As we approach the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, Townhall plans to honor the lives lost and the lives forever changed with our "Heroes of 9/11" series. Every day from now until September 11, we will highlight an American hero. This year, most especially, we wish not simply to commemorate an event, but the character of exceptional men and women who demonstrated the best of humanity in one of its darkest moments. More than that, we want to educate younger generations for whom September 11 is little more than a historical episode so that we embody what it means to "Never Forget."
Lower Manhattan is an island. On the west sits the Hudson River; to the north is the Harlem River. The East River is self-explanatory, and the southern tip of the island faces New York Harbor. For early settlers in the region, this was ideal: a superb natural harbor, the ability to reach the inland via the Hudson, and access to trade routes in the Atlantic.
With the proliferation of cars and subways, skyscrapers and bridges turned most New Yorkers away from relying on the water as the earlier settlers had. But on September 11, those waterways would be the only means of escape for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers trapped in a city crippled by a terror attack.
That morning, Coast Guard Lt. Michael Day was chief of the Waterways Oversight Branch at Coast Guard Activities New York. He was heading to a meeting at the World Trade Center when the command alert came in: a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers.
Then another hit.
"It was chaotic," Day said. All the communications systems failed, so agencies and first responders had no way to connect with one another. "People from multiple agencies were responding to the scene without a unity of purpose." And while the Coast Guard had evacuation plans for Manhattan, none of them addressed the situation before Day that morning. So Day grabbed a copy of the OPSAIL 2000 plan. It wasn't meant as a large-scale emergency plan; it covered Operation Sail 2000, a huge maritime celebration held in New York Harbor around July 4, 2000. All Day knew was that OPSAIL 2000 had a lot of ambulance staging areas and evacuation points.
"Although it wasn't necessarily a full-scale evacuation plan, it had information," Day said to the Maritime Executive last year. Day was joined shortly by Andrew McGovern, pilot of the 100-foot pilot boat New York. They both grabbed lifejackets, the OPSAIL plan, a Coast Guard Ensign, and headed for the pilot boat.
Every time Day listened to the radio, all he heard was more chaos. "Every channel you clicked to, people were screaming, 'Help, people are here...I've got someone hurt here,'" he said.
The 9/11 Boatlift First Responders are #AmericanMaritimeHeroes. This civilian fleet of ferries and tug boats went into the face of catastrophe and evacuated more than 500,000 people from Lower Manhattan. It was the largest rescue boatlift in world history. https://t.co/4cZlXZLmX3
— AMP Maritime 🇺🇸 (@AMPmaritime) January 6, 2020
From their view on the water, Day and McGovern watched the buildings collapse. Despite the chaos and everything going on, Day wasn't worried for his own safety. Instead, he hoisted the Coast Guard Ensign on the pilot boat and began broadcasting over the radio.
"All available boats,” Day broadcast over the radio to anyone and everyone within range. “This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”
Greg Freitas, a charter boat captain who took clients out on his 80-foot schooner, Adirondack, was one of the many who heard the call. At first, however, Freitas slept through the blaring sirens. He'd had a long night taking passengers out and was fast asleep when all hell broke loose in Manhattan. It wasn't until Freitas went to get coffee and the terrified barista told him to look at the television screen that he realized what had happened.
Freitas raced back to the pier and departed to help out in any way he could. "I thought a small plane had hit the tower," he recalled.
Soon Captain Sean Kennedy, who shared Pier 62 with Freitas, reached out. A news organization had called Kennedy asking to charter his boat, the Chelsea Screamer, to get a crew to the World Trade Center. Kennedy asked if Freitas would accompany them.
"Responding is who we are and what we do as captains," Freitas said.
Governors Island made a good rallying point for the boats. Sitting about 800 yards from the southern tip of Manhattan, it was a place to organize and coordinate the boat response. Freitas' Screamer made three trips from that southern tip to the Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City, transporting about 150 people before heading to Chelsea Piers to hand out water to the thousands of waiting evacuees.
