Catamaran Captain Spent 21 Hours Evacuating Victims on 9/11

It was dawning into a warm day, crystal blue and cloudless, when Captain Rich Naruszewicz picked up his first load of commuters. It was the kind of day where it was a pleasure to pilot the high speed catamaran over the slight grey waves of New York harbor, delivering stock brokers and secretaries, arbitrage traders and insurance executives to their jobs in lower Manhattan from their abodes in the Highlands, NJ.

The captain himself lived with his family in the Iselin section of Woodbridge.

On a day with no obstructions, it took 38 minutes to run the catamaran, named "The Finest,"  from the dock near Sandy Hook to Pier 11, just south of the South Street Seaport. Passengers on, passengers off - but mostly off on a weekday morning - then another 15 minutes to drop off the remaining load of commuters at the dock at the end of 34th Street, for those who worked in midtown. 

After two runs in the morning, Naruszewicz and his crew of five seamen would take the same commuters back in the evening at the end of the workday. In between, they refueled, did routine maintenance on the boat, while shooting the breeze with one another, and later, with the passengers who over the years had become friends.

With eight years of experience working for New York Fast Ferry under his belt, Captain Naruszewicz anticipated a pleasant, uneventful workday on the water.

And then one of his crew, while unloading the last of the passengers at Pier 11, stared up at one of the skyscrapers.  

"Did you see that?" the crewman said.

"See what?"

Naruszewicz squinted in the direction the crewman pointed. The World Trade Center. 

"That...is that a fire?"

"Are you sure they aren't shooting a movie?"

It was Sept. 11, 2001.

"I went around the tip of Manhattan and we looked at it from a different angle. We saw the flames. This was no mistake," Naruszewicz said.

While they were watching the tower, out of nowhere came this sound: loud, fast, ominous. A plane.

"I was looking right at it, and it hit the second tower. The sound, the noise, and this debris," the captain said.

The captain made an announcement to the passengers and crew on board. "I said, everyone on the boat comes under my jurisdiction. We're going back to Pier 11," Naruszewicz said. "When we got there, we were the second boat there, and there were thousands of people waiting for any available boat to take them out."

From that point on, Captain Naruszewicz and his crew worked 21 straight hours and made 9 round trips between Manhattan and Highlands. 

The catamaran normally fits 354 passengers. On the first evacuation effort, Naruszewicz that he squeezed more than twice that many onto the boat.

"We took 763 people," he said. "One of the crewman was counting them as they got on."

The people who weren't injured were hysterical, but mostly, the captain said, "they were in shock."

"They mostly stayed outside on the deck, watching the towers," he said.

Not all the people he took off the dock were OK. Some of them were injured, and a few died on the boat before it landed.

That was later in the day, when he had taken as many passengers to Highlands just to get out of Manhattan as he could. And somewhere in between, the towers fell while he was picking up stranded people clamoring to get onboard.

"I was in the wheelhouse when one of the towers fell. The sound was incredible, but the dust cloud. It just rolled at you. You couldn't get away from it," he said.

"The sound was like 50 sonic booms"

The air conditioning was pulling the dust into the wheelhouse, so Naruszewicz turned it off and put a wet cloth to his mouth and kept driving the boat.

People who had been hit by the white dust came aboard, and gallons of water from the catamaran's cafe were used to wash the muck out of their eyes. 

"Some people just took the bottled water and poured it over their heads. It was caked all over them," he recalled.

Later in the day, Naruszewicz changed ships - this time, to a catamaran named "The Bravest", and the destination was different: to Brooklyn, where a temporary morgue had been set up. He also took severely injured people on stretchers out of Manhattan, to a hospital that would treat them. "It's indescribable how they looked. So many people, so many hurt and bloody," the captain said in a low voice.

"We had some pretty mangled people. A lot of firefighters and police, first responders. Some were blinded."

The captain insisted that a priest and a minister accompany him on the trip to Brooklyn, to give aid, comfort, and in a few cases, last rites to victims who didn't survive the trip.

"There were a few who left the boat with a sheet over their heads," Naruszewicz said.

Naruszewicz had his camera with him, and he took pictures of the towers. Lots of pictures.

"A guy up on the dock kept giving me film to use every time I stopped to get more people," he said.

His pictures show the story of 9/11 in the smoking World Trade center, and the aftermath of the dust clouds after the towers collapsed.

With time has come change. Naruszewicz, now 53, has moved on, no longer working for New York Fast Ferry, which itself was bought up by another company. Now he's the captain of an oil ferry: he refuels many of the ships that come into New York harbor.

His daughter, whose birthday was just a few days before 9/11, is now 21. The family still lives in Iselin.

What is different, though, is that Naruszewicz is always alert. He has to be. New York harbor is still considered to be a prime terrorist target.

"I'm a more vigilant person. My head is on a swivel. I check and double check everything. I take a pair of binoculars, and if it doesn't look right, I call the Coast Guard," Naruszewicz said. "Somebody is always going to try to do something."