By Winnie Yu | Photo by Joel Martinez
Not a day goes by that John “Jay” Jonas ’97 doesn’t think about the events of 9/11.
The harrowing ascent up the North Tower stairwell. The agonizing descent. The deafening whoosh of steel, concrete, and dust, as the tower came crashing down, floor by floor.
And of course, he remembers Josephine Harris, the woman who saved his life and five of his men, just as they saved hers.
The accolades started almost immediately. Jonas and his five men went on to win several awards. Together with Harris, they appeared in numerous documentaries, podcasts, and articles, where they recounted their story.
“When I got an award from the Episcopal church soon after 9/11, the bishop told me that God had a plan for me,” Jonas says.
The mission? To share lessons learned from past fires to help future firefighters. Writing those letters in a newsletter became an enormous source of joy for Jonas and a valuable resource for FDNY and other fire departments around the country.
The Day of the Miracle
On September 11, 2001, Jonas, then a captain, was at Ladder Co. 6 of FDNY in Chinatown, when the first plane hit the North Tower. The company raced into the lobby of 1 World Trade Center. While at the command post, they saw a black shadow on the ground, heard a loud explosion, and watched in horror as pieces of flaming debris fell to the ground.
When someone said that the South Tower had just been hit, the place fell silent. “One of the firefighters said, ‘We may not live through today,’” Jonas recalls. They paused to wish each other luck and shake hands. Of the firefighters there at that moment, only Jonas would survive.
With no elevators available, Jonas and his men began to climb Stairway B, with 100 pounds of gear on their backs, preparing to rescue people once they got to the 90th floor. Around the 27th floor, they paused for a break when the building began to sway violently. When one of the men announced the South Tower had fallen, Jonas said it was time to get out.
Somewhere near the 20th floor, Jonas and his men ran into Josephine Harris, a grandmother and bookkeeper for the Port Authority who had made her way down from her desk on the 73rd floor. Harris had recently been in a car accident and was exhausted and having trouble walking. Jonas insisted on bringing her with them, even as she told them to go without her because she was slowing their progress.
Jonas and his men were between the fourth and first floors when the North Tower began to collapse around them, much like a banana peeling open from the top down. “If we had been a little faster, we would have been outside and gotten killed,” Jonas says. “If we’d been a little slower and higher, we would have been killed. We had to be right there where we were. That’s why we lived.”
The event was later captured in a History Channel documentary titled “The Miracle in Stairwell B.” The company gave Harris a jacket embroidered with the words “guardian angel” on it.
When Harris died of a heart attack in 2011, she was given a fireman’s funeral. “The six of us who were trapped with her in the tower carried her casket into St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church,” Jonas says. “Cardinal (Edward) Egan said the mass, and Mayor (Rudy) Giuliani was there.”
The firefighters also paid for her headstone. “To this day, Mike Meldrum (one of the six) will take a ride to the cemetery in Queens and put a wreath on her grave every Christmas and on 9/11.”
Lessons from the Past
"Jay’s work will save firefighters not even born yet."
In 2014, Jonas was named division commander in charge of training for Division 7 in the Bronx. “I told our commander I’d make them the best trained division in the city,” Jonas says.
As part of that promise, Jonas began chronicling some of the city’s most famous fires in a monthly publication aptly titled “Division 7 Safety & Training Newsletter.” Among the fires he wrote about was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, one of the most tragic fires in the city. It killed 146 people and gave rise to the Bureau of Fire Prevention, the Factory Investigation Commission, and New York State Labor Law.
Jonas recounted each event in painstaking detail, offering lessons learned wherever possible. The New York Telephone Co. fire in 1980 for example demonstrated the importance of following FDNY’s strict masking policies. A 1992 fire on 7th Street in Manhattan taught them to never go above a fire without appropriate personal protective equipment, including use of the helmet chin strap.
A fire at 151st Street in Manhattan in 1980 offered a chance for Jonas to list rope safety rules after a rope broke and killed two firefighters, Jerry Frisby and Larry Fitzpatrick. Among the new rules: ropes that are frozen, damaged, or exposed to acid are taken out of service and replaced.
Jonas loved this work. He spent hours at the FDNY’s George Mand Library and other libraries, perusing fire reports, eyewitness accounts, building blueprints, and engineering documents. Over a period of eight years, he produced 75 newsletters. They are now available at the Mand Library and on the FDNY intranet.
“Jay’s work will save firefighters not even born yet,” says Andrew Trabanco ’92, a retired FDNY captain and longtime friend. “He is truly a FDNY legend.”
A Lifelong Passion
Jonas grew up in Monroe, NY, where as a child, he fell in love with firefighting.
On weekends, he tagged along with his dad to the local fire department, where his
dad was a volunteer. At 16, Jonas joined the same department, later serving in the
West Point, NY fire department.
“I just loved it so much,” Jonas says. “And then I realized I could do this for a living and actually get a paycheck doing this.”
After high school, he enrolled at Orange County Community College. “I hated it until one day in the bookstore, I saw they had a fire science program,” Jonas recalls. “All the instructors were New York City firefighters, and I said, ‘I’m in!’”
In 1979, Jonas joined the New York City Fire Department in the Bronx. He climbed the ranks, becoming lieutenant, captain, and deputy chief. Along the way, Trabanco convinced him to attend Empire State University, where Jonas got a B.S. in fire administration in 1997. “It really honed my skills in writing,” he says.
By the time he retired in 2022, Jonas was the commander of Division 7 in the Bronx. That year, he also stopped the newsletters.
While the country contemplates the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Jonas says this year is no different than any other for him. “I reflect on that day almost every day,” he says. “I still think about the things that we went through. It was a unique situation that we survived what we survived.”