Nebraska firefighters remember the rubble, remains and resilience of responding to 9/11

He and his partner, Keith Houfek, were virtually alone on the roads surrounding the Pentagon, the familiar five-sided structure that so often served as a television backdrop to military action abroad.

“It was like a ghost town,” Huff said. “No traffic on the Beltway. No traffic in Arlington. No traffic anywhere.”

Police waved their red Lincoln Fire and Rescue vehicle through without asking questions or checking their credentials.

It was the morning of Sept. 12, 2001 — Huff’s 48th birthday.

The sun began to rise over the complex. The Pentagon was burning.

He thought: How did I end up here?

The answer started a decade earlier, with a letter and a three-ring binder full of federal forms.

In 1991, Huff helped turn a group of local firefighters into Nebraska Task Force 1, one of the nation’s original 25 urban search-and-rescue teams. He helped write the rules for how the national network of highly trained first responders would operate.

The program was first built for earthquakes and saw its mission broadened after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Then came 9/11.

A decade after Huff filled out that application package, he led the search and rescue response to the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon. Another 72 members of his team deployed to New York shortly after the World Trade Center fell.

Twenty-five years later, as a nation remembers 9/11, Huff recalled how Nebraska’s involvement started with that stack of forms.

The three-ring binder

Huff had no childhood dream of firefighting, no romantic notions of heroism.

When Huff applied to Lincoln fire, he was looking for something far more ordinary: a steady job. He stumbled into what the now-retired chief calls a satisfying career.

By the time the 1991 letter that spawned Task Force 1 arrived from the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency, Huff had worked his way up from responder to assistant fire chief.

The letter said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was looking for local firefighters to participate in a new national disaster-response program.

A devastating 1988 earthquake in Armenia prompted American leaders to consider what would happen if a similar natural disaster struck the U.S. or its territories.

The federal government had equipment and money. But local firefighters had the expertise to search collapsed buildings and rescue survivors.

Then-Lincoln Fire Chief Mike Merwick handed the letter to Huff and asked him to look into it.

Basing such a team in Nebraska made sense to Huff. Nebraska was unlikely to suffer that kind of major earthquake, assuming the New Madrid and Humboldt faults behaved. The state’s central location made it easier to send firefighters wherever they were needed. And the program would provide local firefighters specialized training, creating a rescue equivalent to police SWAT teams.

“I didn't have a clue what we were getting into,” Huff told The World-Herald in August 2026.

He emailed the department, asking whether anyone might want to participate.

“I thought we’d be lucky if we got a handful,” he said.

About 90 firefighters — a third of the city department at the time — volunteered.

“What I saw was the opportunity to go help people, and everybody that raised their hand back then, I think, felt the same way,” Huff said.

Huff asked FEMA for more information. FEMA sent back an application package large enough to fill a three-ring binder. Huff filled it out.

“That’s a lot of work," Huff said. "But I was dumb enough to do it."

It turned out no other Midwestern department applied, he said.

Because mail marked "urban search and rescue" kept landing on Huff's desk, he quickly found himself helping build the national program.

FEMA had no manual explaining how to assemble, equip and lead a disaster-response team. The leaders of those early task forces helped write it.

Eventually, they formed three Incident Support Teams — Red, White and Blue — each with task force leaders and experts from around the country. Those teams rotated on-site command responsibilities when FEMA deployed them.

Huff, a Cornhuskers fan, was assigned to lead the Red team.

Oklahoma City

For four years, Nebraska's team trained for a major earthquake.

Then, on April 19, 1995, domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s bomb tore through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

“We never, ever anticipated a bombing in the continental United States,” Huff said. “It was not on anybody’s radar in our responding world.”

FEMA did not deploy Nebraska's task force to Oklahoma City, but Huff himself went to lead the Incident Support Team.

