Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  To get a sense of the magnitude and difficulty of the identification task, consider this statistic: we would eventually recover almost twenty thousand body parts and fragments from Ground Zero and the surrounding area. Most of them were in terrible condition, having been exposed to very high heat, to water, and to other pressures that rendered almost useless our traditional identification methods. Under the prolonged exposure to high heat, even the DNA in the recovered bones began to deteriorate; in many instances, it was too far gone for us to analyze.

  The city set up two operations to recover remains, one at the site of the disaster, the second at a recently closed landfill on Staten Island with the unfortunate name Fresh Kills. I was not at the meetings that led to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s decision to have the rubble from Ground Zero loaded onto trucks, then onto barges, taken across the bay, and finally spread out and sifted through on a garbage dump. It was part of the city’s grand and noble effort to retrieve every possible bit of human remains, but for a number of reasons, the location could not have been more ill-chosen. The name of the site alone should have made any responsible public official shudder. Still, the rubble—more than a million tons in all—did have to be examined, and there were further remains being found in it.

  With identifications piling up, that first week went by in a blur of frenetic activity. For the first three days after the disaster, I worked in the same clothes, without going home, and with only a nap now and then. Part of my job was to organize many of those who volunteered to assist us—among them the people from the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), who soon began arriving to help. DMORT is a national volunteer organization of MLIs, funeral directors, and morticians who mobilize to help local officials during disasters as part of FEMA’s disaster-relief resources. In addition, every consultant we’d ever had at OCME came to help, as did coroner’s and ME’s office personnel from around the country. We needed them all. One fellow drove from New Mexico, and slept in his car for four days before he was able to get in to see me. He ended up working for us for several months, for no pay, sleeping on a cot we arranged for him next door at NYU. I learned much later that folks from his small hometown had taken up a collection to help him stay in New York as long as he did.

  The postmortem information we culled from the remains was not enough by itself to make positive identifications. We also needed ante- mortem information (data about the missing people), which began streaming in from the families within hours and soon grew into a separate database of astonishing size. Here’s why: anyone who was in Manhattan in those weeks after 9/11 saw the missing-persons photos and pleas plastered to any available surface—walls, lampposts, or bus stop shelters. That same set of information reached us, and more: we were flooded with photos, ID cards, X-rays, dental records, toothbrushes, hairbrushes, teddy bears, and other items that families thought would help us identify their loved ones. Every single item had to be accepted, cataloged, and cross-referenced, so the information would be useful. At the Family Assistance Center, thousands of family members, significant others, coworkers, neighbors, and sometimes just plain busybodies filled out seven-page Victim Identification Profiles forms in longhand, providing us with every speck of information that might be helpful, from descriptions of rings or other jewelry to tattoos and even the type of shoes a victim usually wore. “This was the shirt he wore at the barbecue this weekend,” they would say. “It was still in the laundry. Can you get DNA from this?” Or, “Here is her dentist’s name and number. She just went last week because she wanted to have her teeth whitened for her wedding next month. They should have her dental records.”

  And then there were the photographs—those powerful, heartbreaking photos, usually of groups or family gatherings, with the “missing” person circled. “Have you seen anyone who looks like him?” a family member would ask; but their eyes would say, “Please, don’t you find him; let him be in a hospital somewhere, alive.” How do you tell a grieving, frightened widow, “No, we haven’t seen him. I have seen only pieces of what used to be people”?

  Early in October 2001, three weeks after that terrible September 11, a discovery made far beneath the rubble pile at Ground Zero summoned me from the Incident Command Center at OCME into the field on a collection mission.

  High-ranking police officials had shown up at OCME early that Sunday morning to ask if I would come down to the site. A body had been located, four stories under the debris at Ground Zero, where the North Tower had once stood. “We think we found a brother officer,” Deputy Inspector Kenny McKeel told me, “but we don’t think we can get him out anytime soon. Can you come down and take a look? Maybe you can start the ID process.” Kenny’s description of the situation, in combination with my understanding of how quickly decomposition takes its toll on bodies, galvanized me. I informed the staff of the Incident Command Center that I would be down at Ground Zero for a few hours and jumped in the police car.

