By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, an old Baltimore County story is making the rounds again on social media, and it still stings.
In late September 2001, five volunteer firefighters from the Wise Avenue Volunteer Fire Company in Dundalk were suspended by county fire officials. Their offense wasn’t misconduct on a call or a safety violation. It was driving to New York on their own time to help dig through the wreckage of the World Trade Center.
“Their offense wasn’t misconduct on a call or a safety violation. It was driving to New York on their own time to help dig through the wreckage of the World Trade Center.”
The story resurfaced this week when a post on X from an account called Marine Grunt, describing a mother’s experience as one of those volunteers, drew hundreds of thousands of views and reignited an old debate about duty, chain of command, and what it means to serve. The post cannot be independently verified as tied to a specific one of the five firefighters, but the underlying 2001 events it references are well documented in contemporaneous news coverage.
What actually happened
According to reporting at the time by The Baltimore Sun and a wire account carried by The Washington Times, the sequence went like this. On the day of the attacks, a Baltimore County fire captain issued a memo to paid and volunteer personnel saying members were “encouraged” not to travel to New York City unless officially summoned. That phrasing is worth sitting with. “Encouraged not to” is softer than a direct order, particularly given that the discipline that followed was defended as necessary to enforce the chain of command.
“’Encouraged not to’ is softer than a direct order, particularly given that the discipline that followed was defended as necessary to enforce the chain of command.”
Baltimore County did send its own people, but through the official channel. Ten members of the county’s Texas Fire Station in Cockeysville, trained in urban search and rescue for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were formally called up and sent to New York that same day.
Five members of the Wise Avenue company read the situation differently. Lt. Mike Kratochvil, Judi Ulsch, Will Willinger, Chuck Bruzdzinski and his sister Kim Bruzdzinski decided to go anyway, on their own time and with their own gear.
“We were following our hearts.”
“I said, ‘Whatever, I’m still going,'” Kratochvil told The Washington Times.
The five arrived in New York in the early hours of Sept. 13. They signed in at a relief center on Staten Island, then spent the day on a bucket brigade hauling debris from the smoking pile at Ground Zero. They wore shirts identifying them as members of Wise Avenue’s Station 27.
That decision, made during an unprecedented national disaster response, is what got them in trouble. When the group submitted a photo from the trip to a community newspaper, the picture and their names gave commanders the evidence they needed. Acting Fire Chief David Martini suspended all five.
- Kratochvil, as an officer, received a 45-day suspension.
- The other four received 30-day suspensions.
- All five were stripped of their gear and barred from the firehouse for the duration.
Martini defended the discipline as necessary for order at a chaotic scene.
“It is very important to follow orders,” he said, according to the Sun’s account.
Ulsch saw it differently.
“We were following our hearts,” she said.
A hero to some, insubordinate to others
The suspensions did not sit well with everyone in Dundalk. Thomas Toporovich, a longtime community figure sometimes described as the neighborhood’s unofficial mayor, told the Sun he could not understand why volunteers weren’t allowed to go on their own initiative.
“I’m amazed and shocked,” he said.
The county’s position, unpopular as it was, wasn’t unique to Maryland. The same tension played out elsewhere. Three volunteer firefighters in Mechanicville, New York, roughly 17 miles north of Albany, were suspended for 90 days after their own chief learned they had gone to Ground Zero without permission, only finding out when he saw them on television.
“That context does not make the Wise Avenue five wrong. It just clarifies what the county was arguing for: not that Dundalk firefighters shouldn’t help, but that they should help through the chain of command rather than around it.”
There’s a real argument on the institutional side of this. A collapsed-skyscraper site filled with unstable debris, hazardous conditions, and rescue crews from dozens of agencies creates obvious command and accountability problems. Fire departments run on a chain of command for good reason, and officials at the time were trying to keep people working within a formal, coordinated response rather than showing up on their own.
The official Baltimore County deployment illustrates what that formal response looked like. The 10 members of the Texas Fire Station team were briefed on arrival and split into 12-hour day and night shifts. Their assignment was to search for victims, and they ultimately recovered members of FDNY Rescue Company 1 from a collapsed stairwell, according to a 2021 WMAR interview with two of the responding firefighters. One of them, Chris Wilhelm, said he left his wife home with their two young sons for the roughly two weeks the team was deployed.
That context does not make the Wise Avenue five wrong. It just clarifies what the county was arguing for: not that Dundalk firefighters shouldn’t help, but that they should help through the chain of command rather than around it. That argument has never landed well with the public, and it still doesn’t.
Five volunteers used their own time and their own equipment to go help exhausted rescue workers claw through rubble looking for survivors and remains. They came home to a punishment, not a commendation. A quarter century later, that’s still the part of the story that people can’t get past.
“They came home to a punishment, not a commendation.”
What to watch
MDBayNews found no indication that the Wise Avenue suspensions were later rescinded, formally reconsidered, or expunged after they ran their course in October and November 2001. Wise Avenue itself has served Dundalk since 1942. Twenty-five years later, this episode survives as a little-remembered Maryland chapter of 9/11, one that captures the collision between two instincts deeply embedded in the fire service: answer the call, and follow the chain of command.
Sources: This report draws on a Sept. 29, 2001 article published by The Baltimore Sun, “5 volunteers suspended for going to N.Y.”; an Oct. 2, 2001 Associated Press wire report carried by The Washington Times; a Sept. 10, 2021 WMAR-2 News interview with retired Baltimore County Fire Department Lt. Mark Gardner and apparatus driver Chris Wilhelm, both members of the official Texas Fire Station deployment; Baltimore County government’s public list of fire station locations and equipment; and Wise Avenue Volunteer Fire Company’s own public page. The resurfaced social media post from X user @03MarineGrunt served as the news hook for this story but was not used as a source for any factual claim in this article.
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