The collapse looked different than the earthquake scenarios for which the teams had trained. Earthquake collapses often leave pockets of space where people are trapped alive. The Murrah Building had pancaked on itself, leaving far fewer survivable spaces.

For the first time, the team worked inside an active crime scene, which required added care to preserve evidence.

Law enforcement officers combed through the rubble looking for clues. They used a screen made from a two-by-four frame and quarter-inch wire, shaking debris through it like a flour sifter.

“Believe it or not, they’d find ... things that can help them identify who did it and, ultimately, why they did it,” Huff said. “That was always the big question.”

But for the task force, evidence preservation was secondary to saving lives.

“Oklahoma City opened our eyes,” Huff said. “Now all of a sudden, it's not just earthquakes.”

'Everybody was in shock'

Huff was in a command staff meeting at Lincoln Fire and Rescue Station 14 in the Highlands neighborhood on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when a young firefighter entered the room.

A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, the firefighter said. Turn on the TV. 

The first image Huff saw was of the Pentagon, which a plane had also just struck.

“Something's going on,” Huff remembered thinking. “Two planes, two locations, something's going on.”

Then his FEMA pager went off. The message said his team was activated for the Pentagon and included a line he’d never seen before: Do not call back.

Huff called back. He told the federal program office he was bringing Houfek, a task force member and communications specialist. Huff got a terse acknowledgment before the line went dead.

He called his wife to say he was going, estimating he’d be gone for a few days, based on the damage he had seen on TV.

He and Houfek were on their way to Arlington, Virginia, by 11 a.m. They drove cross-country, taking turns at the wheel for roughly 20 hours straight.

Huff and Houfek approached the Pentagon around 6 a.m. on Sept. 12. They saw the smoke, but what struck Huff was what he didn’t see in a city known for traffic: people, cars, any sign of life beyond the occasional police officer.

Then they reached the Pentagon, and no one stopped them.

“Everybody was in shock ...,” Huff said. “I drove to within 100 feet of the Pentagon in a fire car from Lincoln, Nebraska, without being challenged by anybody.”

'Planes are falling from the sky'

Hundreds of vehicles were arriving at the same time. Firefighters had been battling the blaze for nearly 24 hours.

Huff opened the vehicle door to the sound of pumpers, people shouting and firefighters dragging equipment and debris. Crews were still advancing hose lines and putting out spot fires.

He quickly realized securing the building would take longer than expected. The destruction was much larger and more complex than the “little gash” he and the rest of the country saw on national broadcasts.

The Pentagon is enormous: five sides of nearly 1,000 feet each, 6.5 million square feet of floor space and 17.5 miles of corridors.

It hid the scale of the roughly football field-sized damage, which touched all five stories of the western wedge and stretched more than 400 feet wide with a 240-foot deep collapse zone, Huff said.

“Didn't realize that that little gash was about the size of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City,” Huff told The World-Herald.

He could see where the Boeing 757 had hit the ground just before the wall, gouging the grass and knocking down light poles in its path. It plowed into the building, destroying columns and beams and triggering a collapse that expanded as fire and damage weakened remaining supports.

The search and rescue teams Huff would lead arrived from nearby Fairfax, Virginia, and Virginia Beach. Huff said four firefighters drove up from Miami with lights and sirens on the whole way.

“I understand it screwed up Miami's fire statistics that year because they had a 10- or 12-hour response time for an emergency,” he joked.

About an hour after Huff arrived, he and his teams entered the building through an intact portion and started toward the collapse zone.

Inside, they waded through 6 inches of standing water from the firefight, still-smoldering debris and victims’ remains where they had fallen.

“There was zero security — and I'm not being critical,” Huff said. “I'm just saying there was nobody there to stop us. There was just nobody there. They were gone. Everybody evacuated. They were told to get out of here. Planes are falling from the sky. Get out of the federal building if you're in one.”

He said the federal government quickly tightened security over the next 24 hours, posting armed guards throughout the premises, requiring ID and blocking public access with a 6-foot-tall chain-link fence.

