Smoke rises from the site of the World Trade Center Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001.

iBerkshires has gathered some local recollections about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Below are some questions we asked of Pittsfield Police Chief Michael Wynn, Pittsfield School Committee Chairwoman and longtime educator Katherine Yon, Pittsfield Police Officer Steven Hunt and iBerkshires reporter Brittany Polito.

Chief Michael Wynn

Q: Where were you when the 9/11 attacks first happened? How did you find out about it? What was your initial response?

A: So ironically, I was a newly promoted sergeant in 2001. So as a newly promoted sergeant, I had been pushed back to work the night shift so I actually was just gotten off duty, it was on my way home.

At the time I was living on the Pittsfield/Dalton line, and I was actually sitting in the middle of the Coltsville intersection in my vehicle when I heard on the radio about the first plane hitting the tower.

I got home, I immediately called into the station to find out what was being reported officially turn the news on and I was watching the live broadcast from New York when the second plane hit the tower.

I was a newly appointed sergeant and I was also a team leader of the Special Response, too. My fellow team leader was the relief, he was the sergeant on duty at the time.

So I called him because, in my mind, he was one of the people that could get the information possibly for deployment down to the city.

So I spent the bulk of that morning on the phone back and forth with my partner watching the news and packing a to-go bag and probably about 10:30, actually exactly the point at the Pentagon, because I had a friend and mentor who was with the Drug Enforcement Administration, he was in the Justice towers in D.C., I was on the phone with him when he told me he had to go because he just watched the plane hit the Pentagon.

And it was right after that that I found out from my partner that we were not being deployed to the city, as a matter of fact, the Fire Department and the Sheriff's Department were preparing a team to go, but our team members were not allowed, because we were being held close to home because we didn't know if it's over yet.

And so once I got over my initial anger that I was being held back, at that point, I knew when that team got sent, I knew that we were going to have to backfill for them, and we're going to be busy.

So once that call was made I went to bed.

Q: What was it like to be a police officer that day, or in the time after it happened?

A: So, right after, I mean, obviously, like everybody else that day was just pure shock.

Nothing in my professional life up to that point, I had been a police officer for about six years, nothing had been directed at that, we just didn't have that type of counterterrorism and security mindset.

After that, it was what's next, like we didn't know.

We didn't know what to expect. And so it was a scramble within the department. We actually, the department formed our first internal Homeland Security unit.

They were tasked with identifying and evaluating critical infrastructure targets and putting plans together for that.

You know, it was surely there. We're talking about a very short period of time after the actual Sept. 11 attacks.

Our guys were at Ground Zero, and they were trying to figure out how to get them back home and get them relief. So there were some conversations around that.

Then we had the follow-ons with Capitol anthrax scares.

So all of a sudden, we were bouncing from suspicious powder call to suspicious powder call all the time.

I was recently telling somebody a story that we had, we had a wave of suspicious powder calls. I don't remember exactly when it was in 2001. And it turned out that some national marketing company with complete just, you know, cluelessness had decided that this would be an appropriate time to mail, laundry detergent samples.

They were breaking open in the mail.

We just kept going on these calls, call after call after call for these suspicious packages in the mail that turned out to be laundry detergent.

Q: How has 9/11 changed policing?

A: That was the first time as a police officer, I had heard the concept of Homeland Security. And it was the first time that you know, we were being directed to take a role in counterterrorism.

And so it was a mission pivot there, but one of the things I talked about at community meetings, up until that point, all the federal Department of Justice money that was coming into our communities was for community policing and after that, it all shifted to counterterrorism.

Community policing went away, and everything became counterterrorism and stayed that way for a long time.

Q: Even though Pittsfield isn't close to New York City, were we concerned that it wasn't over and worried about being a possible target?

A: Not the city of Pittsfield so much, but the county immediately saw an influx of residents.

A lot of people who, at that time have been very similar to what happened at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people who were second homeowners who had homes, particularly down in South County, they fled Manhattan. And they got up here.

And I remember talking to my counterpart at the time, Chief McGarry, Jim McGarry, who was the chief of Sheffield, and things that you couldn't have anticipated, like the general stores and the small convenience stores in South County, ran out of milk and paper towels and toilet paper because it was after Labor Day, and they were stocked for their residents, not for their summer visitors. And everything disappeared.

Town water systems were overwhelmed, because houses that normally would be occupied, 50 percent of the houses that would be occupied every other weekend, were 100 percent occupied every day so water tables dropped and stuff like that.

There are cultural institutions, and venues and General Dynamics has a presence here. Raytheon has a presence here. So we had to be concerned that we were secondary targets.

I think, you know, we were putting watches on reservoirs, the city reservoirs aren't in the city but we were patrolling them.

I mean, there was there were immediate impacts.

I don't know how many of our firefighters went down with that initial convoy we sent out. We have firefighters at the time who were on the Urban Search and Rescue teams, and so they were activated in phases for months to go back down there.

Q: What was the community like that day?

A: I don't have any personal recollections because like I said, I was on patrol until I went to sleep and I had to go back to work. Right. And then, in the days after, it was just, for days, it was somber, and American flags were popping up everywhere.

It was the first, probably week, we had a large memorial at Wahconah Park and everybody wanted to be there. Everybody wanted to be with their neighbors.

Those guys from the Fire Department, the Police Department, the Sheriff's Department, that went down they're still carrying those images and those memories with them.

