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Today, he thinks of each of these experiences as a layer, he says. "Seeing him like that was not as bad as the fact that I lost him." "It was tough because I had to deal with it professionally," Coppolo says of working at the crash scene. He was returning from North Carolina and shortly before the crash had been cleared to land by the controllers at Essex County Airport. Andrew Coppolo was alone in his plane when it crashed. He had flown helicopters for the New Jersey National Guard, taught flying lessons and volunteered his plane to transport cancer patients as part of Angels Flight Northeast. The elder Coppolo was just 55 years old at the time. He arrived and quickly discovered the pilot was his father, Andrew. You focus on getting the job done."īut even the most hardened EMT is put to the test when the job unexpectedly becomes personal.Ĭoppolo was among the first responders called to the scene of a small plane crash near Wayne, Passaic County, on a densely foggy night in January 2007. He tends to change the subject if someone spends too much time thanking him for his service, an occurrence that reached an apex after 9/11 and is spiking again during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many in his field, Coppolo also has found a way to use humor to cope with daily tragedies he witnesses. For years he watched fellow first responders develop respiratory illnesses and cancer and he worried.īut the calls kept coming and he continued to respond. While he's unlikely to attend any 9/11 anniversary memorials this year – he never really has – he admits that terrorist attacks on New York City changed him as a person and as a paramedic.
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Today, Coppolo is 39 and married with three kids. Scott Coppolo displays a frame with a photo of the Twin Towers and a twisted piece of metal from the wreckage of the towers. It would be a lesson that would stay with him through the harrowing days of 9/11 to hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and even to the airplane crash site that changed his family forever. "He said, 'You need to do your job.'" Coppolo says, remembering those words 19 years later from his living room in Mt. I dialed, and dialed and dialed." When they finally connected, his father imparted a piece of advice that has stayed with him ever since. "We got inundated with people."Ĭoppolo had what he calls a "freak-out moment." He called his father, a retired Army major. "I remember feeling apprehension, but going into a kind of autopilot," he says. Injured people covered in dust and debris were being brought in on ferries that usually transported tourists and commuters. "All you saw was smoke," remembers Coppolo, who heard the first World Trade Center building collapse in a matter of minutes. He and a few others drove ambulances toward a site that would become synonymous with one of the most painful days in modern American history. "I was volunteering for the state squad," he says.
Coppolo, then 20, was new to the EMS job in North Jersey.
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It was an all-hands-on-deck situation at the Jersey City pier just across from Lower Manhattan. Scott Coppolo got the call that clear and sunny morning when he arrived to work in Newark.