Click here to readZac Unger’s first piece about search and rescue.
Everyone says that pictures cannot convey the destruction in Lower Manhattan. Now, having been there, working as a rescuer, I know that the pictures are perfectly accurate. It is reality that is hard to comprehend.
I work as a firefighter in California, and as we watched the first tower burn, when it still seemed like an accident and not an attack, our thoughts were only: “Those poor bastards have a hell of a firefight ahead of them.” When the truth of the situation emerged, we began to mobilize our Urban Search and Rescue team: 62 firefighters and civilians highly trained in the awful art of searching for life in the remains of buildings felled by natural disaster or evil. On Sept. 26, we arrived in New York to begin work as the last technical search team that FEMA would dispatch for this calamity.
I had been to New York before last month, but only briefly, and even then, I hadn’t looked up much. To my unfamiliar eyes, the skyline lacks nothing; for me, there is no before, only a terrible, twisted after. Flying toward sunrise on a military cargo plane, my first image of the former Twin Towers was a column of smoke rising through a layer in the haze, as if the clouds themselves were melting upward. On an Air Force base in New Jersey, miles away from the wreckage, we emerged from the belly of the aircraft and were assaulted with the heavy, acrid smell that is becoming as familiar to New Yorkers as the ever-present honking of horns.
When I arrived at Ground Zero for the first time, the thing that stunned me most was that there was nothing there but metal. No furniture or computer shards, simply nothing. In the wreckage of a building made of glass and concrete, there is no trace of either. Everything has been ground to a fine dust that has settled throughout the city. Only the iron remains, and the force that it has undergone is awesome. Ten-foot-wide I-beams are ripped down the middle like pages from a notebook. When the building was first constructed, the contractors numbered the beams that held each floor. Now they lie stacked on the ground, separated by nothing, only the numbers suggesting their former place in the sky: 77, 78, 79 …
By the time my team arrived in New York, it was a rescue operation in name only. Every tiny void space, every body-thin crevice in the rubble had been marked in orange paint with an X over an 0: The X to say the hole had been searched, the 0 to say that nobody was found alive there. A ragged pattern, an order of operations has emerged for the removal of debris. Chains of heavy machinery snake their way to the top of the pile, and, monsterlike, they stretch out their long arms and pass tons of steaming metal down the line to trucks waiting at the bottom. Occasionally a jet of flame shoots up from a buried pocket of heat. A crane operator will douse it with a load of sand and continue. After a heavy layer has been removed, technical teams like ours move in with dogs and tiny, snakelike search cameras, looking for bodies.
If the dogs get a “hit,” everyone moves off, and a team of New York firemen walk in, proud and exhausted, carrying hand shovels and buckets to finish the excavation. Later, a battalion chief will arrive with a crisp American flag and a black plastic body bag. Hats come off, six pairs of FDNY hands grab a flag-draped wire litter, and the stretcher-bearers pick their way down the splintered pile. Even before the doors close on the ambulance that will carry the body away, the diesel engines of the cranes are refired and the metal-workers drop their shaded hoods and light their torches. The cycle repeats, with no end imaginable. Although my specialized team was sent home after 10 days, FEMA support remains strong. From the beginning, New York has been firmly in control of its own tragedy, and firefighters will maintain a constant presence until this grisly construction site is nothing but bare remains.
The rescue scene is thinly orchestrated chaos. Dozens of cranes, backhoes, and loaders scream by within inches of each other, their backup-warning sirens mingling in cacophony, too numerous to be meaningful. I watched as a construction worker had his pelvis crushed by an errant crane swinging a heavy piece of iron. I will be amazed if the job is completed without the loss of more life. Bombed-out buildings surround the site, their facades a dangerous mess of broken glass tinkling in the wind. The scene is crowded with scurrying representatives of every agency imaginable: EPA, Army Corps of Engineers, Secret Service, Sanitation Police. Around the edges of the site, hundreds of support workers pass out everything from eye drops to dog biscuits. Occasionally, yellow-helmeted relatives of the dead arrive in groups of 50, holding each other tight and crying as they lay flowers in the mud. The work goes on.
Everyone in the country has dealt with the question of when to get back to normal, and rescue workers are no different. In the shadow of the rubble pile, it feels profane to laugh and petty to complain. Despite the sheen of unreality that hangs over everything pertaining to the World Trade Center, there is nothing ethereal about being on “The Pile.” It’s just work, often cold, miserable, and mind-numbingly boring. We’re still firemen; we joked, cussed each other, and talked about Barry Bonds. The constant presence of celebrities lent a surreal edge to the surroundings: Kelsey Grammer gave me a hearty handshake and asked a question about my helmet; Danny Glover came into our camp, sat in a director’s chair, and talked about his latest project; Loretta Swit (“Hot Lips” Houlihan of M*A*S*H fame) put on sanitary gloves and dished out brisket to hungry state troopers. I found the presence of these stars odd and distracting, but I was moved greatly by the still-strong, round-the-clock crowd of well-wishers who stand just beyond the barricades and cheer whenever a rescue worker leaves at the end of a shift. The support has been tremendous: Every grandmother in New York has baked a plate of cookies, and when I went to bed at night I had to push aside boxes of letters from schoolchildren.
I was housed at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, which had been retrofitted as a dormitory and commissary for rescue workers. At the height of operations the always-lit Javits Center housed nearly 500 of us. At any given time, half the workers would be struggling for sleep as the others loaded boxes, test-fired chain saws, and stomped around in heavy steel-toed boots. The details of feeding, cleaning, and supplying us fell to the Forest Service because of their expertise in running large campaign-style wildfires. Rescuers hailing from Las Vegas to Boston mingled with bearded, drawling Ranger Ricks and tireless Zuni smoke jumpers. Most of the rescuers I met there had never been to New York, and for most of us, the Javits Center, the trailers where we ate, and the site constituted our entire view of the city.
New York lost 350 firefighters that Tuesday morning, the equivalent of my entire department. The work has been emotionally difficult, to be sure, but I knew that any firefighter in the country—and many civilians—would want to be in my position. The larger picture is still desperately unclear to me; I don’t understand the attack or our reaction to it. But I do comprehend the grief, the soft words of a New York firefighter who told me that he’d put in for the night shift on the pile so that he could attend funerals during the day. Work is healing; labor makes sense. I couldn’t save anyone’s life, but I could move a bucket from here to there.
