Ash fell like snow as New York City correction officers marched toward Ground Zero, where heat radiated from the pile of twisted steel and concrete left by the collapse of the Twin Towers. The sound of firefighters’ distress alarms pierced through the debris all around them.
Wearing baseball caps and equipped with little more than work gloves, the officers split into pairs and began searching by hand.
As they approached the site, Capt. Phil Rizzo (ret.) turned to Capt. Eli Perez, his partner at the time, and said they might be marching the officers to their deaths.
“With his typical smile, he turned to me and said, ‘We all gotta go sometime,’” Rizzo recalled. “So, I thought to myself, you know, I’m with the right people here.”
The correction officers kept moving.
Around them, PASS alarms on firefighters’ Scott Air-Paks continued to beep. The safety devices sound when a firefighter stops moving.
“The eerie part of it is we could hear the beeping, so we knew people were there,” Rizzo said. “We dug for hours, and we didn’t find anybody that night.”
It was the beginning of a New York City Department of Correction response that would involve more than 1,000 uniformed and civilian employees and extend well beyond the pile. They operated boats, delivered generators and supplies, helped establish a command center and staffed a temporary morgue. At Fresh Kills landfill, they searched for human remains, personal belongings and evidence in World Trade Center debris carried from Ground Zero by truck and barge. At the same time, the department continued operating Rikers Island.
Twenty-five years later, Rizzo stood beside Warden Richard Palmer (ret.) at the department’s 9/11 memorial on Rikers Island. As they moved along the wall, they retraced the response that brought them there, stopping at the names of colleagues who had served beside them.
The back bears the names of 43 uniformed and civilian employees who died from illnesses connected to their World Trade Center work.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks on Sept. 11. No NYC Department of Correction member was killed in the attacks. The losses came later.
Palmer and Rizzo are still telling the stories behind the names, preserving a part of the response they say remains largely absent from the public history of 9/11.
When Manhattan became nighttime
Palmer’s morning began at 60 Hudson Street, which is where the NYCDOC headquarters was located. It was primary election day in New York City. The sky was clear.
When Commissioner William Fraser called to say a plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers, Palmer assumed it was a small aircraft. The weather was too clear for him to imagine otherwise.
Fraser directed Palmer and the other uniformed staff downstairs to assist the NYPD as emergency vehicles converged on Lower Manhattan. Correction officers helped people flee the area as crowds streamed north.
Then the second plane struck.
From the street, Palmer saw people trapped above the flames begin jumping from the South Tower — something he said he lives with every day.
“I can’t even picture myself being in a position where you’re either gonna burn up or you gotta jump and people decided to jump, and that sticks with me to this day.”
As fears grew that the towers could collapse, Palmer directed the uniformed staff back inside 60 Hudson Street. From the commissioner’s office, he watched the South Tower fall at 9:59 a.m. The North Tower followed 29 minutes later.
FILE - In this Sept. 11, 2001, file photo, smoke rises from the burning twin towers of the World Trade Center after hijacked planes crashed into the towers in New York City. Sept. 11 victims’ relatives are greeting the news of President Donald Trump’s now-canceled plan for secret talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents with mixed feelings. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
Richard Drew/AP
Agency escorts load an empty flag-draped stretcher, symbolizing the missing, into an ambulance during a ceremony which officially ended more than eight months of cleanup and recovery efforts, Thursday, May 30, 2002, at the World Trade Center disaster site in New York. The ceremony began at 10:29 a.m., the exact time that the second Tower collapsed on Sept. 11. (AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett)
SUZANNE PLUNKETT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A firefighter carries a bag used to collect human remains amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York, Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2001. The cleanup and search for victims from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack continues. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
LM OTERO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
NYC DOC Members of Service
“Manhattan became nighttime,” Palmer recalled. “And we’re just sitting there, just quiet, like we couldn’t believe what we had just witnessed.”
Palmer and Fraser made their way toward the site to determine how the Department of Correction could help. What they found prompted a call to Rikers Island, a largely self-contained complex with storehouses, emergency equipment and transportation resources.
Workers loaded trucks with body bags, blankets, washcloths, towels, food and water. Palmer estimated the department had about 800 body bags in storage because of Rikers Island’s proximity to LaGuardia Airport.
A convoy then began moving toward Lower Manhattan.
