Local firefighter who helped in 9/11 aftermath still feels void

CHESAPEAKE

Faith Gollob remembers standing in the massive shadow of the World Trade Center as a child and looking up. The view made her dizzy.

Her parents had witnessed the construction of the twin towers and they were as much a part of Gollob's native New York skyline as the Empire State Building.

Then one day, the towers were gone.

Gollob, a fourth-generation cop from Queens, N.Y., moved to Virginia when she was 21 and spent 11 years with the Chesapeake Police Department. Now she's a single mother to a 7-year-old and battles blazes and tends to the injured as a firefighter and emergency medical technician at Fire Station 4 off Battlefield Boulevard. She became a firefighter after her son was born, preferring the lifestyle and work schedule.

She is well acquainted with crackling radios and screaming sirens and the inexplicable tragedy that sometimes follows. She is used to walking into chaos and making everything better.

It's what she hopes to do on today's 24-hour shift.

It's Sept. 11, the ninth since the towers fell and left her hollow. Except for a speech she will give for Operation Homefront Hampton Roads this morning, Gollob won't bring it up unless someone else does first.

Not everybody wants to keep holding on.

In August 2001, Gollob watched the New York City skyline as she drove south on the New Jersey turnpike after a visit home. The World Trade Center was the last thing she saw.

Gollob would be back in a month with other Chesapeake officers who came to help the New York City Police Department's 6th Precinct as it rummaged through the ash and twisted metal that looked to Gollob like massive mounds of spaghetti.

They arrived in the middle of the night. The broken-off piece of skyline made her feel as empty as it looked.

"It was my home," she said.

She worked 17-hour days for a week, filling in at the 6th Precinct while the New York officers worked at ground zero.

Every day, she stopped by. Ash clung to her boots.

When Gollob returned to Chesapeake, she put her sweatshirt in a plastic bag to preserve the smell. She still has the boots.

The gray dust may be part of the victims, and to her they are sacred.

She visited New York over Fourth of July weekend this year. She went to a baseball game and considered the sitting target she and the tens of thousands of other spectators had created. She silently plotted an escape route.

She visited ground zero, just as she has on every visit home since 9/11. The Freedom Tower is going up and Gollob tracks its progress: It will stand 1,776 feet tall when it is done - 104 stories topped with a giant spire.

A year after the attacks, she saw blue beams of light where the World Trade Center once stood. Nearly nine years later, she counted more than 20 stories.

"In a few years, the sky won't be empty anymore."

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5208, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com