Its communications cut, NASDAQ’s corporate offices closed. The New York branch of the Federal Reserve Bank was evacuated, not without a moment of comedy. The building had never before been left unmanned, and no one present knew how to lock up.
Many key financial figures were far from the decision making on the morning of 9/11. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was in the air halfway across the Atlantic, returning with colleagues from a meeting in Switzerland, when U.S. airspace closed down. His airplane, like others in mid-flight, had to turn back. Frantic calls to the White House eventually got Greenspan back to Washington courtesy of the military, part of the way aboard a U.S. Air Force tanker.
The minders of the American economy wrestled for days with problems ranging from sustaining liquidity to averting the nightmare scenario—potential public panic if the cash at ATM machines ran out, which in turn might spark a run on the banks. New York City, meanwhile, faced the daunting costs that had been inflicted in less than two hours. Reporting a year later, New York’s comptroller would calculate the economic cost to the city at between $83 and $95 billion.
ON 9/11, after the second collapse, there was at first a long, empty moment, a vacuum in time. Then the start of an epic, heartrending, recovery operation.
NINE
“AMBULANCES GOING THIS WAY, ESU TRUCKS FLYING DOWN THE street … Nobody had any idea what was going on. Where is the command post? Where is staging? We had no radio … You looked where you thought the buildings should be, and if they were there, you couldn’t see them … disorientation … I had already seen my third skyline in forty minutes.”
Fire Department lieutenant Michael Cahill, on the period after the second Trade Center collapse. A time of “absolute panic … absolute panic … Most of us were just too tired … out of it … disorganized … Stuff in our eyes, cuts, bruises, equipment lost. Half the people we came with were lost.”
Off-duty firefighters, former firefighters, men who worked in construction or salvage, all rushed to Ground Zero to help. One of them, crane operator turned fireman Sam Melisi, was one of the first would-be rescuers to pioneer routes through, over, and under the rubble. He had all the expertise and experience one could wish for, but was forced time and again to retreat.
It dawned on Melisi that the “tremendous devastation” of the Oklahoma City bombing, which he had worked six years earlier, had been nothing compared to this. “Visualize fiftyfold or a hundredfold, no matter where you turned … You can never quite prepare for something like this … on this magnitude. We started searching … We were hoping to find many live victims. But as time went on we realized there weren’t going to be that many.”
There were only a few. Twenty people were rescued after the collapses, all but one emerging in the first twenty-four hours. Two civilians, trapped at first in what had been a shopping mall beneath the plaza, managed to squeeze out through an opening. Next out were twelve firefighters, a civilian, and a Port Authority policeman—thanks to “the Miracle of Stairway B.”
When the North Tower collapsed, Captain Jay Jonas and his crew had been four stories up the stairway, trying to help a woman who could walk no further. Swept away on an avalanche of rubble and steel, Jonas had thought, “This is how it ends.” They ricocheted down to certain death, only to find themselves alive—the civilian included—still on or near the stairway.
The difference now was that they were in pitch darkness, at something like ground floor level, in what was rapidly to become known as “the pile.” Jonas began hearing radio transmissions from firemen buried elsewhere: “Just tell my wife and kids that I love them.” “Mayday. Mayday … I’m trapped and I’m hurt bad.” The messages gradually petered out, for the men were dying.
Jonas kept sending his own Maydays. “It was a waiting game,” he remembered. “We were trapped in there for over three hours … I heard one fireman on the radio saying, ‘Where’s the North Tower?’ and I’m thinking to myself, ‘We’re in trouble if they don’t even know where the North Tower is.’ ” Deep in the rubble, Jonas had no way of knowing the reality evident to everyone outside, that the tower had simply vanished.
He realized the truth only as the dust began to clear, when a beam of sunlight penetrated the darkness. It was coming through a hole that was to prove the group’s salvation. “I survived,” Jonas thought as he emerged. “All my men survived. And we have this small victory that is within us, that we brought somebody else out with us … We had a nice void. We had a nice little pocket. There’s got to be hundreds of them. There’s got to be a lot of people getting out of here.”
In fact only three others were to be rescued. Port Authority engineer Pasquale Buzzelli had plunged down, also on a stairway, from the 22nd floor. The fall reminded him for a moment of an amusement park ride. Then he was hit on the head, saw stars, and fell unconscious. Buzzelli came to three hours later, covered in dust and reclining on a cement slab fifteen feet above the ground, there to be rescued by firemen. His only physical damage, a crushed right foot.
Two Port Authority police officers, Jimmy McLoughlin and William Jimeno, were found not by professional rescue workers but by two former U.S. Marines. Determined to be in the front line, they donned military fatigues, talked their way into Ground Zero, and clambered around hollering: “United States Marines! If you can hear us, yell or tap.” After an hour of shouting, a muffled cry came back. The pair summoned help, and rescuers had Jimeno on the surface by midnight. McLoughlin, who was seriously injured, was extracted early the following morning.