Huff met every six hours with the site's incident command team, including Arlington County Assistant Fire Chief Jim Schwartz, FBI representatives and a three-star general.

They had to secure the building enough for people to return to work the next day.

“Early on, the … military decided they were going to be closed one day,” Huff said. “That was the 12th of September — the only day the Pentagon has ever closed.”

The general on the team put soldiers around the perimeter of the collapse zone to keep Pentagon employees from wandering into danger.

Rescue teams began rebuilding the damaged portion of the structure from the inside out.

Where American Airlines Flight 77, scheduled to fly from Virginia to Los Angeles, had destroyed floor-supporting columns, crews built heavy-timber boxes around each one, using thousands of 8-by-8 beams cut and wedged tightly to keep the building from collapsing on responders below.

The impact had carried the aircraft deep into the structure. At one inner ring, the plane's nose punched through the wall, leaving an opening that responders later used as an access point. Near that spot, they recovered the plane’s nose gear and black box.

Every load of debris was hauled to the Pentagon’s north parking lot, where investigators sifted for evidence.

Huff said his teams found no survivors while he was there, but as they moved debris and dug deeper, they found people or pieces of people who had tried to take shelter.

When the teams found victims' remains, everybody in the area stopped what they were doing, and a military honor guard removed them before work continued. That was the cadence of the Pentagon response during Huff’s two weeks there.

Cut lumber. Stabilize. Move debris. Search. Stop for removal of human remains. Repeat.

“It becomes … kind of like a battle rhythm,” Huff said.

By the time Huff returned to Lincoln, other members of Task Force 1 were preparing to deploy to the World Trade Center, Lincoln’s fire chief with them.

Huff unpacked his bags, took a shower and went to bed. The next morning, he was back at work, running Lincoln Fire and Rescue while 72 of his task force teammates deployed to Manhattan.

Task Force 1

Like Huff, then-task force safety officer Pat Borer hadn't grown up dreaming of becoming a firefighter. He was a high school physical education teacher and football coach when he decided he wanted a different way to serve his community. He was one of the original 90 Lincoln firefighters who volunteered for the new task force in 1991.

Borer said he started as one of the grunt workers who entered a damaged building first to secure it for the rest of the team — a position lovingly known in the task force as a “rock breaker.” Huff later recruited him as a safety officer.

Borer walked into Lincoln Fire and Rescue Station 2 near the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s East Campus on Sept. 11, 2001, and found the kitchen was empty. That was unusual. It was normally a hub where the team gathered.

Borer continued through the kitchen into the dayroom. Everyone was watching television. He looked at the TV and saw a plane hit the second Trade Center tower.

For a moment, he thought it couldn’t be real. But as the news coverage continued, the reality set in. It was an attack.

The task force firefighters waited for the call.

For nearly two weeks, Borer mentally prepared. He thought about what hazards his responders would face, what chemicals would have been in the collapsed buildings and how to protect his team.

The 72-person team of Nebraska firefighters, engineers, doctors and experts flew on a military aircraft to New Jersey in mid-September. From there, they piled into a bus that drove them to Manhattan.

Borer was stunned by the security in New York. Armed military and law enforcement officials lined the streets and sidewalks surrounding the Javits Center — the convention center where the urban search and rescue teams and some FEMA leadership were staying. Two checkpoint perimeters surrounded the center.

Borer didn’t understand the reason for so much security until it dawned on him: They were preparing for another attack.

As that understanding sank in, he thought: What has our world come to?

The Javits Center had become a temporary home for teams from across the country. Ballrooms and conference rooms filled with cots. The windows were blacked out so night-shift responders could sleep during the day.

Nebraska’s task force was assigned to work with the remaining members of the New York City Fire Department’s heavy rescue teams, splitting into two groups that helped in different areas of the city. Borer’s half of the team traveled through the city with FDNY, assessing high-risk locations and potential targets of further attack.

