9/11 Loomed Large, Even From a Distance

For Mark Chubb, the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 almost seemed surreal. Chubb, interim fire chief for Woodinville Fire & Rescue, was working as fire chief in Christ Church, New Zealand at the time. With the time difference (it was Sept. 12 in New Zealand), Chubb said he woke up to a changed reality.

“My wife’s from New York, we have family and friends there,” Chubb said. “We first heard about it when the clock radio went off. It was surreal not only because of what they were saying but because we had been there, we knew exactly where they were talking about.”

Chubb said his family was easily recognizable as Americans the minute they spoke, their non-New Zealand accents giving them away. His family experienced firsthand the goodwill the world felt toward America in those first few days after the attack.

“My wife stopped at a McDonald’s to get the kids breakfast and somebody heard her talking to the kids in line and asked her if she was OK; before she could answer the woman hugged her and she broke down in tears,” Chubb said.

Moved by what was happening back in the states, he put an American flag in his front yard, which instantly became a shrine as neighbors and passersby began leaving flowers and candles under the flag. “It was hard to come home because you were reminded immediately of what happened,” he said.

The horrors of the terrorist attacks made Chubb look at his job in the fire service in an entirely new way.

“I’d just been notified that I was being promoted to chief and I had the very stark realization that now I was responsible for people in a very different way than I had been before and that was not just humbling it was frightening.”

Chubb said 9/11 changed the way emergency responders look at the job they did in the past and how it needed to change in the future to face the new realities of a more vulnerable America.

“If 9/11 taught the fire service anything it’s that despite all of our training all our preparation and all of the effort we put in to knowing what can go wrong and preparing for it, there are things out there that not only do we not know, we can’t even imagine.”

In the wake of 9/11, the fire service is trained not just in hazardous waste emergency scenarios, but also in chemical, biological, nuclear and other explosive threats, Chubb added.

The fire service had a bit less of a learning curve on implementing new procedures after the terrorist attacks than other first responder organizations because it had already standardized the way it communicated among different fire agencies, Chubb said.

Nearly 20 years ago, fire services across the United States adopted communications protocols based on those used by the military so that there would be a clear chain of command and communications scheme in emergency situations.

“This may not seem like a big thing, but if you’re a cop you work with maybe one or two people, same with medics, same with public works. We travel in packs in the fire service. We put 15 people on a fire. At that level of complexity you need a system,” Chubb said.

In the decade since the attacks, the fire service has been working with law enforcement and other emergency preparedness agencies to streamline communications, making sure every agency is incorporated into decision making processes.