How the 9/11 Boatlift Became the Largest Water Evacuation in History

At 10:28 a.m. on September 11, 2001, the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in an avalanche of dust and debris. Below, Lower Manhattan was already engulfed in a thick cloud from the South Tower’s collapse 29 minutes earlier. With roads, bridges and tunnels to and from Manhattan closed to traffic shortly after the second tower was struck, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves trying to escape the devastation. Many of them headed for the water, where hundreds of mariners stood ready to carry them to safety.

The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) issued a call for “all available boats” at 10:45 a.m. But by then, a spontaneous flotilla had been in action for close to two hours, almost from the moment the first plane hit. Within hours, roughly 800 mariners aboard at least 150 vessels had evacuated nearly 500,000 people in the largest waterborne evacuation in history—larger even than the evacuation at Dunkirk during World War II.

In Saved at the Seawall: Stories from the September 11 Boat Lift, Jessica DuLong details multiple examples of mariners who, without any prompting or clear knowledge of what had happened, immediately found ways to head straight for the disaster to see if they could help.

Michael McPhillips, port manager for the ferry company NY Waterway, immediately grabbed two mechanics to act as deckhands, commandeered the ferry Frank Sinatra and, in DuLong’s words, “shot straight for the World Financial Center.” Greg Hanchrow, operations director for Spirit Cruises, which ran dinner cruises in the harbor, borrowed a speedboat from a friend’s marina 30 miles away from where his boats were docked at Chelsea Piers and raced toward them at 40 knots. Seeing crowds of people gathering along the western shoreline of Manhattan, he immediately put all three of his vessels to work ferrying people from the island.

The volunteer civilian crew of the John J. Harvey, a retired 1931 fireboat functioning as a living museum, pumped water from the Hudson River to help firefighters on shore.

The scene, says DuLong, who was an assistant engineer on the John J. Harvey, was a seemingly contradictory one of calm, confusion and chaos. Radio communications were hampered by the loss of relay antennas atop the World Trade Center, and, as Dulong says, “there were periods, with smoke, ash and debris coming down, where there were mariners operating by radar alone. Even the radars stopped functioning because there was so much particulate in the air.”

Faced with unexpected challenges, sailors improvised, “and in those moments, during the dance of coming to the seawall and then backing up to allow the next vessel to come to the seawall, it was oftentimes orchestrated by hand signals, almost like air traffic control, because they couldn’t hear each other from far away.”

As they were confronted with obstacles, mariners responded on their own initiative. When Tony Sirvent, senior pilot with the NYPD Harbor Unit, saw civilians trying to scale wooden fences to reach safety, he tied a rope to his aluminum launch and pulled the fences down. Others cut down metal and chain-link barriers.

Civilians, too, played important roles. Many offered their services to help, while, DuLong says, thousands more remained calm and compassionate toward others even as they awaited rescue.

“They’re 10-deep against the railing, pushing up, screaming for help to the boats. And then all of a sudden, somebody injured shows up in the back of that stack of 10, and people cleared the way, and they helped people onto the boat who couldn’t get on themselves,” she recalls.

By the time the official request for all available vessels was issued, dozens of ferries, tugs and cruise boats had been working together for almost two hours. When the Coast Guard arrived on the scene, DuLong says, the on-scene commander, Lt. Mike Day, made a key decision.

“The Coast Guard has all the authority in the world,” she explains. “He could have come in and started bossing everybody around and tried to take over. And he did not do that, which is such a testament to real leadership.”

Instead, he convened the Sandy Hook Pilots, who are tasked with guiding ships in and out of New York Harbor and have detailed knowledge of its underwater hazards and safe berths, and focused on providing the vessels with information and coordination.

“He would be relaying information like, ‘Don’t go into that pier because there are obstructions. This is a good place for you to dock.’ Or, ‘You’re a tugboat. You draw a lot of water. You should avoid here and go there.’”

The attitude of those who participated that day is perhaps best expressed by the late Vincent Ardolino, captain of the Amberjack V, then a charter fishing boat and later converted into a floating restaurant and party boat.

“I’m that type of person who can’t stand by and watch other people suffer, and to me they were suffering,” he said in the short documentary Boatlift: An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience.

“They wanted to get off the island and there was no way for them to get off the island other than the water … I said fine, I can take people on my boat, get in there and take people where they want to go.

“And that’s what we did.”