a group of like-minded firemen and starts up one of the north tower staircases to aid the rescue of civilians and fight the fire.

Thirty-five floors up the mission changes when the unthinkable happens. They hear the deafening collapse of the adjacent south tower and it is now about getting back down and out before the north tower follows suit and brings down the seventy plus storeys above onto their heads.

The orderly retreat, picking up the lame and infirm civilian stragglers en route, gets only so far before, inevitably, the north tower goes and plunges Pitch and his men into dust filled hell-holes ‘fortunately’ preserved among the twisted metal and fractured concrete blocks. It’s dark and radio contact is non-existent, then sporadic, as he first waits for rescue then decides to look for an escape route.

The first-hand account is, has to be, gripping, and reading it 12 years after the event the scale of the physical damage is maybe easier to take in than it was immediately after the event when the sense of the human tragedy was overpowering. It is a very personal account that also reflects on the nature of the firefighter’s job - the danger, rewards and camaraderie – and its effect on the family.

Although writing with Daniel Paisner, the words that come out of the page are clearly Picciotto’s, in a no-nonsense, tell it how it is, style. It doesn’t give the complete story of 9/11 (he does not concern himself with the politics or the thousands of civilians killed on the upper floors whose bodies he does not even see in the wreckage) just the experiences that day of one fireman who survived against the odds, unlike the 343 others listed at the start of the book who did not.