Thomas Richardson, Christopher Howard and Paul Heglund, FDNY members from Long Island, reflect on 9/11

Thomas Richardson, a retired chief of department of the FDNY, recalls arriving at the World Trade Center site a day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks expecting to see chaos.

It was just hours after two planes smashed into the buildings, prompting their collapse and burying nearly 3,000 people.

“My expectation going there the next morning was that it was going to be just total, complete chaos,” said Richardson, 63, a Deer Park resident. “No organized effort whatsoever … We didn’t even know how many people we had lost. People were still thinking we had lost 500 or 600.”

Instead, Richardson was struck to see long, organized lines of people passing five-gallon buckets to one another filled with debris as they tried to find buried survivors of the attack.

“When I went I was pleasantly surprised … What I saw was organized chaos,” he said. “The fire department is very resilient. We get the job done.”

As the nation prepares to mark on Monday the 22nd anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Richardson and other first responders are reflecting on a day seared into their memories.

He and other Long Islanders are featured in a new book about the FDNY which traces its recent history, from the days of “the Bronx is burning” era of widespread arson in the late 1960s and 1970s to the 9/11 attacks and beyond.

'They’re all my brothers'

The book, “They Saved New York: The Men and Women of the FDNY,” is an ode to workers widely seen as heroes during 9/11.

“They’re all my brothers,” said Dan Potter, the book's author and a retired FDNY member. He lost 60 friends in the attack, including three close ones, he said.

“It’s heartbreaking. It’s heart-wrenching,” he said. “But that’s what we do — we go in.” The book was conceived by Massapequa resident Glenn Usdin, who also took its photographs.

Richardson said what he saw on the day after the attacks and for months more made him “proud. The fire department somehow, some way came to some kind of organization.”

It was often gruesome work. Paul Heglund, a retired FDNY captain who lives in Centerport and is also featured in the book, recalled how they would rarely find a fully intact body in what was called “The Pile.” Instead, they more frequently found body parts.

He recalled one night, while he was working near a temporary morgue set up at the site, he and others formed an impromptu honor guard as the remains of one victim was brought to the facility. But they had to form the guard five separate times as more parts were delivered.

9/11 hero father would be 'immensely proud'

Christopher Howard, 40, of Massapequa Park, was 18 years old when his father, a Port Authority police officer, was killed in the attack.

Christopher had long wanted to become a police officer like his dad, or a firefighter, but his father, George Howard, had discouraged him from doing it. After his father died, Christopher applied to the FDNY partly because his father “wasn’t around to tell me no anymore,” he joked in an interview Friday.

“A lot of his friends came into my life that were both cops and firemen and helped steer me in the direction as well,” he said. If his father was alive today, he would be “immensely proud” of his career choice, he added.

Howard said he was troubled by how the attacks seem to be commemorated by fewer people as the years pass, but he does his own ceremony to keep the memories of the 9/11 heroes alive.

On his front lawn, he places about 400 crosses painted red, white or blue to honor the first responders who died in the attacks. On the nights of Sept. 10 and 11, he beams two large lights into the sky, representing the Twin Towers. Hundreds of his neighbors, attracted by the lights, come to pay tribute. Last year, the event drew about 500 people.

“I’ve tried my best to take a really bad day and turn it into something good,” he said.

He recalled that the last time he saw his father was on Sept. 10, 2001. “September 10 will always be a special day for me,” he said.

He had damaged his car in an accident a few days earlier, and his father took him to a junk yard to get it repaired. While they waited, he bought his father a meatball parmigiano hero for lunch.

“We spent the entire day together fixing my car, not knowing that that was going to be the last day I ever saw him,” Howard said.