Twenty-five years ago this week, two hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center, and Lower Manhattan filled with smoke and ash. Bridges and tunnels closed. Subways stopped running. Cell service failed. Hundreds of thousands of people were trapped at the southern tip of the island with nowhere to go but the water.

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What followed became the largest waterborne evacuation in history. It began with a Coast Guard lieutenant who picked up a radio and asked for help.

From the Daily Wire:

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.

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.

Lt. Michael Day had been scheduled to attend a meeting at the North Tower that morning. He never made it. The first plane struck before he arrived, and the second plane hit minutes later. When he and his crew got underway, they found a scene with no playbook. Communications systems in lower Manhattan had failed, and multiple agencies were responding without a unified plan. There was no standing operation for two airliners striking the Towers.

Day reached for the closest thing he could find, an emergency response plan he knew listed ambulance staging areas and evacuation points. It was not built for a mass evacuation, but it gave him something to work with. He switched to handheld radios and sent Coast Guardsmen to the piers to organize the crowds waiting to leave the island.

The response that followed far exceeded anything in that plan. Ferries, fishing boats, tour vessels, private yachts, dinner cruise ships and small dinghies answered the call. On the New Jersey side, emergency responders met the arriving boats with food and water to send back to those still waiting. Day later described setting up three staging areas because supplies arrived faster than they could be handed out, and he acknowledged breaking more rules that day than he had enforced in his entire Coast Guard career. Captain Richard Thornton, who normally ferried commuters aboard the Henry Hudson, took his vessel without waiting for authorization. His company, which typically moves about 34,000 people in a day, carried 158,000 stranded New Yorkers to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn and Queens.

Scripture teaches that no one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, and on September 11, 2001, that love showed up in ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Mariners who had no obligation to sail into a disaster zone sailed anyway. A lieutenant with no script for the moment used what he had and trusted others to fill the gaps. Twenty-five years later, the church still has a role on this anniversary: to remember the dead, to honor those who ran toward danger, and to intercede for families whose grief has not faded with time.

Let us pray for the families who lost loved ones on September 11, for the first responders who paid the ultimate price, and for the mariners whose quiet courage carried half a million people to safety.

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(Excerpt from the Daily Wire. Photo Credit: COD Newsroom – COD Commemorates 20th Anniversary of 9/11 Attacks, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110974317).