Richard Thornton grew up on Coney Island and had a lifelong fascination with boats. He joined the Navy and then, in 1990, began working with New York Waterways. He was a captain, and the company ran scheduled crossings on the Hudson between New Jersey, Midtown Manhattan, and lower Manhattan's financial district. The morning of September 11, Thornton and his crew were on board the Henry Hudson preparing to ferry commuters across the river.
Then Thornton noticed the smoke coming from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and passengers told him what had happened. Thornton's mind immediately traveled back to February 26, 1993 — the day of the World Trade Center bombing. Thornton and his ferry, along with several others, had helped evacuate people from lower Manhattan that day.
Without hesitation, Thornton turned the Henry Hudson towards the burning buildings, believing another water evacuation would be necessary. "We immediately just took off," he'd later recount at a program at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. "We stole the boat...we didn't tell anybody."
Thornton and his crew watched in horror as United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower shortly after 9 AM. The Henry Hudson pulled into Pier 11 near Wall Street and was swarmed by people escaping the city. They filled the boat well beyond its 399-person capacity, but Thornton didn't care. He took them to Hoboken, New Jersey, and turned back.
That's when Thornton heard the call.
"All available boats ..."
Thornton didn't stop evacuating people until 6 PM that night. After docking for the last time, local law enforcement boarded the boat to decontaminate it and everyone on board. Before he disembarked, Thornton grabbed the American flag that had been hanging off the stern of the Henry Hudson. It was dirty and frayed from the day. Thornton saved it for posterity and donated it to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in 2023.
The story of the boatlift was turned into a documentary, "BOATLIFT, An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience."
"They were feeling helpless, and that's the worst feeling in the world," said Amberjack V Captain Vincent Ardolino. "My wife was there and I turned around and I says, 'I have got to go do something.' Just like that. And she looked at me, she says, 'What are you going to do, you maniac?' I says, 'I'm going to take the Amberjack up into the city and help.' She says, 'Well, what if they're attacked again?' and I says, 'That's something that I'm going to have to live with.'"
"Even if I save one person or I rescue one person, that's one person less that will suffer and die," he added.
"They were trying to evacuate Manhattan because nobody knew what was going on. You didn't know if something else was going to happen. It was just a madness on one side and wanting to help people on the other side," said Herb Jones, engineer on the Mary Gellatly.
And at first, the evacuation was calm. Panic set in when the first building fell and lower Manhattan was blanketed in smoke, dust, and debris.
"People were actually jumping into the river and swimming out of Manhattan," Thornton, who appeared in the documentary, said.
Even those on the boats were worried. James Parese, captain on the Staten Island Ferry, was concerned for the safety of the people he was rescuing. "I was wondering if they were going to come on the boat. If they had people with bombs...we're a big orange target in the middle of the harbor. My job is to keep the boat safe, keep my passengers safe."
"Every mode of transportation out of Manhattan was shut down," said Captain Kirk Slater of the NY Waterway. "All the subways were shut, the tunnels were all closed, they closed the bridges. They closed everything immediately."
The “Boatlift” heroes of 9/11
— END OF TERROR (@_endofterror) March 28, 2026
After the September 11 attacks, thousands were trapped in lower Manhattan.
Boat captains—fishermen, ferry operators, and civilians—organized a spontaneous evacuation.
In just hours, they rescued over 500,000 people across the water.
For the first time in over a century, boats were the only way in and out of Manhattan.
And the boats showed up. Ferries, tugboats, yachts, party boats, schooners. Hundreds of boats all answered Day's call and converged on lower Manhattan.
"All available boats ..."
Robin Jones, an Engineer on the Mary Gellatly said, "When that call came on the radio, they were coming. If it floated and it could get there, it got there."
Some have made the comparison between the September 11 boatlift and Dunkirk, the World War II effort to remove troops from the French coast. While there are some similarities, 338,000 French and British troops were evacuated over the course of nine days.
In New York, as many as 500,000 people were evacuated from lower Manhattan in nine hours. And it was all thanks to ordinary people who answered the call.
"All available boats ..."
This is part of the American Heroes of 9/11 series. To read more about the American Heroes of 9/11, click here.
Editor's Note: We must never forget those lost on 9/11 and the American heroes who sacrificed their lives to save countless others.
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