It was standard procedure for Father Mychal Judge to jump on a fire engine as it sped out of 31st Street fire station and headed to battle a blaze in downtown Manhattan.
He was a chaplain for the New York City Fire Department and always wanted to be on hand in emergencies to administer to firefighters and fire victims alike.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11th, someone came to him in his home in the Franciscan Friary across the road from the fire station and told him of the awful events that were beginning to unfold at the World Trade Centre. Father Mychal rushed to the scene. He was administering last rites to people who had fallen from the blazing towers when he was struck on the head by a rain of debris and killed.
"He went the way he would have wanted to go," said a firefighter outside the basement chapel in 31st Street where Father Judge's body lies ahead of his burial today.
The funeral is expected to draw a huge crowd. The 68year-old Franciscan was also chaplain to the New York Press Club and to the Emerald Society, an Irish-American association.
"He knew everybody, the cops, the firemen, the press and everyone loved him," said former deputy fire commissioner Mr Harry Ryttenberg.
It was fitting that the fire service, which, along with the New York Police Department, has traditionally had a strong Irish-American contingent, had an Irish-American chaplain. Five firefighters from 31st street station are among the hundreds of rescue workers missing after Tuesday's assault on the World Trade Centre.
"The attack affects us all but the fact that New York is such an Irish city and so many Irish-Americans have been caught up in it adds extra poignancy and horror to it all," said Mr David O'Sullivan, of the Ireland-US Council for Commerce and Industry.
"It's not only in the police and fires services, but also in the financial sectors that there is a huge Irish element," he added. Companies such as Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the most powerful bond brokerages in the US, Keefe Bruyette and Woods, an investment bank, or Carr Futures, all with offices in the towers of the World Trade Centre, had dozens, if not hundreds, of employees of Irish origin.
A spokesman for Cantor Fitzgerald, asked how many Irish-American employees were still missing, replied that he "wouldn't know where to begin".
The company's website, however, lists all its workers who were in the building on Tuesday morning. Dozens of Irish names come under the category of those who are still "unaccounted for".
Thomas Henry McGinnis (41) was a broker with Carr Futures. His picture is now posted on walls all over Manhattan. Below it is the word, in capital letters, MISSING. Then follows a description: 6ft tall, 180lbs, green eyes, fair skin, light brown hair, wearing a wedding ring with a Celtic cross and a St Christopher medal. The notice describes how Thomas was meeting fellow brokers Brendan Dolan, Joey Holland and Jimmy McAlary on the 92nd floor when the jet slammed into the skyscraper. He had time to call his wife Iliana on his mobile phone before communications were cut. The home-made poster requests anyone who might have seen him since Tuesday to contact his wife.
By yesterday she had had no word of him. She told The Irish Times from her home in New Jersey that she now held out little hope of seeing her husband alive again.
"It was the phone call no wife wants to get," she said.
She believed that because he was still alive he would survive the attack. But then he told her of the flames coming up from below and the line went dead.