Joseph Pfeifer

Joseph W. Pfeifer served thirty-seven years with the New York City Fire Department and was the first FDNY chief on the scene at the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

He was a battalion chief that morning, out on a reported odor of gas in lower Manhattan, accompanied by the French documentary filmmakers Jules and Gedeon Naudet, who were making a film about a probationary firefighter at his house. When American Airlines Flight 11 passed overhead, Jules Naudet turned the camera and captured the only known footage of the first aircraft striking the North Tower.

Pfeifer established the command post in the North Tower lobby and directed the initial response, sending companies up the stairs into a building nobody believed could collapse. Among them was his younger brother Kevin, a lieutenant with Engine 33, who did not come back.

He remained in the department for another seventeen years and became the founding director of the FDNY Center for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness, retiring in 2018 as an assistant chief. Much of that work addressed the interagency communication failures that cost lives that morning, including the radio repeaters that did not carry transmissions from high in the tower and the separate command structures that kept police observations from reaching the chiefs in the lobby.

He holds degrees from Fordham University and the Harvard Kennedy School, has been a senior fellow at Harvard's Program on Crisis Leadership, and has taught and published on crisis command and organizational resilience.

Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11, published in 2021, became a New York Times bestseller. It is an operational account written by the person running the operation, which makes it a different kind of document from the other memoirs of that day, and it treats the grief and the seventeen years of subsequent work as a single subject.