Twenty-five years after 9/11, the first battalion chief to send firefighters into the Twin Towers tells his story

That morning, Pfeifer was inspecting a reported odor of gas a few blocks from the Twin Towers when he heard a thunderous roar and saw a plane fly past fast and so low he could read “American” on the fuselage. It disappeared behind a high-rise and reappeared to smash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, sending huge plumes of smoke and flame into a clear blue sky. With him was Jules Naudet, a young French filmmaker, who caught the entire day on film. 

In the only existing footage documenting the first plane to hit the World Trade Center and the situation inside the towers, Pfeifer heads straight to the scene, calmly radioing dispatch to send units to the building. A mere minute later, he calls it a “deliberate attack” and orders back-up units to a staging area. 

In the midst of chaos, Pfeifer establishes an operations post in the North Tower lobby, implements an evacuation and rescue plan, and sends hundreds of firefighters up the narrow stairs of the 110-story skyscraper. Then, covered in dense black smoke, he makes the hard call to pull out firefighters with civilians trapped on the upper floors only minutes before the North Tower fell—all while keeping a close eye on Naudet, who, with his older brother, Gédéon, happened to be making a documentary that summer about a rookie firefighter’s first nine months with the Duane Street firehouse. The film they ended up making, 9/11, became one of the definitive accounts of the day.

To watch the film is to be astounded by Pfeifer’s cool-headedness as he makes what appears in hindsight to be the right call at every pivotal turn. Most people on the scene were dumbfounded, Naudet recalls. “We thought, what a horrible accident, what was the pilot thinking?” But Pfeifer had already connected all the dots: a picture-perfect day, not a cloud in the sky, a plane flying unusually low but without any apparent engine trouble. It was “aiming for the tower,” Pfeifer told dispatch. 

“That’s Chief Pfeifer in a nutshell,” says Naudet. “He thinks 50,000 feet ahead of us and we’re all playing catch-up.” 

By all accounts, Pfeifer was the ideal person—and Engine 7 and Ladder 1, the ideal team—to respond first: located blocks away, they’d been to the World Trade Center countless times, sometimes several times a day. A serious student of fire behavior and safety protocols, Pfeifer had taught courses on fire safety and commanding at high-rise building fires. No one knew the ins and outs of the building and its fire safety systems better. But being inside the tower also meant having limited awareness of what was happening elsewhere.

“People watching the news at home knew more than we did,” says Naudet, who describes operations inside the tower as a “beehive” of activity—a complex delegation of tasks as first responders filed into the building, knowing they were facing the most dangerous fire of their lives and choosing to head into the unknown. Even after the South Tower, the first to fall, prompted Pfeifer to evacuate all units, they had no idea it had completely collapsed—or that the North Tower would soon follow. 

In the days and months after 9/11, there were near-daily funerals and memorials for fallen firefighters. Among them was Lt. Kevin Pfeifer, who had checked in with his brother in the lobby; they locked eyes wordlessly before he was given the same order as other officers to head up the stairs. He spent his last moments guiding other responders and civilians to a faster exit, saving members of Chief Pfeifer’s own firehouse—who, miraculously, all survived. 

But the upper ranks of the FDNY were decimated. One of four battalion chiefs out of 23 to survive, Pfeifer stepped up as planning chief for the rescue and recovery efforts at Ground Zero, a 16-acre hole of rubble and twisted steel, where only 20 survivors were found in the collapse and nearly two million tons of debris were eventually removed. The airborne toxins would later take more lives than the attack itself. 

Shifting grief into action, he achieved a number of firsts: writing the operations plan for the largest disaster rescue, recovery, and clean-up effort at an active crime scene in history; pioneering the use of a handheld GPS tracking system that showed precisely where remains and equipment were across the rubble field; and coordinating information sharing among diverse agencies. 

By the summer of 2002, he was fast-tracked to senior leadership. Suddenly, Pfeifer had an 80- to 100-hour workweek and was responsible for leading the FDNY through a new era. Before 9/11, mostly you just had to “put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” he told Allô Dix-Huit, the official publication of the Paris Fire Brigade, in 2018. Since 9/11, he’s led responses for some of the most complex disasters in the city’s history; launched the FDNY’s Center for Counterterrorism and Emergency Preparedness; wrote the department’s first-ever strategic plan; secured millions of dollars in public funding for a new Fire Department Operations Center; and created interagency alliances where none existed. 

