"From blue sky into Armageddon." FDNY's Rich Naviasky on 9/11, Deutsche Bank, and the illness the job wouldn't cover
Twenty-five years after 9/11, retired FDNY firefighter Rich Naviasky walks us from a blue-sky Tuesday morning into Armageddon — and everything that came after. This is ground truth from a first responder who ran toward the pile, worked the pit, survived the Deutsche Bank fire, and was then told his 9/11-linked illness wasn't line of duty. It's a story about brotherhood, memory, and what this country still owes the people who answered the call.
Twenty-five years on, the stories from 9/11 are the ones we cannot let calcify into a slogan. In this replay conversation, Paul sits down…
The Brief
→ Four things from today’s episodeRich's minute-by-minute account of 9/11. the phone call from his father, commandeering an MTA bus on Queens Boulevard, and walking into ash and smoke with a length of hose on his shoulder
Going down on his own time, day after day, with the surviving guys from Rescue 4. and what "access" to the pile really looked like
March at ground zero. the southeast ramp, the grappler operators he calls "absolute surgeons," and recovering a fully intact firefighter whose identity he still doesn't know
The Deutsche Bank fire of 2007. 28 Maydays, Joey Graffagnino and Robert Beddia, and the exposures nobody wants to talk about
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