Remembering Empire State Building plane crash: a lesson for firefighters in how to battle high-rise fires

It was a tragedy that shook the nation and made headlines around the world: a plane crashing into the tallest building on Earth.

It happened 80 years ago Monday, July 28, 1945, when a twin-engine North American B-25 Mitchell bomber on a ferry flight from Bedford, Massachusetts, to the then-U.S. Army Air Forces-controlled Newark Metropolitan Airport crashed in heavy fog into the upper floors of the Empire State Building.

The crash killed all three men aboard the B-25 and 11 others in the building and on the ground. It injured another 24.

The accident led to passage of the Federal Tort Claims Act, signed into law a year later by President Harry S.  Truman, allowing private parties to sue the government. It resulted in what is the Guinness World Record for the longest survived elevator fall — when severed elevator cables sent operator Betty Lou Oliver and her elevator car plunging more than 75 floors, about 1,000 feet, into the building basement. 

The crash also led to changes in how FDNY firefighters dealt with fire and rescue operations in high-rise buildings.

And those changes likely played a role in the tragedies suffered by emergency responders to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, said Vincent Dunn, retired deputy chief and division commander of the FDNY Midtown Manhattan High-Rise Division.

Retired in 1999, Dunn, 90, of Douglaston, Queens, author of more than 10 books on firefighting, remains a leading expert on high-rise firefighting tactics. He said that the Empire State Building crash was "studied, restudied and then restudied again" by generations of firefighting personnel, he among them.

"We really are the high-rise experts of America," Dunn said of New York firefighters in an exclusive interview this week. "But, the lessons learned from the Empire State Building fire absolutely influenced how we responded on 9/11 — and those lessons were misleading. It gave us a false sense of the impact of construction on a fire and it gave us a false sense of the effect of flammable fuel ... It made us think we had response time we didn’t have."

How it happened

The war in Europe had ended in May 1945, and the war in the Pacific was two atomic bombs removed from resolution. The B-25D, the same type on display at the American Airpower Museum at Republic Airport in East Farmingdale, was flown by Lt. Col. William Franklin Smith Jr. 

According to the "Throwback FDNY Podcast" by historian Gary Urbanowicz, low cloud cover and dense fog on the morning of the crash made flying near impossible. Smith asked to divert to LaGuardia Field  but was denied. His bomber, bearing the nickname Old John Feather Merchant, was to cross Manhattan north of Central Park, then turn south to Newark.

But Urbanowicz said Smith mistook Roosevelt Island for Manhattan and the west side of the East River for the Hudson.

He turned south over midtown.

Witnesses told how Smith narrowly missed the Chrysler Building, but at about 9:40 a.m., his B-25, doing 200 mph, slammed into the Empire State Building between the 78th and 80th floors. The plane punched a huge hole in the north side of the building, touching off fire. One radial engine careened through and out, igniting a fire that destroyed a penthouse in a nearby building. Debris rained onto the street.

 The official FDNY publication WNYF, With New York Firefighters, later noted that responders from nearby firehouses were on scene in minutes. It described how firefighters trucked up narrow staircases, evacuating those in the building on an otherwise quiet Saturday, using standpipe locations to get water on a four-alarm fuel fire "of unusual intensity." 

The fire, which remains the highest structure blaze ever brought under control by FDNY firefighters, was extinguished in 40 minutes.

But Dunn and James T. Bullock, retired FDNY deputy chief and commanding officer of special operations, said construction of the Empire State Building was vastly different from that of modern high-rises. That prevented structural failure and the spread of fire between floors.

Three-hour window

And, Bullock and Dunn agree, success responding to the Empire State Building crash led to the subsequent thinking that responders had at least a three-hour window to fight high-rise fires and evacuate high-rise buildings.

Bullock, 80, of Staten Island, was 2 weeks old at the time of the Empire State crash. The former commander of the lower Manhattan High-Rise Division, who is an owner and co-founder of the Manhattan-based consulting firm International Fire & Life Safety Experts, told Newsday: "The thought when they were fighting the fire that day at the Trade Center was they had more time. They thought they were making progress, but didn’t realize the beams were compromised when the planes hit — and they didn’t realize all that fuel had caused a fire they couldn’t fight ... No one realized any of it until afterwards."

 Though 1970s fire Commissioner John T. O’Hagan warned that modern construction used on the Trade Center could lead to the rapid spread of fire and structural collapse, Dunn said the 1993 terror bombing in the basement garage at the World Trade Center  actually reinforced lessons learned in 1945. 

But, Dunn said, the substructure and superstructure of the World Trade Center towers were much different. The belowground construction was more akin to that at the Empire State, while the aboveground construction was nothing like it. And that B-25 bomber carried just 900 gallons of gasoline and was less than a third the size of two Boeing 767s that hit the towers — each hijacked airliner carrying more than 20,000 gallons of jet fuel.

The South Tower collapsed about 56 minutes after being struck; the North Tower about one hour and 42 minutes after impact.

Experts note that high-rise firefighting procedures are now regularly evaluated and updated to consider all avenues of ongoing evolution.

As Dunn said: "Responders were thinking 1945, and they were thinking 1993, when they answered the call that day to the World Trade Center ... They weren’t thinking the building’s coming down."