There would eventually be an army of rescuers from all over the country, professionals with technical skills, volunteers with a contribution to make—and some who were no help at all. Every city has its cranks, but none outdid the fellow who jumped overboard, early in the aftermath, from a ferry evacuating people to New Jersey. The man then began swimming—back in the direction of the Trade Center. “I thought,” he said as he was hauled out, “I could swim over to New York to help people.” Not everyone on board wanted him rescued. “Shoot him!” someone shouted. “He may be a terrorist!”
HOSPITALS IN MANHATTAN and beyond, expecting an “onslaught of patients,” had rushed to activate their disaster plans. Off-duty personnel, including a busload of surgeons attending a medical conference, dropped what they were doing and offered their services to the Fire Department. The expected flood of injured, however, never materialized. With most of those brought to hospitals released by midnight, the surgeons wound up loading water supplies.
On September 11 and for long afterward they found not survivors, not the injured, only the dead. Cadavers sometimes, but more often mere scraps of humanity. Those who found them saw things they will never forget.
“A person’s torso, just no legs, no head, no arms, nothing, just chest and stomach area … Then like fifteen feet away I found a head to go with the torso … we tagged it.”
“People had I-beams [steel joists] through them, and things like that.”
“A woman’s severed hand. You could still see the engagement ring on her finger … The constant smell of burnt flesh.”
“The body of a young woman … her child underneath … an arm they found, a woman’s, and when they pried open her fingers they found inside the fist of a baby.”
“You couldn’t walk more than a few feet in some areas without encountering body parts.”
The charnel house that was the Trade Center would over time yield up 21,744 separate human remains. Chief medical examiner Dr. Charles Hirsch, whose task it would be to collect and identify them, was based on First Avenue, only two miles from the Trade Center. He and aides had rushed to a nearby site early on 9/11, to prepare a temporary morgue, and several of them had been injured by flying debris. Those still able to work then initiated the necessary, macabre process that—as this book goes to press—continues still.
Remains were brought to Dr. Hirsch’s headquarters as they were found. They were analyzed, borne to a white tent nearby. Th
ere, a prayer was spoken over them. Then they were stored in refrigerated trailers pending identification. The operation would eventually require the installation of sixteen trailers.
To Hirsch, it came as no surprise that there should be so few complete bodies and so many thousands of body fragments. “If reinforced concrete was rendered into dust,” he said, “it wasn’t much of a mystery as to what would happen to people.”
More remains would be found as the years passed—some as late as 2009—atop the damaged Deutsche Bank building, in manholes, under a service road at Ground Zero. An assortment of remains, from a complete cadaver dressed in a suit to tiny bone fragments, was found at a landfill on Staten Island, destination of the half million tons of debris removed from the site. The landfill’s name, the name it had had since the late 1940s, was Fresh Kills. It was revealed in 2012 that some remains of those killed at the Pentagon, reportedly too small or charred to be identified, were also sent to a landfill—following cremation.
Within ten months of 9/11, science and detective work would identify 1,229 of those killed. In the years since, 404 more victims have been identified. It has been an unparalleled forensic achievement. Even so, 1,119 men and women—41 percent of the total who died—remain unidentified. The families of more than a thousand people cannot bury their loved ones.
THERE IS ANOTHER REASON, though, that the true death toll will long remain elusive. Listen again to the voices of those who endured 9/11 on the streets and in the buildings of New York City.
“I see this fifty-, sixty-story dust rolling down the block.” “The ambulances looked like they were covered with gray snow … so thick you couldn’t see a sharp edge from a smooth edge.” “People were just full of dust … looked like zombies.”
“Nobody could breathe. Everything was stuck in their throats and their eyes, mouths, faces, and everything.” “Everybody’s coughing, breathing in mouthfuls of shit.”
“Our face-pieces were on, because the probie [trainee firefighter] was having trouble with chest pains, having difficulty breathing.” “My lungs were filling up with this stuff. I don’t know what it was. I thought I was going to die.” “The sergeant asked me, ‘You think we could die from this stuff?’ I’m like, ‘Right now? No. But eventually? Yes.’ ”
Less than an hour after the second strike, a Fire Department operator had logged a phone call from a woman on Duane Street, near the Trade Center. At 9:59 the dispatcher noted:
FC—CONCERN ABOUT THE RESPIRATORY EFFECT OF THOSE PARTICLES
The person calling about the “particles” must have come across as a fusspot, her call a mere nuisance. Who had time to think, then, about the bits and pieces falling from the towers and wafting on the breeze? The material spewed out by the towers, however, did have significance—a significance that increased greatly once the towers had fallen and the walls of dust had roared up the canyons of Lower Manhattan.
“Dust” covers many evils. 9/11’s dust contained: asbestos (tests after the attacks showed hazardous asbestos levels at sites up to seven blocks from Ground Zero), lead, glass fibers, dioxin, PCBs, and PAHs (potentially carcinogenic chemical compounds) and toxins from perhaps fifty thousand vaporized computers.
