I.S. 89 Custodian Hailed as School’s Hero

By Ronald Drenger

"You are our I.S. 89 hero," said 8th-grader Jackie Kopel as she presented a plaque to Sean Casey, to resounding applause from several hunded students, parents, teachers and staff in the school’s cafeteria. I.S. 89 Principal Ellen Foote gave Casey a warm hug. The tribute to Casey, custodian at P.S./I.S. 89 in Battery Park City since it opened, fittingly came during the Jan. 18 celebration marking I.S. 89’s return from a four-month exile in Chelsea. On Sept. 11, seeing the Twin Towers burning, Casey saved the school from being inundated with dust and debris by shutting down its ventilation system. In the following months, he tended the building while it served as a command center for the city’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) and then during cleaning and environmental testing by the Board of Education. In a recent interview, Casey said it felt good to be appreciated but he played down the hero label. "We saw the towers burning and the smoke coming out of them," he said. "Standard procedure is, any time there’s a possible contamination from the outside, you shut down the fans.We never thought the towers would fall down, we just thought some of the smoke would come in." After students were evacuated, Casey, at Principal Foote’s request, checked all the classrooms to make sure every child was out. He thought he would be evacuated too. Instead, he spent the next 48 hours working in the building, and returned every day thereafter.

"I felt I’d rather stay with the building," he said. "I know it inside and out. I just wanted to do whatever I could to help."

He watched in amazement as the massive emergency operation took shape.

"OEM set itself up in the cafeteria, with a different agency at each table. They met every few hours around the clock, asking each agency what it needed, and finding someone to do the job. When the generators were conking out, and when they needed office space and supplies upstairs, they turned to me. I’m just the little guy and these were all the top brass."

Casey led officials through the building, helping them restore phone and gas lines, and ran wires out a window to bring in power from 15 portable generators. Food was delivered, and he helped feed the emergency workers.
"I napped a couple of times, I think. It’s all a bit of a blur," he said. "But it wasn’t just me. There were lots of people involved, other building staff."

But Casey knows the building as perhaps no one else does, and loves it.

"I got here while they were still working on it," he said. "They gave me the specs, 1500 pages, and I read the whole thing, and I looked at all the mechanical and structural drawings." He listed some of the equipment he maintains: 10 air handling units, 12 exhaust fans, 93 computerized ventilators, a fire pump, two boilers and a 750-gallon tank for the boilers. "It’s an eclectic design," he said.

Casey's affection for the building extends to the kids and staff who populate it. "People here are so nice," he said a few days after I.S. 89’s return. "The principals and the teachers are wonderful." All the students, he added, "should feel proud of the role that their school played.