9/11: The Coast Guard Lieutenant Who Launched The Largest Boatlift In History

“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard.”

The voice of U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Michael Day cut through the static and the chaos as New Yorkers fled to the water’s edge, trying to escape the billowing smoke and ash from the collapse of the World Trade Center — and following that voice, boats came by the dozens.

Day was supposed to attend a meeting at Tower One of the World Trade Center that morning, but before he arrived, the call came out that a plane had struck one building — and then another plane struck the other. Running to the water to escape the dust and debris, some people jumped into the Hudson River without waiting for boats. Others lined the waterways and just waited, hoping that they’d be picked up eventually.

“We were unable to get any reports from lower Manhattan since all the communications systems failed. It was chaotic. People from multiple agencies were responding to the scene without any unity of purpose. There wasn’t a pre-planned response; there was no CONOP for how to respond to two planes crashing into the Towers,” Day recalled.

Grabbing the closest emergency response plan he could think of, Day set to work: “I knew it had a lot of ambulance staging areas. We had a lot of evacuation points identified. Although it wasn’t necessarily a full-scale evacuation plan, it had information.”

“I remember listening to the radio because by this time we were underway on the boat and it was just … chaos. Every channel you clicked to, people were screaming, ‘Help, people are here … I’ve got someone hurt here.'”

With cellular phone service and radio communications unreliable at best, Day shifted to handheld radios and sent Coast Guardsmen to the piers to help coordinate the crowds of people trying to leave Manhattan.

And then Lt. Day picked up a radio of his own: “All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”

The boats were already on their way: ferries; fishing boats; tour lines; private yachts; dinner cruise vessels; and even a few dinghies that could only carry two people at a time.

Captain Richard Thornton, who normally ferried commuters from Manhattan to New Jersey aboard the Henry Hudson, answered that call: “We immediately just took off. We stole the boat … we didn’t tell anybody.”

Joining in the relief efforts, emergency responders on the New Jersey side met the boats with supplies: food and water that could be taken back to those still waiting for a ride off the island.

“We set up three different staging areas because the supplies were coming in so fast and furious that we were running out of room, and we couldn’t distribute them fast enough,” Day said, later reflecting, “I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”

By the numbers, the September 11 evacuation of Lower Manhattan was bigger than Dunkirk, where between May 26 and June 4, 1940, civilian and military vessels evacuated 338,226 Allied soldiers who were stranded on the beach.

On September 11, approximately 800 mariners evacuated nearly 500,000 civilians from Lower Manhattan in about nine hours. Captain Thornton’s company alone — which would normally transport about 34,000 people in a day — moved 158,000 stranded New Yorkers to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Queens.

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