When terrorist attacks struck the United States on September 11, 2001, local first responders were called upon to serve on the national stage. Among them was former Lincoln Fire and Rescue Fire Chief John Huff, who had previously spearheaded the effort to get Lincoln involved in FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue system.
The initiative began years earlier in 1991 following a letter from the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency seeking volunteers for a national disaster program. “I put out an email to our fire department, and I had 90 people respond,” Huff recalls. “A third of them said, ‘Sounds like something that might be interesting.’ So we sent a letter, tell us more.”
After navigating a lengthy application process, Lincoln became the only department in the region to secure a spot in the national system at the time. “I was the only one dumb enough to do the application,” Huff joked. “Nobody west of us, nobody east of us, so we were it.
The average USAR task force member during a deployment gets more experience in search and rescue than the average firefighter in the United States gets in a career. We saw it as a win-win.” On the morning of September 11, Huff was serving as the leader of FEMA’s Red Incident Support Team when he received an unusual page.
“The page said, ‘The red IST is activated for the Pentagon. The blue team to World Trade Center. Do not call back.’ That was the page that I got that activated me. ‘Do not call back’ from FEMA. It’s like, that’s weird. Never got one of those before.”
Despite the instruction, Huff called the office staff directly to confirm and immediately packed up to leave. “Keith Hofick and I left here before 11:00 o’clock on the 11th. We drove straight through, 22 hours. We got to Washington, D.C. about sunup, driving in from the west, you could see the column of smoke miles away.”
Upon arrival in the nation’s capital, Huff found an eerie, empty landscape as emergency operations were rapidly mounting at the Pentagon. “It was just surreal,” Huff tells KLIN News. “There were no people on the streets. There were no cars on the beltway, it was like Washington, D.C. had vanished.”
When Huff reported for duty, the local Incident Commander had a simple question: “Why are you here from Nebraska? “It’s like, ‘Well, they sent me. I’m here,'” Huff remembered. Huff’s leadership during the crisis marked a historic moment for Nebraska emergency responders, proving that a team built in the Midwest was ready to answer the call on one of the country’s darkest days.