Black Sunday

Today is the second anniversary of Black Sunday, a day when six New York firefighters became trapped in an appartment blaze in the Bronx and had to jump four stories to the concrete below. I read this story and cried on the Q Train tonight which is very unlike me, or is very much like me.

"The bodies of six firefighters now lay on the ground. When Stolowski had let Cawley go, the probie had tipped backward and started falling headfirst. “I kind of tucked my chin to my chest because I knew I was falling upside down,” he says. “I didn’t want to land on my head.” He landed on his upper back, shattering his right shoulder, cracking his ribs, splitting his skull, and collapsing a lung. He used his right arm to pull himself up to a sitting position so he could breathe easier. Then he passed out....

DiBernardo landed feet first, shattering everything from his waist down. “I didn’t even feel the cold,” he would say later. “All I felt was the pain in my legs.” Cool broke both his shoulders, fractured his skull in two places, shattered his pelvis in three, and broke thirteen ribs and an arm. But he was conscious enough to talk to two firefighters who held a shower curtain over him to keep burning embers from falling on him."