Marching toward the pile
At the time of the attacks, Rizzo was at the Emergency Service Unit compound on Rikers Island. From there, he could see smoke rising from Lower Manhattan.
Two captains and 20 of the unit’s most highly trained officers deployed first. Rizzo and other captains remained behind to lock down the island’s facilities because officials did not yet know the scope of the attack.
The lockdown process took hours. When it was complete, Rizzo joined two captains and more than 30 correction officers on a bus to Lower Manhattan. They reached Stuyvesant High School shortly before 7 World Trade Center collapsed, then marched into the ash and began searching.
“At the time, it was like it was snowing from the ash, and we could feel the heat,” Rizzo recalled. “We saw police officers, we saw firefighters with Scott Air-Paks running around. Everybody was in chaos.”
When the team reached the site, the heat made it difficult to work.
“We split up in twos and just started searching. All we had was some work gloves and baseball caps.”
The correction officers searched the debris by hand through the night without finding anyone.
As they worked alongside responders from other agencies, the usual distinctions between agencies and ranks fell away.
“When you were down there, there was no rank,” Palmer said. “You just worked next to somebody. You didn’t know if he was FDNY, FBI, correction, PD, fire. It didn’t matter.”
They were called back to Stuyvesant High School around 1 or 2 a.m., where Red Cross workers used hoses to wash soot from their eyes, hats and clothing.
The next morning, the crew worked another 12-hour tour on the pile.
The officers had been so focused on finding survivors that they had little sense of what was happening across the rest of New York City. As their bus traveled back toward Rikers Island after the second tour, they saw people lining the streets and cheering for responders.
“We were kind of taken back by that because we didn’t really know what was going on,” Rizzo said. “And till this day, I don’t know if there was ever a time we were so united.”
A response on land and water
While correction officers searched the pile, the department’s response spread across Lower Manhattan and the surrounding waterways.
Palmer said three boats from NYCDOC’s harbor unit evacuated thousands of people stranded in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. In the days that followed, the department’s 52-foot boat traveled to New Jersey for supplies and carried them back to Ground Zero and Stuyvesant High School.
On land, the collapse had left the area around Ground Zero in darkness.
“There wasn’t a streetlight to be found,” Palmer said.
Rikers Island had portable generators available in case its facilities lost power. The department sent around 80 of them to illuminate the response area, Palmer said.
“They were shocked that we had that kind of equipment,” he said.
Department plumbers, electricians, maintenance workers and other civilian employees helped turn Stuyvesant High School into a working command center. The communications unit established telephone and fax lines for the responding agencies.
The work extended far outside the city’s jails.
“Nobody thought correction,” Palmer said. “Correction is more than just jails. You know, our emergency service, we have fire safety, we have transportation.”
The department still had to operate those jails. For approximately six months, the Emergency Service Unit ran separate daily deployments to Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills landfill, where NYCDOC members searched World Trade Center debris for human remains and personal belongings.
“We still had the same problems that we had before,” Rizzo said.
Searching debris for human remains
Almost immediately after the attacks, dump trucks began carrying around 1.5 million tons of debris from Ground Zero to the recently closed Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.
For around six months, the NYCDOC sent teams to the site each day. A captain and 10 to 12 correction officers received assignments that took them across designated search areas and alongside conveyor belts carrying debris lifted by heavy machinery.
“They would search through it looking for any kind of personal property or any body parts,” Palmer said.
Recovered items were placed in evidence buckets and taken to an evidence trailer, where they were logged.
By the time the search ended, more than 2,300 human remains were matched to over 700 victims, while search teams recovered more than 50,000 personal effects, according to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
“Everybody had a task, and they went in there for the same goal,” Palmer said. “Trying to find closure for a family or find one of their partners.”
The first correction officers assigned to the landfill had nowhere to rest except the bus that brought them there. When supervisors were asked who could improve the conditions, they chose Capt. Jerry Cariello.
Cariello secured a trailer and a television so the officers had somewhere to go during breaks.
His efforts earned him a nickname he carried proudly for the rest of his career: the “Don of the Dumps.”
The recovery operation also extended to a temporary morgue outside Bellevue Hospital. Department staff initially helped establish the site, setting up tents, lights, fax machines and other equipment.
Within two days, trailers equipped with cooling units and shelves arrived. As ambulances brought body bags from Ground Zero, correction officers unloaded them, attached identifying tags and documented where each was placed inside the trailers.