New York firefighters had reason, historically, to fear such pollutants. “We lost quite a few firemen back in the seventies in a telephone building fire,” remembered Salvatore Torcivia. “They were exposed to PCBs when all the transformers in that building burned and they didn’t have the proper equipment to protect themselves. Numerous guys died the first year from cancer. Over the next five to twenty years, all the guys from that job died. The majority went within the first ten years.”
Torcivia worked at Ground Zero every day for two weeks. “There’s gonna be a lot of people sick from this,” he forecast later,
and not just firemen. I wasn’t wearing a mask the whole time … They issued us these paper masks used for painting, but they don’t stop anything … From day one, everyone was complaining of the cough and the sore throats … The second day or third day I was getting told by private test groups at the site that the contaminants in the air were off the charts. They were so high they couldn’t register them. But we were also being told by the city and the state that everything was within the range where it’s not gonna harm anyone. That just wasn’t so.
The firefighter coughed as he talked, a cough that seemed to come from deep inside his chest. He had begun having problems within a month of 9/11.
Going on the normal runs, we noticed that a lot of us were getting winded more easily … On regular walk-ups, where I never had a problem before, I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. I couldn’t catch my breath … I went to the Fire Department surgeon … They found out that I’ve dropped around 40 to 45 percent of my breathing capacity since the last time I was tested … I went to see a specialist. He explained to me that all the stuff that got into my body down at Ground Zero—I didn’t just inhale it into my lungs and bronchial tubes—I ingested it … And everything working together is keeping it constantly inflamed and infected … There’s four to five hundred guys with breathing problems.
Salvatore Torcivia’s problems were far from unusual. A 2007 study by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the New York City Fire Department noted a huge increase in the number of firefighters suffering from the lung ailment sarcoidosis. Some two thousand firefighters had at that point reportedly been treated for serious respiratory ailments.
“The World Trade Center dust,” the college’s Dr. David Prezant has noted, “is a combination of the most dense, intense particulate matter [first responders] were ever exposed to in an urban environment.”
The respiratory ailments have continued to increase, affecting not only firefighters but policemen, emergency medical personnel, and those who worked on the rubble removed from Ground Zero.
Many have succumbed to their illnesses. In a landmark decision in 2007, the New York medical examiner ruled that the 9/11 dust cloud contributed to the death as early as five months afterward of a young attorney from sarcoidosis. As in the case of all victims of the attacks, the cause of her death was registered as homicide.
According to figures published in late 2008 by the New York congressional delegation, 16,000 9/11 responders and 2,700 people who lived near Ground Zero were at that time “sick and under treatment.”
Reports in 2009 suggested that some 479 people, from different walks of life, had died from illnesses that may be attributable to the condition of the air during and after the 9/11 attacks. One by one, news reports show, others continue to die.
In late 2010, when deaths from illness among first responders had risen to 664—many of them from causes suspected to be related to 9/11—Congress acknowledged the gravity of the problem.
The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named for a New York policeman who had died of pulmonary fibrosis at thirty-four, earmarked $4.2 billion to address the health needs of the long-term victims of 9/11.
“We will never forget the selfless courage demonstrated by the firefighters, police officers, and the first responders who risked their lives to save others,” said President Obama when he signed the act.
It seemed, though, that one category of sufferers might be forgotten. A study indicated that cancer rates had risen by 14 percent among first responders—including more than three hundred members of the New York City police force. As of April 2012, it was not yet clear whether 9/11 survivors with cancer would be covered under the law.
Back in September 2001, concern about the possible dangers of exposure to toxic dust and fumes had been swept aside. The Environmental Protection Agency declared after two days that initial tests were “very reassuring.” Five days later, Assistant Secretary of Labor John Henshaw said it was “safe to go back to work in New York’s financial district.” The Stock Exchange reopened on September 17, with EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman reassuring New Yorkers the next day that their air was “safe to breathe.”
Those who knew the situation on the ground knew that opening the next day was an impossible fantasy. The President, however, had been removed from the realities.
AFTER HASTILY LEAVING Sarasota airport in Florida, at 9:55 on the morning of 9/11, Bush had spent the rest of the day aboard Air Force One, with brief stops at two U.S. military bases. “The President is being evacuated,” press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters on the plane, “for his safety and the safety of the country.”
Key civil and military aides were at Bush’s side, but circumstances wreaked havoc with the concept of round-the-clock presidential grasp of the levers of power. For all his power and all the modern technology at his disposal, it is not evident that the President had much influence—if any—on the government’s reaction to the day’s events.
Accounts conflict mightily as to whether communications aboard Air Force One functioned well or appallingly badly. Bush spoke with Dick Cheney around the time of takeoff, but it is far from clear with whom, and how usefully, he spoke once the plane was airborne. In interviews conducted for the first anniversary of 9/11, chief of staff Andy Card repeatedly emphasized how efficiently the President had been able to communicate with the Vice President, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, and the military.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 9