“Their people would kind of brief us, and … we were basically waiting for a call, (for) an event that happened in the city outside of Ground Zero,” Borer said.

The Lincoln firefighters were also preparing to supplement FDNY for routine emergencies. FDNY lost 343 responders when the Twin Towers collapsed.

During that stretch, Borer’s group of Nebraska firefighters never got sent to a call or another attack. But as they drove by in FDNY vehicles, people on the streets cheered.

Unpile the pile

About halfway through the deployment, Borer’s half of Nebraska’s task force was sent to Ground Zero to “unpile the pile” — search for survivors and victims and sift through debris.

During that first 20-minute bus ride from the Javits Center to the Trade Center site, Borer looked up at the tallest buildings he’d ever seen. He’d never been to Manhattan.

As the bus neared the fallen towers, the damage came into view.

Huge pieces of steel jutted from the surrounding buildings, remnants of the towers that broke loose in the collapse. To Borer, the metal looked almost like giant splinters driven into the structures around the pile.

The destruction had spread far beyond the towers themselves, so wide that as Borer stood in the collapse zone, it was all he could see. Every building around him was damaged.

All Borer had to compare it to were photos of bombed-out Europe from history books he’d read in school. He was standing in a warzone.

Firetrucks were still half-buried in the rubble. Smoke still billowed from several places in the pile, bending with the breeze. No one really knew what was burning.

The group’s rock breakers traveled up 100-yard makeshift walkways of wood and metal from the street to the edge of the pile. From there, they used ladders to climb down into the debris.

“We were working … our way down to the bottom to try to find people,” Borer said.

They were still in rescue mode — still searching for survivors. But they knew the odds were slim.

“You recognize that as time goes on, it's less likely that you're going to find anyone ... alive,” Borer said. “And so, since we weren't there immediately, I think we had a sense that if we actually find someone alive, it's going to be a miracle.”

But Borer said they realized it was just as important to find the dead, for civilians who lost loved ones and for first responders who lost their own.

If anyone found remains of a firefighter, they were told to notify FDNY. The department wanted to handle the recovery of its own people.

At one point, while Borer oversaw his team in the pile, he thought he caught a glimpse of yellow markings from a fire coat. He pointed it out to a task force member.

“He looked at me,” Borer said. “We both thought of the same thing, and he went over and checked it, and it wasn't. Thank God, it wasn't. I mean … it would have been good to find somebody. But at the same time, you didn't want to.”

Virtually nothing in the pile remained a recognizable object, Borer said. Finding a piece of a fire coat would have been an anomaly.

“The collapse was so catastrophic that it just crushed everything,” Borer said.

The Nebraska responders never found anyone alive or dead — not that Borer knew of. After he returned home, Borer learned the rubble his crew removed was tested for DNA to see whether it contained human remains.

The fire, smoke and flattening collapse had left everything so unrecognizable that Borer realized they might have handled victims’ remains without knowing.

The pile was so deep that inside, they couldn’t see out or even tell if they were above or below ground.

Inside, the rock breakers were surrounded by concrete and unidentifiable debris, standing on whatever slab seemed sturdy.

“It was like rock climbing, kind of,” Borer said.

As they dug deeper and deeper, adding ladders and walkways, they tried to terrace the edges of the pile to prevent it from caving in around them.

Safety Officer

Only later — when responders who worked the pile began dying from inhaled dust and particles — did it occur to Borer that his team had been stationed upwind. The smoke had blown away from Task Force 1.

All responders were supposed to wear respirators, and part of Borer's job was making sure they did. But he knew working 12 hours in a mask got annoying, and many took them off when he wasn't looking.

The site had a distinct odor Borer had never encountered before and hasn’t encountered since.

“I've smelled concrete dust before, but that was not an odor of concrete dust,” Borer said. “I can't even characterize it or put a name to it. But … the whole area smelled.”

