September 11, 2026

By Mary Beth Gahan

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Michael Bassano was on the 20th floor of 55 Water Street in Lower Manhattan. Just before 9 a.m., his boss pointed to the windows that faced west and said a small plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

From 10 blocks away, Bassano, a volunteer police officer and EMT, saw the amount of smoke pluming from the building. It wasn’t a small plane, he thought. He knew he had to go. His help would be needed on the site.

He walked north from his office toward Central Park and across the 59th street bridge to his precinct station to get his gear. There were people standing and walking around in the streets.

Another plane had crashed into the South Tower and no one knew what would be the next target. Bassano wondered if bridges were on the list. He started to run to get to the other side as fast as he could.

“It was frightening, period,” Bassano recalled.

It was a five-mile walk to his station, where he waited for the rest of his team to get there so they could take a truck to the scene. By the time they arrived at the World Trade Center, it was about 3:30 p.m.

Bassano, now a Captain with Double Oak Volunteer Fire Department, had various jobs at Ground Zero in the six months he worked there. He mostly handled logistics – making sure chainsaws, rebar cutters, light towers and trucks were charged or gassed up and ready to go. In later months, he directed family members and school children who came to view the site.

But sometimes he was searching. The first night he was on the pile is the one he remembers the most.

“It was a surreal atmosphere,” he said. “Twisted steel all over the place. The smell of the World Trade Center was remarkable, and you know, I'll never forget that.”

Face masks and other supplies had been stretched thin during the day, so they made do with what they had.

The moon was bright that night. They had handheld flashlights. As he was working, he thought about Silvercup, a Long Island recording studio he knew about that he was sure had large film lights that could illuminate the site.

An hour later, big trucks arrived.

“They put their boomers up and then there was light on the scene,” Bassano said. “It was amazing.”

In all, he spent 400 hours at the site of the attacks. Some years he marks the anniversary by attending a memorial service in Grapevine. There are statues there of a flight crew, police officer and firefighter. When the last one was added in 2013, it was modeled using some of Bassano’s features. It has his face and mustache, but it also has a full head of hair. Bassano is bald.

76-year-old Bassano flew from Dallas to New York on Wednesday for medical appointments. Every year around this time, he has a full day of exams with CAT scans, a pulmonary test, and a dermatology checkup. He has prostate cancer, skin cancer, and nodules growing in his lungs.

“I’ve got a bunch of illnesses, I call them diseases, that I got from the World Trade Center,” Bassano said.

He plans to go to the World Trade Center Memorial with friends on Friday to reflect on the passing of 25 years.

“We were all together. That was the mood,” he said of the country in the weeks after 9/11. “You know, when you look at it now, we’re all pulled apart.”