NEW YORK – The sad and familiar sound of bagpipes echoed through a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood this morning as colleagues and family mourned one of two firefighters killed in last weekend’s Deustche Bank building blaze.

The body of Joseph Graffagnino arrived at St. Ephrem’s Church in Bay Ridge atop an FDNY fire truck, just three days after the firefighter would have marked his 34th birthday. Instead, he died Saturday in the long-vacant toxic tower opposite ground zero.

Governor Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg joined hundreds of firefighters, most in their dress blues with white hats and gloves, at the service inside the brick church. The skirl of bagpipes accompanied the arriving casket before giving way to the tolling of a lone bell as the thick crowd stood silently.
Graffagnino, an eight-year FDNY veteran who left behind a wife and two small children, died along with 53-year-old Robert Beddia. Both worked out of a Greenwich Village firehouse that lost 11 members in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and both survived the brutal day that claimed the lives of 343 firefighters.

The adjoining 40-story Deutsche Bank building on Liberty Street was rendered useless by the attack. Construction crews were in the process of dismantling the skyscraper when the fire broke out, and the cause of the blaze remained under investigation.

Graffagnino and Beddia became trapped on one of the burning floors, dying of cardiac arrest after inhaling the thick smoke that floated above lower Manhattan. The firefighting effort was crippled when a failed standpipe system sent thousands of gallons of water into the building basement, rather than the fire hoses.

Pieces of the standpipe have been found lying unattached in the building’s basement.