Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  I had two people on my team who’d just got their EMT cards two weeks before. This was their first big job, and I tried to help them stay focused. They were so eager, like: “We have to go in, we have to go in.” I understood. Of course I did. It’s what happens on a job. You get pumped up, but you have to restrain yourself. We couldn’t all go in because we’d end up getting in the way of each other. EMS isn’t designed to work in a pit like that. You’re there to treat people. If you get injured yourself, you’re just adding to the problem, not the solution.

  And there were more people helping out at Ground Zero than anyone knew what to do with. Throughout the day, they came pouring in from all over. A fire department from Nova Scotia, Canada arrived—where the hell had they come from? Teams from Boston and Pennsylvania. They just came—you’d be surprised how fast. The Red Cross was already organized, handing out bottles of water. Hatzolah, the volunteer Jewish ambulance company, was making kugel.77 It was unbelievable.

  An auditorium at the school we were in became the main staging area for the rescue efforts. We set up our makeshift command post there along with NYPD, K-9, and ESU. ESU is the police department’s Emergency Services Unit—Special Ops, tactical. They respond to things like barricaded patients, hostage situations, rescues, subway jobs. They’re trained as EMTs, but they’re paramilitary, like a SWAT team. All that training to save lives and, as it turned out, it was total overkill for this situation.

  We just sat there, watching people shuttle back and forth. I felt so useless, like I didn’t even belong there. And I kept wondering what had happened to Gary.

  Block it out, block it out, block it out.

  I didn’t feel like I was contributing at all.

  I mean, people can relate to a fire emergency. They see flames coming toward them and think, hey! Get some firemen over here on the double! Same thing with a police emergency: you can see what’s going on, the effect that policemen have.

  But with EMS, you’re not plunging into a fire, you’re not in danger of getting shot. Our enemy is far more subtle, often airborne or blood-borne. You may not see it until it’s too late. When you work EMS, you worry about contracting HIV, TB, or hepatitis. You hope you don’t bring it home to your family. It’s a more cerebral job. You’re directly involved, one-on-one, with people in need. You deal with people when they’re vulnerable, really hurt. And since you can’t fix everything—that’s outside the scope of first aid—you try to make patients as comfortable as you can, often as they’re dying in your arms. It’s an astoundingly intimate job.

  And there are incredible upsides to EMS. Sometimes you get to know your patients. You might visit their house four or five times, get to know their families. The bottom line is that we sometimes save lives. When you save someone’s life, you very often become a member of their family.

  I remember when I delivered my first baby. So far I’ve done six. Intimate? Fulfilling? I walked home on air that night. And the only thing that kept echoing through my head was, this is what I did today. This is what I did.

  The OEM’s office was in 7 World Trade Center, but they had to evacuate it before the building collapsed. Once OEM was lost, the command structure had to be completely rebuilt from the bottom up.78

  It was an amazing effort. You saw people dragging equipment to a forward center, which had dug in at the American Express building, 3 World Financial Center. A forward is important because it becomes your initial casualty center. In an MCI—multiple casualty incident—the forward becomes the first safe zone out of harm’s way. Incoming patients stop there first. From there, they get stabilized and shipped out to one of the triage centers for further examination. Then, we decide whether they’re going home or to the hospital.

  Standard procedure says that EMS will set up a staging sector where ambulances come in; it’s like a transportation hub where dispatchers tell you, “You have to take this patient to that hospital.” The staging sector is especially important because, if all the patients went to the same hospital, that hospital would be overwhelmed and wouldn’t be able to treat anybody.

  And New York City has a very particular hospital system. Certain facilities do specialty referrals. Montefiore is a replantation center; you take your amputees there because they have surgeons specially trained to reattach limbs. Jacobi is an antidote hospital; snakebites go to Jacobi because the Bronx Zoo is right next to it. You have special trauma teams at Bellevue, St. Vincent’s, and Jacobi again.

  Depending on what your patient needs and depending on their stability, you take them to the specialty hospital best prepared to treat them. That’s how it’s supposed to go, at any rate. But when no bodies were found, we just waited. And waited.

  I found myself remembering an earthquake that happened a few years back in India. Thirty days after the earthquake struck, they were still pulling survivors out of the rubble.

  I hoped that’s what we were facing.

  And I remember it had just gotten dark. Eerie silence, maybe eight o’clock at night. A few rescue workers who’d been out on the Pile stumbled into our area. We washed out their eyes and treated them for minor lacerations. Nothing serious, though. People were still going up to the site, coming back, going up, and coming back. I took a walk with one my lieutenants to keep from going crazy.

  The neighborhood was all shut down. There was no electricity or plumbing in all of Lower Manhattan. The only lights were from generator-powered halogen lamps, the kind you see hauled out in paramilitary operations, movie shoots, or major disasters. The reflections from the light bounced off the burnt cars and crushed fire trucks. The only sound was the generators in the background chugging away, like sitting down on your porch and hearing a lawnmower in the distance on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

  Two blocks from Ground Zero, we started walking through a snowfall of memos and papers from people’s offices in the Towers. I picked up some of the sheets and read them. Reports for that day. Spreadsheets. Someone’s shopping list. There were also pieces of coffee mugs mixed in with the papers, and personal effects of people who’d been sitting at their desks one moment on a bright late summer day. Then, bam! It’s over.