In essence, Pfeifer had to evolve into the consummate modern fire chief: intuitive and analytical, expert yet eager to learn, a loyal FDNY leader and a diplomat, a skilled storyteller and public figure. His 9/11 story appeared in many interviews and documentaries. But it wasn’t until he published the bestseller Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11 in 2021 that he was able to make sense of his larger journey, from former seminarian to legendary fire chief. Born in the middle of one century, he had to adapt—as did the city and the fire department—to the rapid changes of a new millennium. The oldest of three close-knit siblings, Pfeifer grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the borough of Queens. His father was a letter carrier and his mother worked in a local clothing store. “As kids, we played football in the street, from sewer cover to sewer cover,” he says. It was a place where “every neighbor knew everybody else,” as if “we were one family across the entire block.” 

To escape the summer heat, the Pfeifers headed to Breezy Point, a beach community on the Rockaway peninsula. Breezy Point is where Pfeifer got his start in public service—first as an ocean lifeguard, then as an EMT and volunteer firefighter with the “Vollies,” one of a handful of volunteer fire departments in New York City at the time. When FDNY applications arrived at the volunteer firehouse, he was quick to apply. It would take four years to hear back. By then, he was halfway through a master’s program in theology.

Pfeifer was a rookie firefighter in Brooklyn, on leave from his studies to be a Catholic priest, when he met his future wife, Ginny, an oncology nurse. He loved serving communities in need, choosing to minister at prisons and hospitals rather than teaching Sunday school, a radical choice for the time. But torn between two paths, he chose Ginny and the FDNY.

It was a choice that would align with his faith in unforeseen ways. When he was inducted into the department, he received a badge in the shape of a Maltese cross with the number 1513—the same numerals as one of his favorite Gospel readings, John 15:13: “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for a friend.” Years later, as a firefighter, Kevin wore the same badge that was passed down from his brother.

Pfeifer began his career as a firefighter at the tail end of a notorious wave of arson known as the FDNY’s war years. Landlords and developers burned thousands of homes in low-income neighborhoods for insurance money. By the time Pfeifer joined the FDNY in 1981, Mayor Ed Koch had passed anti-arson reforms, but it took another decade for the fires to die down. Pfeifer was what firefighters call a “black cloud,” a rookie whose shifts coincided with serious fire calls. Early on, he rescued an elderly woman trapped in a burning building and delivered a baby in a blizzard.

By the turn of the century, there were more ambulance calls than fires, leading the city to merge fire and emergency medical services. In the wake of 9/11, the threats grew more complex and necessitated a global approach. Pfeifer’s “black cloud” streak continued. He protected the city from more disasters—huge fires, some of which were the largest in FDNY history, train derailments, disease outbreaks, a plane landing in the Hudson, and a superstorm hurricane—than any chief before him. All the while, he questioned, “How do you lead when you’re thrown into an unexpected situation under great pressure with no script?” To find the answer, he studied in master’s degree programs at the Naval Postgraduate School (2005) and then at Harvard Kennedy School.

After completing an HKS Executive Education program for senior officials, Pfeifer won a fellowship for NYC first responders to attend the School’s Mid-Career Master in Public Administration. “I had to convince the commissioner and the mayor to let me go,” he says. “I basically turned down a promotion to go to the Kennedy School.” Once on campus, he attended every conference and speaker engagement he could, soaking in as much as possible. He applied what he learned about negotiation from Brian Mandell, the Mohamed Kamal Senior Lecturer in Negotiation and Public Policy at HKS, and from classmate and former FBI agent Christopher Voss to collaborate with other agencies to recover the “Miracle on the Hudson” plane that landed safely in 2009—and then turned that story into course material for students when he later taught crisis leadership classes.

HKS enlarged his sense of what was possible. He became a scholar, publishing widely in his field, and began to teach and learn from other cities’ crisis response leaders around the world. He was invited to guest-teach crisis leadership courses in the HKS Executive Education program by Herman “Dutch” Leonard, Baker Professor of Public Management at HKS and Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Arnold Howitt, Pfeifer’s faculty advisor at the time and faculty co-director with Leonard of the HKS Program on Crisis Leadership. Pfeifer has all the qualities of an effective teacher, says Howitt, who has traveled with him to guest lecture at Tsinghua University and other institutions in China. “He is a consummate professional with vast experience, an analytical thinker, a provocative speaker, and a warm human being who relates easily to many types of people.” 

Through research and practice, Pfeifer has come to define the art of crisis leadership as the capacity to connect, collaborate, and coordinate. He later forged these principles into a challenge coin, a medallion passed from hand to hand to signify camaraderie among members of the military, fire departments, and other professionals who put their lives on the line to protect others. 