  I had not been out of the office much during the previous weeks and the ride downtown revealed that the city still had an urgent, chaotic feel to it, which even a first-time visitor would have recognized as a city in a state of emergency: traffic lanes reserved for emergency and other official vehicles, and every street along the route to Ground Zero lined with people. Hundreds and hundreds of them held up signs that said “Thank You” or “God Bless You,” and the ones who were not holding signs just applauded and called to us as the car went by. Unable to directly help, they were pouring out their appreciation for the people intimately involved in the recovery effort. They brought tears to my eyes. Their presence, and their good wishes, reinforced the feeling of unity in New York—in the whole country—that would last for many months. Looking back now, almost five years later, I only wish we had held on to a little of that feeling a bit more permanently.

  I had been to Ground Zero two weeks earlier, but this time, on arriving there, I was staggered by the scope of the recovery effort, now going at full throttle, working on what the workers called the “Pile.” I use the phrase recovery effort, since in October of 2001, that was the official label. It had not been easy for the city to stop using the phrase rescue effort. As for me, from the moment that the Towers fell, I realized there would be few if any survivors and not many additional rescues. A first public note of realism was sounded on September 18 by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani: “We don’t have a substantial amount of hope to offer to people that there is anyone alive there,” he told a press conference. “We have to prepare for the overwhelming possibility that finding anyone alive is very, very small.” Just then the city was not yet ready to give up hope that by some miracle survivors might be found; but on September 29, the city officially stopped using the term “rescue” and reluctantly switched to “recovery.”

  Heavier equipment was now being used to shift around the rubble, but otherwise, the change in objective from rescue to recovery was meaningless to the firefighters, police officers, steel workers, and others who toiled ceaselessly around the clock, digging into the Pile. They continued to act as rescue workers.

  It is hard for anyone who wasn’t at Ground Zero in those chaotic days to fathom the bravery of the people who were physically working on the Pile, spearheading the recovery effort. As I watched, they attacked the rubble with picks, shovels, crowbars, and even with their hands. The big machinery was used mainly for pieces of steel that were far too massive to be moved by human strength. But the smaller debris was removed manually, by workers in long bucket brigades carrying out the material. And they were doing so on a gigantic pile of twisted steel, smashed concrete, and who knew what else, that was ablaze! Fires were raging in and under the rubble that reached temperatures in excess of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Many if not most of the police officers and fire fighters digging at the mounds of debris had lost coworkers and close friends. A few like Lee Ielpi, whom I met that day, were even looking for their family members. Lee, a veteran firefighter, was searching for his son, also a firefighter, who was buried s
omewhere under the rubble. Lee had sworn to his wife that he would not rest until he brought his son home.

  Augmenting those brave guys at work on the Pile every day, in conditions of utmost physical and emotional peril, was another group of men for whom the word “brave” is an inadequate adjective. Their task was, if anything, even more dangerous: to go down into the Pile on as many as five search and recovery missions daily. Until September 29, they had searched for survivors, and since then had been searching for remains. Their dedication was incredible. They were risking their lives in the effort to recover the body parts of a fallen comrade or civilian victim. Those trekking regularly into the inferno were members of New York’s Finest (NYPD) and Bravest (FDNY), together with police officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In small groups, they went inside, every day for months, looking for human remains.

  That Sunday morning, Kenny McKeel brought me over to one such group, led by Joe Blozis, a sergeant from NYPD’s CSU, whom I knew well from years of working cases together. “Not to worry, you’re in good hands,” Kenny said, and I knew that was true. Joe is a giant of a man, around six feet four inches and broad as a barn door. He took me to a supply area where we suited up. Tough overalls, boots, goggles, a hard hat with a lantern, heavy duty work gloves and, to complete the outfit, a double-barreled full-face respirator that the guys said was guaranteed to keep out most of the contaminants known to be floating around the site.

