DAN KADISON
Courtesy of The New York Post
Trauma Central: Supervising fire alarm dispatcher Bruce Brenner is haunted by the Sept. 11 attacks and the Flight 587 crash. - Matthew McDermott
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They call him the "Master of Disaster."
Bruce Brenner, a supervising fire alarm dispatcher for the Fire Department, has the distinction of sending firefighters to the World Trade Center during the earliest moments of 9/11 and the Flight 587 crash, which happened two months later in Belle Harbor, Queens.
Up until now, Brenner's never talked about his role in both tragedies.
"I'm definitely not the same guy I was before," said Brenner, an 18-year vet.
When he's not working, he's a little more forgetful, "more easily distracted," and tears well up when talking about his "good friend" who died when the towers fell, a good friend who was part of the first wave of 11 engines and seven ladder trucks - 90 men in all - that Brenner sent to the trade center site.
On the morning of Sept. 11, Brenner and his Manhattan staff were discussing breakfast when an alarm sounded in the dispatch center.
Brenner called up the alarm on his monitor and a computer program suggested a response of three engines and two ladder trucks. He pressed a red button that sounded an alert at the chosen firehouses. Brenner pushed the button again when a battalion chief, close to the scene, radioed in a "two-alarm" fire.
And with those two red button pushes, his good friend and many others he knew were ordered to their deaths.
"We were doing what we had to do," said Brenner, who was joined by four of his bosses and supervisors that morning.
Together, the shocked team worked on automatic, moving outer-borough units onto the scene, providing coverage in Manhattan, and maintaining communication with the chiefs down at the trade center.
Later in September, Brenner was detailed out to Queens, and he, along with the borough supervisor, called the early shots when the American Airlines plane tumbled from the skies Nov. 12.
At first, they had no idea "what [they] were dealing with," Brenner said.
Somebody pulled an alarm at a street box and the "phones lit up" at the Queens dispatch center.
Then, a call to an airport tower worker confirmed a commercial jetliner had fallen.