“It takes a group to lead,” he says. “[Modern leadership] is not the old, hierarchical, giving orders from the top.” The key crisis leadership lessons from 9/11, Pfeifer emphasizes in his memoir, are to “ensure that responders are connected to critical information, agencies collaborate for innovative solutions to novel challenges, and teams coordinate to implement those solutions.” 

For years, he worked to mend the historic feud between the fire and police departments that stemmed from turf wars at emergency scenes. As the chief of counterterrorism, he invited law enforcement officials to lunch often and made sure fire officers and police officers got to know each other. Over many shared meals, the two agencies developed procedures to protect the city from terrorist incidents—a lesson in the importance of breaking bread together he learned in part from his French friend, Jules Naudet.

Naudet, who remains close with Pfeifer, helped facilitate many collaborations with the Paris Fire Brigade, the BRI SWAT team, trauma center doctors, the mayor of Paris, the French prime minister, and other officials. After the November 13 attacks at several Paris venues, including the Bataclan concert hall, 2015, and the Notre Dame Cathedral fire in 2019, Pfeifer led a contingent of HKS professors and American fire chiefs to meet with French counterparts, discussing lessons learned and running preparedness drills together in Paris and New York, and invited French crisis leaders to HKS. For his efforts, he was inducted into France’s National Order of Merit in 2020—and became likely the first American to scale the outside of the Eiffel Tower and rappel down. 

At HKS, Pfeifer also learned how to develop his story. “Before Harvard, I told my story a few times,” he says. “But by telling it at HKS, it took on new meaning in the context of exchanging tales of purpose, hope, and collective action.” Long drawn to the power of narrative—both the church and the FDNY have rich storytelling traditions—Pfeifer believes stories are the gateway to social change. 

“If you want to change the world, you do so through storytelling,” he asserts. For survivors of terrorism, collectively sharing experiences can turn pain into purpose and inspire the hope to bring about change, he remarked in his speech from the General Assembly Hall at the United Nations Global Congress of Victims of Terrorism in 2022. The event led to the launch of the U.N. Victims of Terrorism Associations Network (VoTAN), which unites victims and survivors worldwide, supports their rights, and drives efforts to prevent terrorism. 

The act of creating meaning and purpose through storytelling was critical to the FDNY’s resilience after 9/11. Such resilience is built ahead of time, Laura Kavanagh, the FDNY’s first female fire commissioner, learned during her decade at the department: “It’s either there or you don’t have it the day after.” And the 160-year-old fire service’s practice of sharing stories and bonding around a firehouse meal contributed to the organization’s strength and healing. As Pfeifer describes in his memoir, “recovering from trauma requires turning memories into new dreams.” 

Pfeifer’s ability not only to recover and return to work but to keep dreaming of a better future defines his leadership, says Kavanagh. He was one of her earliest mentors at the FDNY, encouraging her to pursue a public role despite her preference to work behind the scenes. In 2023, she pulled him out of retirement to serve as her first deputy commissioner. In a department often led by big personalities and loud voices, Pfeifer and Kavanagh shared a quiet and singular focus on ensuring a better-equipped, safer, and more versatile organization years down the line. She explains, “Joe taught me that the ultimate lesson in all the loss we’ve had is to think, what is the future? How do we build on behalf of those who are no longer here? How can we be a better agency 5 or 10 years from now?” 

Now two years into his second retirement, Pfeifer is laying the groundwork for a new generation of crisis leaders as a senior fellow at the Kennedy School and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. On his agenda is a new chapter for the paperback version of Ordinary Heroes, to be released in September 2026. Every Sept. 11, he is reminded of how ordinary people became heroes through simple acts of kindness. “The courage of ordinary heroes is in each one of us,” he says. “And each of us, sooner or later, will be presented with a moment to be one.” 

By the reflecting pools of the Memorial Plaza stands a pear tree, the sole tree to survive 9/11. For 10 years, its seeds have been sent to communities impacted by tragedies around the world—Paris, Uvalde, Parkland, Oslo and Utøya, Christchurch, Ukraine, and more—to symbolize resilience and rebirth. 

“You carry these events with you forever, no matter who you are,” says Pfeifer. But like seeds, the stories, once told, “carry themselves into worlds we may never know,” inspiring hope—and with hope, change.

—

Photographs by David Sanders and Amr Alfiky/REUTERS