The records allowed the medical examiner’s office to track the remains as it worked to make identifications through DNA provided by victims’ families.
The morgue operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Some correction officers volunteered there during the first days of the response and later became part of its regular staffing. They continued receiving remains even after the work at Ground Zero shifted from rescue to recovery.
The funerals for 343 FDNY members soon became another part of the response. Because city officials could not attend every service, Commissioner Fraser represented the mayor, with Palmer accompanying him.
Some days, they attended two or three funerals while continuing to check on correction officers at Ground Zero, the temporary morgue and the Staten Island landfill.
“We’d go to the morgue, we’d go to the landfill, and in between that we’d go to a funeral,” Palmer recalled. “It was a busy couple months right after 9/11.”
In the years that followed, NYCDOC members who participated in the response began developing World Trade Center-related illnesses.
The names behind the response
Many of the illnesses represented on the memorial trace back to the earliest days of the response, when officers worked without masks or other respiratory protection.
Palmer spent three days inside 60 Hudson Street, where the windows could not be opened. He said dust from Ground Zero entered the building through its ventilation system.
“We ate there, we drank there,” Palmer said. “We didn’t have masks and everything in the beginning, and that’s why a lot of us got sick from working down there.”
Standing before the memorial, Palmer and Rizzo stopped at the names one by one. There were Emergency Service Unit officers who spent months on the pile, correction officers who staffed the morgue, K-9 and transportation officers, investigators, tradespeople and other civilian employees who worked inside the hot zone.
William Balinski and Dennis Kelly worked at the temporary morgue. Fernando Gonzalez spent months at Ground Zero. Peter Murphy was a K-9 officer assigned to the response. Brian Clark was a plumber whose team helped get Stuyvesant High School operating as a command center.
Commissioner Fraser’s name is on the wall, too. He rose through every uniformed rank before leading the department. Palmer remembered him simply: “He was a good boss.” The street outside the memorial now bears his name: William J. Fraser Commissioner Way.
Each name carried a longer story.
Cariello, the “Don of the Dumps,” died after developing neck and blood cancers. As he underwent treatment, Rizzo was experiencing persistent pain in his own neck. Their conversations pushed Rizzo to keep looking for answers after doctors initially could not determine the cause.
Cariello died while Rizzo was still trying to determine what was wrong. Two or three weeks later, Rizzo was diagnosed with head and neck cancer.
“For some untold reason I’m still here and he’s not,” Rizzo said. “... One of the reasons why I come and tell these stories is because of people like Jerry and other people on the wall.”
Capt. Jorge Torres’ name brought Rizzo back to the beginning of his career.
When Rizzo’s daughter was born while he was in the academy, Torres added an extra $50 to a card for the new father. He joked that by the time she married, Rizzo would need a walker or wheelchair to accompany her down the aisle.
As the years passed, Torres continued asking Rizzo whether his daughter had gotten married.
“The crazy thing is, my daughter’s gonna get married next year, and George is not here to witness it,” Rizzo said. “But I tell my daughter the story.”
The list of names continues to grow. Capt. Jacqueline Payden, who died in 2016, and Capt. Thomas Weadock, who died in January 2026, are expected to be added in September, bringing the total to 45. Palmer said another 25 to 30 department members have cancer or are in remission.
‘Everywhere we went, we told our story’
After retiring, Palmer and Rizzo continued supporting department employees affected by their response to Sept. 11.
They traveled to Washington, often with the FealGood Foundation, as responders fought for federal health legislation and benefits. Palmer said over 12 years, they made around 100 trips and participated in more than 1,300 meetings.
They also helped former colleagues and their families document assignments, navigate illnesses and apply for assistance. Palmer remains in contact with many of the families represented on the memorial. Some of the widows now meet as a group, connected by losses that came years after the attacks.
Palmer advocated for Cariello’s family and other DOC families with young children, contacting the Tunnel to Towers Foundation on their behalf. He said the foundation paid off the mortgages of four families represented on the memorial.
Twenty-five years after correction officers first marched into the ash, the illnesses and losses continue. So does the effort to preserve their place in the public record.
“My main reason to come and tell the story is because the people on this wall here,” Palmer said. “We do it to honor them and to let people know what they did.”
At the department’s memorial on Rikers Island, the message Palmer and Rizzo have carried for 25 years is etched across the front: “We were there ... We remember.”