  Thus equipped, our group of six men, including me, was ferried to the edge of the site in a roofless vehicle called a Gator, which looked like a giant golf cart borne by six overstuffed, knobby tires. Joe was grinning behind his mask. “You all right, doc?” As an employee of the ME’s office you constantly get called doc, whether or not you’re an MD. You get tired of explaining that you’re not and simply perk up when somebody says, “Hey, doc.”

  “Yeah,” I responded, “let’s just get this over with.” Actually, of course, I was terrified, but somehow managed to move my feet, and we started walking the hundred yards or so across the top of the rubble pile to where we would begin our descent.

  A hundred yards is not too great a distance when you’re strolling along Fifth Avenue, but it’s endless when you’re crossing the equivalent of a debris field in an urban war zone. Every step was fraught with danger because none was on a flat surface. I stepped from beam to beam, from one large chunk of concrete to another. Razor-sharp pieces of steel poked out at me from every direction, often hardly visible in the gray smoke pouring up from the ground. Along the way, we passed a large, golden-colored metal ball that I recognized with a start as a sculpture that had graced the plaza between the two towers. It was the only recognizable artifact on the Pile.

  After reaching the center of the debris field, one by one we crawled backward through a small hole, tied together like spelunkers, to begin our descent. Our way was lit by the lanterns we carried and by the bare bulbs that had been strung on endless extension cords. Under the Pile were a surprising number of cavernous pockets, and once inside one, I could sometimes see forty or fifty feet around me. My experienced guides seemed at home, moving confidently about as though they knew where they were going; I, however, felt like I was moving slowly in a nightmare of frightening, surreal jumbles of twisted wreckage, between house-sized agglomerations of metal, stone, and concrete, each indistinguishable from the next. After we had descended about twenty feet through these labyrinths, I felt like an ant crawling around a junkyard.

  Only this was no junkyard, it was a graveyard, a giant tomb. In the dim light, I could make out spray-painted numerals, arrows, and other symbols, the fruits of previous expeditions. Some of the markings, I soon realized, staked out areas where remains had been found. Other marks showed egress and exit points. Some I simply could not decipher, but I didn’t ask my fellow spelunkers about them as conversation among us was virtually impossible at first, partly because of the masks we wore but also because of the thunderous noise above our heads. It came from mobile cranes rumbling around the site, tearing at the rubble, sending pieces of it flying about and crashing down. When one of those huge cranes stirred, or moved a particularly large piece of rubble, dust would drift down on us and the wreckage we were walking through would creak and shift eerily, as though it was some special effect in an Indiana Jones movie.

  But it wasn’t Hollywood, it was real, and I was engaged in a job that terrified me. Today I’m somewhat amazed that I was able to do it, but the can-do, we-Americans-are-helping-one-another spirit of the moment assisted me to get through my fears, as it assisted so many others.

  We descended farther, nearing the victim. The noise began to subside. After squeezing through yet another narrow concrete-and-steel passageway, we popped out into the largest open space I had yet seen, and the sight left me awestruck. After a few seconds, I realized that we were in what had once been an underground parking garage for the Port Authority police. The north side of it was virtually intact and two Port Authority police cars sat there in their assigned parking spots, untouched by the devastation around them except for being covered by five inches of the ubiquitous gray powder; but for the dust, it could have been a car showroom. Here we were able to stand upright. We walked normally to the end of the room, turned the corner, and entered a staircase—at which point any semblance of normalcy again disappeared. An enormous steel H-beam had pierced the ceiling of the stairwell on its plunge downward, and its momentum had been arrested only a few inches before it touched the steps. It had become a giant metal stalactite, a mute testament to the unimaginable forces unleashed on that terrible day. We squeezed around it, one by one, walked up six steps to the first landing and turned as though to go up the next flight—but there were no more stairs. The Pile had flattened them, and protruding from the mess of that non-stairway was a booted left foot. From the looks of the boot, it belonged to a uniform, possibly that of a Port Authority officer who had gone down into the parking lot in the minutes after the attacks trying to evacuate anyone still left inside, only to be caught on the stairs by the collapsing building.