  This was quite a ways from the actual site of the Towers, too. The debris had scattered far and wide.

  At one point, we came to a clearing in the buildings. You could see where Towers 1 and 2 used to be. In the background, a building was still burning inside, like a scene from a movie. The Terminator. Firefighters were scurrying around all over the place, trying to put the fire out. They’d been at it for hours, and they were dead tired.

  We walked back down along the lip of the site and over to the high school, which is when I realized: I can’t stand here and watch this anymore. There’s nobody coming out. There are people in there who haven’t had relief all day. Somebody’s got to help them.

  At that very moment, there was a stretcher full of equipment going down to the Pit, masks and boots mostly. So I grabbed my team and said, “Come on. We’re going.”

  At that point, I didn’t care anymore if I was going to get in trouble. I couldn’t take standing there doing nothing anymore.

  We went into the forward center and I said, “We’re here. Where do you need us?”

  The looks on the faces of the people manning that post. I knew right away they weren’t going to turn down helpers. And then I kicked myself for having waited so long.

  Down in the Pit, we pulled out body parts. Parts of bodies, not bodies themselves. In all, I think we only retrieved one whole corpse.

  I remember looking at the faces of the new guys on my team. They were like, “What do we do?”

  Not having an answer for them, I just looked away and kept digging.

  The forward center had turned into a morgue. There was a woman’s severed hand lying on a table; you could still see the engagement ring on her finger. Over there was a torso. The constant smell of burnt flesh was everywhere, hanging in the air. It was the air.

  At one point, we saw a rope
sticking up from the ash and everyone started running toward it, hoping it was a firefighter. Ten of us jumped onto that pile and started moving shit out of the way, hoping it was something. Well, it wasn’t. It was a piece of rope, all right. But there was nobody connected to it. If anyone had been at the other end, they were lost now.

  It was a long night, and I tried to keep my emotions in check. But it was tough.

  At one point, we got word that they were shutting down the forward triage. NYPD had taken over and officially made it a morgue. So we retreated to our triage area at Stuyvesant and continued helping rescue workers and construction workers with minor injuries.

  We slept a few hours upstairs on the third floor of the high school. And like I said, there was no power. One of the firemen brought his bolt-cutters and ran upstairs to the cafeteria. He clipped all the locks on the freezers. He did this because we were all hungry. We ate cold chicken patties. They were much better than nothing.

  After I’d been there for twenty-four hours, they ordered us home to get some rest. I went home, got six hours of sleep, and went back to work at midnight on the twelfth. I expected to right back down into Ground Zero. But no. The command structure had reformed, and the orders were firm: “Just go down to your regular line unit.”

  I felt horrible. But I knew what they were doing. A person that has a chest pain in some other part of the city needed us as much as anybody else working the Pile.

  Luckily, everyone from my group had made it out okay. I learned that Gary was alive. He’d been hospitalized for injuries sustained trying to rescue people, but he went back to the site and started treating people the moment he was released. He’d been right there in the thick of things all along.

  I remember coming home that night after being at Ground Zero and walking down my block. Everyone was honking and yelling this pro-USA stuff. People were shaking my hand, saying thank you. And I felt guilty. Someone called me a hero. I didn’t feel like one. What did I do? What had I accomplished? I didn’t help anybody out, I didn’t make one bit of difference. This, more than anything else, was the thought that stayed with me.

  So, as days went by, I kept going back there. I worked my regular shifts, and on my days off I worked overtime at Ground Zero or I attended a memorial service. I did that right up until November, when my father passed away and my family obligations didn’t leave me any time to spend down there anymore.

  Still … you know? Part of me wonders if there was something else I should have done. Maybe I should have worked the overtime that morning. Maybe I should have just gone down earlier on my own, not waited for someone to tell me what to do. So many people went down there on their own, you know? Of course, a lot of them died, too.

  I’m thankful I’m alive. And I try not to feel guilty about it. But the truth is, I do.

  UPDATE

  Mike Potasso grinned as he slid into the booth and extended his hand. “I’ve got so much to tell you. Man, I’ve been keeping busy.”

  We were in a pub down on Liberty Street, a hundred yards from Ground Zero. It was a cold night in late January 2007, and the site, as we walked past it, was lit up with cold halogen light. Mike didn’t pay much attention. He was more interested in the girl on his arm, his fiancée, Adrian Colon. The two of them had just gotten engaged.

  Mike had asked Adrian to marry him at midnight that past New Year’s Eve. They’d been dating for two and a half years, and Mike popped the question by hooking an engagement ring over the end of the noisemaker Adrian was blowing to summon the New Year.

  “That’s exciting enough,” Mike said. “And then there’s work. I’m on the list to make lieutenant.”

  Mike was still with FDNY*EMS, only he worked out of Station 57 over by the border between Brooklyn and Bed-Stuy. Since 9/11, the city had gone for broke in terms of how it trained its EMS responders. Mike and everyone he worked with had been Haz-Tac trained, which meant they were the only EMT/Paramedic personnel qualified to enter the “hot” zones of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (hazmat) disaster.

