Greg Manning saw the televised images, heard the chaos unfolding over his fire department radio, and called his pregnant wife, at home with their 2-year-old daughter.
“I told her that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, and I would be late coming home,” Manning recounted on Sunday, at Morris County’s annual 9/11 observance. On Sept. 11, 2001, the Hanover native was in his second year as a firefighter, attached to the “Harlem Hilton,” as Engine 69/Ladder 28/Battalion 16 was known.
After a team of firefighters and officers rode a city bus to a staging area five blocks north of Ground Zero, Manning watched “in horror and disbelief” as the fire went from floor to floor of the 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story office building near the Twin Towers.