  It had taken half an hour and the efforts of five other people to get me here. Now it was time for me to do my job. With help from my comrades-in-arms, I cut open his boot and severed his pinkie toe, which I dropped into a DNA specimen container. I took the entire toe, bone and all, because I was worried that his soft tissues had already decomposed too far to provide useable DNA. I paused for a moment before we left, feeling deeply moved and choked up as I imagined this brave man’s last few moments. I hoped that we would be able to identify him, and that his family would find some peace in the knowledge that he had been doing his job to the end.

  Eventually, the victim was identified. He was, indeed, a Port Authority police officer, and the rest of his remains were brought out and given to the family for burial.

  ELEVEN

  ON THE STREET surrounding our office building, a tent city had sprung up, covering both sides of Thirtieth Street from First Avenue to the FDR Drive at the river’s edge, housing an incredible assortment of city, state, and federal agencies, as well as a chapel and a large mess tent where the Salvation Army served up as many as 1,200 meals a day. Hundreds of remains were being processed at a time, a pace we had been maintaining since the disaster occurred. The body-receiving system that we had set up that first day was functioning smoothly and no longer in need of constant tinkering. It was operating twenty-four hours a day.

  Inside our building, in the main-floor-level conference room, our Incident Command Center was also transformed. Thirty-five feet by fifteen feet, it was now packed with dozens of people and with thirty computer terminals. The database system had to be up and running on a continuous basis; yet we also constantly needed to make adjustments to its software programs to accommodate all the information we were receiving and to make use of the data once it had been entered. Normally, computer systems are shut down so that programmers can open the software, make changes, and test them out; only
after that do they return the system to full functioning. Fixing a “live” system, on the fly, constituted what our outside consultants called “extreme programming.”

  Prior to 9/11, the entire OCME Information Management Department consisted of two people. To support OCME’s response to the WTC attacks, the office quickly turned to outside contractors and used many different computer experts in various areas. Four of these vendors worked directly with me in the Incident Command Center and became integral members of our team. The first keyboard jockey to arrive was Adrian Jones, a British software developer—and Dataease expert, it turned out—who happened to be attending a convention in the United States at the time of the attacks. Tom Brondolo, OCME’s deputy commissioner for administration, knew that Adrian was at that convention and got word to him that we really needed his help.

  Within a few days of the attack, I returned from a trip to the Family Assistance Center to find a tall, slender fellow with a mop of dark, curly hair sitting at one of the computers, typing blindingly fast on the keyboard in a rhythmic pattern, as though playing a piano. He finished with a dramatic flourish and turned, realizing I was standing over him. “Hallo,” he said in a clipped British accent. “I’m Jones, Adrian Jones, at your service.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bond—I mean, Mr. Jones.” No, I didn’t say that; I only wish I had. But this introduction proved to be the start of a wonderful partnership: I knew what business the office needed to conduct, and Adrian knew his computers. Together we spent countless hours building a data management system nimble enough to absorb every twist and turn the disaster and its aftermath threw at us. Having planned to be in the States for only the few days of the conference, Adrian had with him just a small overnight bag. When we asked him to stay on and help us, he agreed. But he would need to buy a few more pieces of clothing since he stayed on for two years, becoming a critical part of the OCME effort. Shortly after Adrian arrived, we were joined by two more Dataease experts, Al Munoz and Don Metzger, and then by Naeem Ullah, a colleague of Adrian’s from the same London-based company.