  Haz-Tac units are usually the third specialized unit to arrive at a hazmat scene after firefighter and firefighter Special Operations units. “We’re trained to assist in decontaminating the populace,” Mike explained, “while still dispensing life-saving medical care. And if there’s any situation involving nerve agents—organo-phosphate poisonings, sarin gas, for instance—we’re the only ones qualified to administer antidotes on the scene.”

  Mike’s unit was also one of only five throughout New York City whose members had been trained as Rescue Medics. These units specialized in first aid and extraction rescues in situations of extreme confinement, such as a collapsed building. “We’re trained to rappel several stories, to tie knots and package patients for removal from very tight places,” Mike grinned. “It was an optional program, but not for me. Not really. When they offered it to me, I was like, ‘Who wouldn’t want to do this?’”

  On top of all this, Mike served on New York’s Task Force 1, the statewide, FEMA-deployed search and rescue team. He served as a volunteer firefighter in his hometown, and he was also on the dignitary protection unit that deployed whenever notable figures came to town. “I was in President Bush’s motorcade once,” Mike said. “And Cheney’s, too, although that was easy. He’s got a whole team of doctors with him because of his pacemaker. And one time I rode with the president of Afghanistan.”

  “He’s always busy,” Adrian said, shaking her head with a smile. “Always.”

  After a drink, we headed back outside and Mike looked toward Ground Zero. “Politics,” he said, apropos of nothing. “I kind of expected it.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I said so. He explained, “I’ve got a lot of friends in Oklahoma City. After that incident happened, it took them something like three years of bickering to get the wording right on the memorial. It’s been nearly six years since 9/11, and what’ve we done with this site? Nothing. Politics. Everyone’s playing the blame game. Nobody can agree on anything, so the whole situation’s an embarrassment. All this time I’ve been thinking, everybody shut up and just build something. Please!”

  Mike kept talking, and he confided something that he hadn’t mentioned before. A lot of people he worked with—EMS personnel who were first responders on 9/11—were getting sick. They were dying. A few more people every year, Mike said. “One guy I know of was twenty-six years old and died of lung problems. Explain that. And my current partner has sarcoidosis. The other day, his lung collapsed for no good reason at all. He’s still working, though; most of them are. They don’t go on technical disability, but the department gives them something called a reasonable accommodation, which means they pull less physically strenuous duty. Me? I’ve still got this nagging cough that I never had before 9/11. But it’s small stuff. What can you do?”

  He switched subjects fast and told me that he participates in the National EMS Memorial Bike Ride, a 500-mile event from Boston down to Roanoke, Virginia, to honor any paramedic or rescue worker who had died in the previous year. “Because life goes on,” Mike said. “You take what you can from it. You participate in something. You learn. You adapt. You don’t look back and get sad. Who’s got the time?”

  He looked toward the empty socket in the ground where the Trade Center used to stand and said, “I’d like nothing better than to see two towers here again. But I know that’s never going to happen. Take what you can and keep going. That’s what we do in life.”

  77 An Eastern European baked pudding, often made with noodles or grains and usually featuring a sweet element, such as raisins or apples.

  78 The mayor of New York’s Office of Emergency Management. When 7 World Trade showed signs of collapsing early on the afternoon of September 11, the OEM was forced to abandon its crisis headquarters (for additional information, see: Ken Longert and Fred Horne in the section “The Aftermath”).

  JESSICA MURROW

  The heart of Morris dancing is unadulter
ated joy. It is art too blissful for soldiers. Still, Morris dancers die in war. Take the case of Steven Adams. Steven danced the Morris his whole life. He died in the World Trade Center on September 11.

  Jessica Murrow, fifty-one, tells the story of the marriage she shared with this rare and wonderful man.

  STEVE WAS A very different kind of man. He was quiet, reserved, an incredibly gentle person. When I first met him, I thought, wow. What a relief from the other men I’ve known! Steven wasn’t New York City fast-lane. He was country. He was simple. He was also a single, good-looking guy. He was fun, and he was available! I mean, come on. In this world, how many men in their forties in this world are available?

  Morris dancing is a huge community, and I’ve played the Morris for years.79 I’m a musician. The Marlboro team started coming to New York to dance on Easter. That’s how Steve and I met twenty years ago—we’d bump into each other. See, Morris dancing is all about tradition, and it became a tradition that Steve and his friends would come down from Vermont and stay with me each spring.80

  Then, one summer, we all rented a house together near Amherst and that was it for Steve and I—our relationship just started working. I had my eyes set on him, I don’t mind telling you. I was 44 and I’d had a lot of relationships, none of them really successful. I’d never been married in all that time, and I was at a point where I really wanted to make something work.

  He’d had problems making a success of his life. He’d applied to law school, but he didn’t get in. He was in debt up to his ears; in fact, he had to return his car because he couldn’t make the payments, and then he owed money on it just the same. He had huge tuition payments due to Marlboro College, where he’d put himself through school and graduated at age thirty-four. Frankly? He was kind of a mess.