Funeral Is Held for Firefighter Killed by Ground Zero Toxins

NEW YORK — Firefighters die because they run into dangerous places, and they die because they stay.

Chief Ronald Spadafora stayed — for nine months. His assignment was ground zero, the patch of steel and debris that a federal labor official in 2001 called “potentially the most dangerous workplace in the United States.”

The job of making sure no one got hurt fell to him.

In fall 2001, he watched rescue workers trade their dust masks for half-face respirators with triple-combo cartridges for organic vapor and acid gas.

In the winter, he made a plan for extracting 8,000 pounds of chemical coolant from underground tanks, the substance so toxic that, at high enough concentrations, it could cut glass.

And in the spring, after the remains of another two victims were found, he oversaw the bones being carried out in Stokes baskets, which are metal-ribbed stretchers, draped in American flags.

On Friday, Spadafora’s body was lifted off the back of a firetruck and carried into St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue the same way: swaddled in an American flag and laid in a Stokes basket. The toxins released by the World Trade Center site had given him blood cancer and, on Saturday morning, killed him at age 63.

“He was there as each and every member was carried out,” the fire commissioner, Daniel Nigro, said of the post-9/11 recovery efforts, “just as he was carried out of this church.”

That he was once the chief of safety for the entire post-9/11 recovery operation was a reminder of the indiscriminate trail of sickness and death that has followed the attacks. He was the 178th member of the Fire Department, and its highest-ranking member, to die of World Trade Center-related illnesses. Another 343 members died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a 2002 article in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Spadafora described the safety precautions he had helped design while conceding that he and other rescue workers had still been exposed to a toxic soup of chemicals: “asbestos, metals, silica, organic compounds, and aromatic hydrocarbons, to name just a few.”

And he recently wrote an article for a Fire Department handbook urging firefighters to wear their bunker gear in fires, to wash it afterward and then to shower, given the growing risks of cancer from burning plastics. “I thought I was invincible,” he wrote, “but I was wrong.”

Just as the World Trade Center site paused when a firefighter’s body was recovered, so too did members of the Fire Department pause Friday. From the edge of the bus lane to the opposite curb, firefighters filled Fifth Avenue. Police officers shut the street to traffic for blocks. On the sidewalk outside St. Thomas Church, a uniformed firefighter mopped up a grimy spot.

Across the street, tourists and passers-by carrying shopping bags and cameras leaned against the metal barricades and glass storefronts. They asked who was being buried, little aware that the death toll from Sept. 11 was still climbing.

Spadafora was remembered as a professor of firefighting in a department full of students of the craft. He was an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, wrote for WNYF Magazine, the official training publication of the Fire Department, and once gave a copy of a book of firefighter exams he had written to a neighbor, author Amy Tan.

He played down his smarts, Tan said during the funeral Mass, but she later told him the book had taught her that she “wasn’t smart enough to be a firefighter.”

“My books make mothers and daughters cry,” Tan said. “His books save lives.”

His cerebral attitude suited his work as a safety supervisor after Sept. 11. He wrote a safety message that became the second or third sheet of the daily incident action plan at ground zero. It described tripping hazards, cutting hazards and breathing hazards and how to mitigate them.

“Most firefighters are Type A personalities; they think they can do anything,” said Robert Sweeney, who worked with Spadafora at ground zero and is now the commissioner of the Yonkers Fire Department. But Spadafora had an academic bent: He liked drafting plans and considering big-picture risks and was never rattled by the enormous scale of the recovery operation. “The man had the skills, the experience,” Sweeney said. “He was kind of a slow-motion guy — he talked slow, he walked slow.”

A recipient of two master’s degrees and a bachelor’s degree, he became chief of fire prevention for the department, lifting morale among inspectors whose job it was to review construction and ensure businesses were following protocol.

After being diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2015, he went into remission with the help of an experimental treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital and returned to work. He is survived by his longtime partner, Rhonda Shearer, 64, and a son, Brian Spadafora, 27.

After the funeral, 178 members of the Fire Department carrying American flags, one for each department victim of World Trade Center-related illnesses, started walking back down Fifth Avenue.