A few Bradford City firefighters sat down with The Era on Friday to talk about what they remember 15 years after the September 11th attacks.

The three men agreed that memories of the horror and heroism of that fateful day will stay with them forever — and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We don’t want to forget,” Capt. J.D. Tehle said. “For me, it’s like our Pearl Harbor.

“We have a sheet on the wall downstairs with pictures of the 343 FDNY firefighters who died. I look at it almost every day, their faces, their names — there are fathers and sons on there together — it keeps it very real for me,” Tehle explained. “That’s the reality of it, and as painful and devastating as it is, I don’t want to forget the feelings I had that day, the people that were touched by those acts — it’s huge, it’s part of the fabric of America.”

Tehle had been a firefighter for about 15 years — just over two of those years at the city department — when the planes hit the towers. He recalls he was injured after a motorcycle accident and was getting ready to go to a physical therapy appointment when his mom told him what she’d seen on the news.

“A plane had hit the World Trade Center, and like anyone else we thought it was a small plane,” Tehle said. “We were shocked and watching as the second plane hit.

“Immediately, all of us (firefighters) just came down here. This just doesn’t happen and we knew it was something horrible. Then we heard about the Pentagon and Shanksville…” he continued. “Our first thought was, what are we going to do, what’s next? Would we have to be prepared to protect the city?”

Like most everybody in America during those first moments, Bradford City firefighters were grappling to understand what was happening. Glued to a small television set in the office of Central Fire Station, they tried to comprehend the horrendous images and information coming across the news — outbursts of anger and emotion punctuated by long periods of uneasy silence.

“We gathered instinctively in case we could be of service,” Tehle said, relating when he did go home to be with loved ones later that night “it didn’t feel right” and he was compelled to return to the station. As emergency responders, they had a special understanding of what firefighters, paramedics, police officers and others were facing in the rescue efforts at Ground Zero.

“Those guys knew it was a suicide mission, and they went into the towers anyway…without hesitation,” he said. “You can’t fight a fire like that with two-and-a-half inch hose. If I was faced with that situation, I would know I wasn’t coming back out of there.”

Tehle said the department was fortunate enough that none of their family members had been directly affected, “but as far as the brotherhood goes, we knew they were out there trying to do the impossible and that a lot of people were being killed.

“They knew a 2.5-inch hose wouldn’t do anything, that they would be running up stairs for, what, two hours? That they probably wouldn’t reach the 85th floor, but they were just going to try to get people out,” Tehle continued. “It’s what they were there to do. Then, the building collapsed with them inside of it, and the fires continued for a long time after that.”

Bradford City Firefighter Mike Valine, who started as a firefighter in 1994 but joined the city department in the months before the attacks, said 100,000 gallons of jet fuel with all the combustibles in the building may have put temperatures of the fire in the tower near 2,500 degrees. “That’s like a welding torch,” Tehle put in. “Steel fails at 1,100 degrees.”

Valine said he was driving to Central Fire Station in a rental car, having just dropped off his vehicle for service, when he heard bits and pieces about the attacks come over the radio.

“It was 8:30 a.m., I went straight to the station, and I remember just all of us watching the TV. It was so quiet those first couple hours,” he said. “Everyone got angry, then quiet again. It was very emotional, very confusing. I remember the silence, no one knew what to say. Then, the other two planes went down, and we knew it was an act of war against us.

“Even 15 years later, when I think about that day, words cannot express the emotions that ran through me,” Valine stated. “To see those skyscrapers come down, it was very surreal to me.”

And, it wasn’t just the Twin Towers. The firefighters noted there were three other tall structures with 50+ stories that caught fire and collapsed in the vicinity of the World Trade Center and acknowledged the mutual aid brought in from numerous companies in surrounding states.

“In the days and weeks that followed, these firefighters worked 16, 20, 24-hour days — covering their shifts and heading back to ‘the pile’ to keep digging. They couldn’t leave their men behind,” Tehle said. “And, through it all, there was area of New York that went without coverage. There were still car accidents, other fires and incidents that needed help, and someone was there for them.”

Tehle visited a station in the Upper West Side of Manhattan two years after the attacks, and even then he said he could “feel the sadness,” that it was “palpable.”

“It’s incredible how it still continues to impact people to this day,” he said. “There are still guys — firefighters, cops — dying today of cancer as a result of the time the spent on ‘the pile’… the asbestos, the hydrocarbons. They breathed that day in and day out until it was all taken care of, and they’re still suffering for that sacrifice.

“You can never forget. These guys live it every day,” Tehle added. “And, now their kids are signing up as firefighters. Their dads, uncles, brothers died in 9/11, they know how tough that job is, and they’re happy to do it.”

Bradford City Firefighter Joseph Spencer was 21 years old and working at The Bradford Club the morning of the attacks. He had been a firefighter in high school and was working a couple different jobs as he decided whether or not he wanted to devote himself to a dangerous career when he had a daughter on the way.

Inspired by the heroism and dedication of those he saw give their lives in the effort to help victims of the attack, he made his choice and has been serving with the city department ever since.

“Fire service was dying off, and this made a lot of people want to join,” Spencer related. “I had to go back. It lit a fire in my belly.”

And, Valine noted, it brought the department closer together. “There’s only three of us left — Tehle, myself, and Chief (Eric) Taylor — that were part of this department on 9/11,” he said. “But that group of guys, and now the younger guys coming in, we’re part of something together, and we’ll never forget.”