Oyster Festival to feature 9/11 fireboat

A retired New York City fireboat pressed into service after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, will be a featured attraction at this year's Oyster Festival in Oyster Bay.

The 130-foot-long John J. Harvey, one of the most powerful fireboats ever built, will be dockside at the 28th annual Oyster Festival on Oct. 15-16.

It will be the first visit to a Nassau or Suffolk port for the Harvey, which was built in 1931 in Brooklyn and served the New York City Fire Department until 1994. While at the festival, the boat will be open so the public can board.

After evacuating survivors from the World Trade Center site on 9/11, the privately owned Harvey was asked by emergency officials to join the FDNY fireboats Firefighter and John D. McKean in pumping water to firefighters at the disaster site, which the craft did for 80 hours until water mains were repaired.

"Going to Oyster Bay is great for many reasons," said Huntley Gill of Manhattan, one of the preservationists who banded together to buy the Harvey in 1999 to keep it from being scrapped and got it running again later that year. "It was TR's town," he said of Theodore Roosevelt. "It's a beautiful harbor."

Jennifer Sappell, co-chairwoman of the festival committee that arranges for visits by tall ships and historic vessels, said the suggestion to bring the Harvey to Oyster Bay came from hamlet resident Daniel Walker, who volunteers on ship restoration projects.

"It's a marvelous, marvelous story," she said of the Harvey's involvement on Sept. 11. Having the vessel come to the festival this year is "an important historic tie for the 10th anniversary," she said.

Sappell said the choice is also appropriate because "it's a working boat and Oyster Bay is a working harbor. It's not just beautiful boats for wealthy people."

The Harvey is capable of pumping up to 18,000 gallons of water a minute. It assisted in fighting a Cunard Line pier fire in 1932, the burning of the liner Normandie in 1942, and a fire on the ammunition ship El Estero during World War II. It was named for a fireboat crew member killed in an explosion while fighting a ship fire in 1930.

On Sept. 11, the boat's owners asked FDNY officials for permission to assist in evacuations from Ground Zero. Because of the many damaged water mains, fire crews had no water so officials radioed the Pier 40-bound Harvey to drop off her 150 passengers as soon as possible and return to the disaster site to pump water, reactivating her official designation as Marine 2.

For more information, visit fireboat.org or theoysterfestival.org.