Louis Calderon: Portrait of a 9/11 First Responder

By all accounts, Sept. 11, 2001 was a beautiful day. The temperature hovered in the mid-70s, and the sky was crystal clear. But Louis Calderon doesn’t remember it that way. He remembers thinking that it must have been more than 100 degrees—that in fact, it must have been one of the hottest days he had ever felt.

It wasn’t until later that he realized the heat had nothing to do with the weather. It was from the fire, raging from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, hundreds of feet above where he stood on the ground, working as volunteer with the Little Neck-Douglaston Community Ambulance Corps.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Calderon had planned to take the day off from his job as crew chief at the ambulance corps. He’d just returned from a week-long vacation in Pennsylvania, and was still asleep in his Douglaston home when his wife called to tell him what happened.

Calderon leapt into action without hesitation.

“I immediately called my partner at the Little Neck Ambulance Corps. I said ‘Scott, a plane just crashed into World Trade Center. Let’s go.’ He said ‘Absolutely.’”

They arrived at the intersection of West and Vesey Streets, right at the base of the towers, just as the second plane hit.

The two went straight to work, washing soot from eyes and tending minor wounds. The air was already thick with dust and debris, and it was around that time that Calderon noticed how hot it was.

In fact, Calderon remembers almost every detail from that day.

At one point, he stopped to help a firefighter who was having trouble breathing. He placed an oxygen mask over the firefighter’s mouth and was preparing to take him to the hospital, when he felt a tug on his shirt. It was his partner, Scott.

“Louie, watch out,” Calderon recalls his partner saying. “The tower is falling.”

Calderon didn’t understand. How could the tower fall? That’s when he saw the cloud, a huge ball of smoke and debris and God knows what else, barreling toward him at what seemed like 10,000 miles per hour. 

They ran. For ten blocks they ran, eventually staging at Chelsea Piers, waiting for people to help. But nobody came. Anyone with injuries had scattered, and everyone else had perished in the collapse.  

As for the firefighter Calderon had stopped to help?

“I don’t know what happened to him,” Calderon said. “Was he able to get up and run? I hope. I just left him there.”

“That hurt me for a long time.”

In the days and weeks following the attacks, Calderon, like many Americans, struggled to process what he had seen. He was repulsed by the garish displays of patriotism that cropped up suddenly around the country.  

“I couldn’t look at American flags. I thought people were being fake,” he said. “Everyone singing ‘God Bless America’ and all that crap. I didn’t like it. I don’t know why. I still don’t know why.”

Ten years later, Calderon still suffers from what happened that Tuesday morning. The images of what he saw, smelled and felt remain vivid in his mind. He can still hear the loud thuds and bangs that filled the air as the towers collapsed, which, he was told, was the sound of bodies hitting the ground.

He’s more fearful of people now, too. He took his first plane ride in ten years only a few weeks ago.

He has no plans to revisit the site where he remained, for days after the attack, digging in the rubble, where he was only able to find and rescue one firefighter.

When he heard about the memorial museum set to open this coming Monday, Calderon said that while it sounds like it will be lovely, he has no intention of visiting.

“I remember after 9/11, we would go to the hospital and drop patients off. And there’d be fliers hung up on every wall possible, saying missing, missing—it had the people’s names. Those signs were everywhere. And I heard they’re going to bring those back, and put those up.”

“No,” he said. “I can’t go back there.”

On Sunday, Calderon plans to do what he does every year on Sept. 11: He will turn on his television, watch the coverage and grieve. He has two children now, a daughter who is 8 years old, and a 4-year-old son. He still doesn’t know how to tell to them what happened, nor how to explain to them what, on the TV, has their father so rattled.

Despite the grief, Calderon said some beautiful things emerged from that day, too. Strangers were friendly to each other. When Calderon stopped for coffee at the local deli, the owner waved away payment, thanking him for his services. When Calderon crossed a bridge, the attendant would let him pass through for free.

“That blew my mind,” Calderon said. “In Manhattan, people aren’t nice.  Everyone was holding the doors for other people. I’d be on the ambulance and I’d get a ‘thank you.’ You never get a ‘thank you.'”

The kindness held out for some time, though slowly, people started to return to their normal, well, New York selves.  

“It lasted awhile. At least a year. And then… New York is New York. It’ll always be New York,” he said.

Though the 10th anniversary holds no particular significance to him, Calderon says he hopes that some of that kindness, once so rampant around the city, will make a comeback, if only temporarily.

“I’m hoping New Yorkers will go back to the way they were,” he said.

He also hopes people will again appreciate the first responders who eschewed their safety on that terrible day, and went straight for the scene that everyone else was so desperate to leave.

Lots of firefighters lost their lives helping others, Calderon said. But less often acknowledged are the other first responders who lost their lives, too.

“It’s about the 343 firefighters," he said. "See, I know that number. But do you know how many EMTs lost their lives? How many paramedics lost their lives? No. Cops? No. Everyone knows that 343.”

“I mean, no disrespect to the firefighters. Hey, what they did is phenomenal. I was taught to run away from a fire, that’s what my mama taught me. Firefighters run the other way. They ran in.”

But Calderon ran in, too. And while he made it out, there were many others who didn’t.

“I think that’s what the ten-year anniversary will do,” he said. “I think people will start to appreciate the fire, the police, the EMTs again.”

“It would be nice to get the ‘thank you’s’ again.”