Despite daily decontamination, his wife noticed the smell immediately when he got home. Whatever it was seemed to have seeped into his skin.

Nebraska’s Ground Zero team worked the 12-hour day shift, which made it much easier to see what they were doing, even though floodlights lit the area at night.

Leaders like Borer worked longer: closer to 4 a.m. to 10 p.m., including preparation, briefings, meals, the bus ride to Ground Zero and decontamination, including showering and laundering or discarding gear.

The team slept any chance they got. Sometimes during their lunch breaks away from the site, responders ate quickly and caught a nap on the curb.

“That is the most … physically demanding work I’ve ever done,” Borer said.

The Javits Center had masseuses for volunteers whose muscles gave out under the strenuous labor and counselors and ministers to help people deal with what they were seeing.

Borer recalled speaking with a minister. He said his faith in God carried him through the darkest things he saw on the task force.

As the team’s safety officer, Borer’s job was to guard against the physical dangers his team faced. But he came to see he had to look after their mental health, too — to remind them to take care of it.

“Your mental health is not like a cold you can feel coming on,” Borer said.

Firefighters can’t always know when something will become too much, he said. It may not be the biggest call that finally overwhelms someone. It could be the smallest one after a career of hard ones.

They were willing to go

The lessons of 9/11 followed them home.

The attacks exposed how difficult it was for emergency agencies to coordinate. Radio systems didn’t always mesh, hampering communication. Different agencies sometimes used different codes and command structures.

In the years afterward, Lincoln firefighters trained on a new national incident command system designed to give emergency response agencies a common way to operate. Borer traveled around Nebraska teaching the system to other responders.

His lasting impression of New York revolved around people.

Borer remembered New Yorkers bringing food and coffee to the responders and cheering as firefighters passed. He had never seen anything like it.

“I can only imagine that must be … what a soldier feels like when they come back from war,” Borer said.

He remembered the appreciation for firefighters that spread at home and across the country after the attacks.

For a brief time, he said, people forgot their differences and remembered their commonalities.

“Even if you weren’t in New York, it was an attack on you,” Borer said. “It just brought people together.”

Borer eventually became a task force leader before retiring from Lincoln Fire and Rescue in 2022. He still fights fires as a volunteer with the Cook Volunteer Fire Department. Huff eventually served as Lincoln’s fire chief before retiring in 2015 after 42 years with the department.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Nebraska Task Force 1 is still built around the same impulse that brought those 90 firefighters together in 1991 — to help where needed. They couldn't have known where the call would take them, what they would see or what many of them would carry home.

They only knew they were willing to go.

Borer knows there are things they couldn’t fix. They couldn’t bring home the 2,753 people who died at the World Trade Center, the 184 killed at the Pentagon or the 40 passengers and crew of Flight 93 whose hijacked plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field after those aboard fought back.

But he measures the mission by what they did.

“Even though we didn’t find anybody … I think we helped,” Borer said. “That’s always the goal is to help. And we did that.”

The need for a national network of highly trained rescue teams was impossible to ignore after 9/11, Huff said.

Funding for Task Force 1 became much easier to justify. The task force gained resources and expanded beyond Lincoln, bringing in firefighters from Omaha. Each deployment brought new equipment, capabilities and experience back to Nebraska.

“We’re blessed to have the task force here,” Huff said, gesturing toward the specialized equipment in its headquarters — resources he said a community Lincoln’s size would otherwise struggle to justify buying.

“We are lucky,” he said. “And only because I was dumb enough to fill out a three-ring binder full of forms.”

In the early 2000s, Huff found himself traveling throughout the Midwest, telling emergency management groups about the Pentagon response, telling reporters about how he came to be at the center of an event now taught in history books, and remembering what it meant to be able to help when much of the country felt helpless.

“It really solidified our Americanness at the time,” Huff said. “And I think we could use some more of that right now.”