On September 11, 2001, New York City firefighter Sal Argano benefited from a stroke of luck. Rather than working at his regular station—a small Manhattan firehouse situated directly across an intersection from the Twin Towers—he was on temporary loan to another unit in Brooklyn when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center.
Racing downtown, he discovered his firehouse badly damaged but still standing. He would later learn that six of his colleagues were among the 343 New York City firefighters killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center.
“If I wasn’t sent out on rotation there would have been a good chance I would not be here today,” Argano says. “I think about that all the time.”…