Our guys used to get together every year on the 11th just so they could share the experience and talk to one another, Sheriff [Thomas] Bowler was a police officer with us at the time and he was on that relief column.

Also, then, every police department, fire department, sheriff's department was trying to set people down there really was like a national call to arms.

In hindsight, there were some valuable lessons learned because a lot of agencies ourselves included, we self-presented, we left before the official calls went out.

And I know like our guys when they got down there, they actually couldn't get into the city.

And they had to take boats across to the city to get to the site because they blocked off the city.

Katherine Yon

In the days that followed, I did discuss with my classes the events that occurred. As I always told my students, good literature is about life and makes an attempt to understand human nature. Now we were seeing the nature of people unfold before our very eyes. They brought in newspaper clippings that we discussed. They had horrific pictures of death and destruction. However, what eventually emerged were incredible photos and stories about the heroes who were risking their lives to find survivors and save lives … incredible goodness, courage, kindness, and love within the rubble and debris of hatred that precipitated such a despicable desire to kill.  

Officer Steven Hunt

Pittsfield Police Officer Steve Hunt was deployed to the city right after the attack. This reporter attended school with his daughter and remembers he and Lt. Glen Decker coming to the school to talk about what happened.

Q: How did you feel when you first found out about the 9/11 attacks on Sept. 11, 2001? What was your response? And what was that first day like?

A: I was actually working patrol that day and when I saw it on television, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing.

And the first thing they did was, they had me go over and cone off the federal building, and we evacuated the federal building over on Center Street.

And then we just sort of waiting, like everybody else, to see what was going to happen next, if anything.

And then when I went back into the building four o'clock, I found out there was an opportunity for some of us to get supplies and load up the mobile command post and go down to New York to assist whatever we could do.

And so that night, I don't know, probably about seven o'clock, we got supplies from Berkshire Medical Center, and Walmart, and we loaded up the command post and went down to, I think it was called the Meadowlands area [in New Jersey] where the Giants played.

And we got redirected over to Liberty Park, which is right across from Ground Zero, it's an old like train station, and that's where they had put all the ambulances and all the first responders.

And that actually set up the old train station as a triage, so I think I think they thought that they were going to have survivors, but as it turned out, you know how that worked out.

They had all these, IV bags hanging in the terminal, and they were set up for, you know, massive casualties, and it just didn't happen.

And then we got settled and we met up with a commander from the New Jersey State Police. He connected us with a Jersey City or Jersey shore police boat.

And that's when we got ferried across the river and we got right near the American Express building.

Just ...

It was like walking on the moon. It was the concrete from the World Trade Towers. Just went back to sand.

So when we get off the boat, it was dark and they had all the ambient lighting.

It was like walking on the moon. And we had on the helmets and the goggles and the double breathers. And we just walked through that. And we were trying to get to the, to the site where the towers had actually fallen.

And we walked through, I think it was the American Express building, and there was about an inch of water on the floor.

As you looked into Starbucks, you could see like, half-eaten bagels, and half-drank coffee because everyone just ran.

it was just, it was just too much to really comprehend what you're seeing.

It was terrible. And then we wound up when they put us to work, we were actually digging because there was just so much of that concrete dirt. And I just remember we did a bucket line.

They had like, you know, a pickle bucket.

And people would shovel debris into the bucket, which was sand. There were like office things like pencils, orange pencils, just, whatever was in the building when it came down, we would pass that down and they would dump it into a bucket like an excavation machinery and then they would dump that in into a dump truck, big dump trucks.

And then that all went out to I think it was called Fresh Kills [on Staten Island]. It was an island where they actually comb through everything, you know, and they found badges and all kinds of stuff.

We stayed down there from actual the night of 9/11 through Friday, and, you know, one day we actually uncovered, it was these big walkways that went from the World Trade Center over across the six-lane highway and the firemen had parked underneath those to protect the trucks and the one we were in actually fell on the truck and I think what happened was the firemen were trapped under there and didn't make it.

I remember the day that we actually uncovered the fire truck and then and they rescued the firemen that were under there. I'm not sure exactly how many there were.

And then Friday, they declared it a crime scene and we loaded up into the command post and four other people had come down, they were going to take over for us and we could go back but they actually sent all eight of us home that Saturday.

I was so upset for about a year, I couldn't even talk about it and every 9/11 it just hits me right in the chest.

Q: Do you get together with other first responders to talk about 9/11?

A: We usually go out and we try to go to one of the less crowded restaurants, bar-type places. And we always pick the corner and you know, watch the events, played back from 911.

I remember talking to my dad from the scene, standing in the middle of the debris.

And I was just so angry. And my dad called me. And I talked to him for a minute. And, you know, he said on 9/11 he felt just like he did the day of Pearl Harbor, which had to say I wasn't old enough for that. But he was.

So now here we are in a 20-year reunion.

It's funny, but going down there, I thank God for that opportunity. Because it was a chance of a lifetime. I mean, everybody was pulling together, why can't we go back to there?

Our country is so divided.

How do we get back to that point? I mean, there was every walk of life in there trying to find survivors. And you know, I remember they had these big steelworkers, they're great big burly guys and they were going up and like a lift and they were cutting up the walkway. And they would come back down with tears in their eyes.

Everywhere we went, people gave us coffee, wouldn't take money. Just a different time I guess.

Brittany Polito, iBerkshires staff writer in Pittsfield

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