Bill Feehan joined the FDNY in 1959 and served at every one of its nine ranks, including commissioner. On September 11, 2001, he was helping direct the response from the West Street command center …
One gray Saturday morning in 1945, days before the atomic detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to a close, a US Army B-25 bomber, lost in thick fog, careened into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building.
Bill Feehan’s father William poses with his company circa 1930. A 20-year FDNY vet, William was one of the first on the scene when a plane crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945.The crash of the B-25 bomber during thick fog resulted in 14 deaths and millions of dollars worth of damage. Bill Feehan regularly recounted his father’s experiences battling the Empire State Building blaze.
“The last thing he remembered was the floor beneath him falling away,” McDonald writes. “The rush of air caused by the collapse lifted him and blew him down the stairwell.” The Feehans’ daughter, Tara, kept the firefighting tradition alive when she married Brian Davan , a second-generation firefighter from Queens.“In a way, [Bill’s] love for his dad and his love for the fire department were one and the same,” McDonald writes. William Patrick Feehan, a lifelong non-smoker, died of emphysema in 1975.
By 1985, after stints as staff chief of operations and of fire prevention, Bill was known as “the most broadly experienced fire officer in the department,” McDonald writes. Bill won the respect of politicians on both sides of the aisle as he hit the department’s highest echelons. In 1993, outgoing Mayor David Dinkins appointed him the FDNY’s 28th fire commissioner — even though Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani would certainly name his own pick the moment he was sworn in.
Bill Feehan was at the side of his FDNY colleague Peter Ganci when the North Tower fell on 9/11, killing them both.Firefighters mourn Bill Feehan at his funeral four days after the attacks. “The truest form of love is to lay down your life for another,” Bill once said during a eulogy for a fallen firefighter.
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