Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  I went to Pier 94 on October 1. So many people there—so many people were affected. I saw store owners, limousine drivers, taxi drivers … everyone who suffered stood all in a line, and they were being helped. All of them.

  The agencies gave out coupons according to how many family members you have. They take down everybody’s social security number so they can find out how much help the person needs, how much food they need—and they write a coupon.

  Safe Horizons gave everybody a two-week paycheck. At that time, I made $200 a week; they gave me a check for $440. Some woman standing in front of me in line worked in a bank in the World Trade Center, and she made $750 a week after taxes. I saw them give her a check for $1,500. If you made $500 a week, you got $1,000. I tell you! The Red Cross is number one!

  The government—all agencies. Trying to help those people who are injured. Suffered. Big problems. Lose business. They helped me and many people in this neighborhood. I have many Chinese friends with stores along Canal Street. They’re getting help, too. Anybody! Everybody who needs it.

  Are things getting back to normal? No. Business has picked up to only 20 percent of previous earnings. But a lot of people have no jobs. There’s no money to spend, so how are they gonna go shopping?

  We try to keep the store. We’re talking with the landlord and we tell him, “This is not a tragedy, this is a war,” you know? I tell the landlord, “We need your support.”

  He says he’s thinking about giving a break to everybody on this row. Even for the people who live in the apartments above the store. He owns this building, a nice gentleman. He came personally to every store and every apartment; he talked to everybody. He’s gonna give us a break for January, February, and March of 2002. Then he says, “After that, let’s see how the business picks up.”

  He comes by every two weeks to check for himself. When things get back to normal, everybody will pay what they used to pay.

  See this restaurant next door? It used to be open twenty-four hours. Now they close at 6:30 every night. No customers.

  Before? On this street? Too much traffic! You come out here at two o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the morning? It looked like daytime, at twelve o’clock. People walking everywhere. Limousine drivers, yellow cab drivers parking all over the place, waiting to pick people up. All for the World Trade Center, which was open twenty-four hours.

  They had a lot of big companies there. Lots of international banks. They had a Hilton Hotel inside, you know that? A lot of restaurants. The shopping mall underneath. It was a good life.

  Now, there’s nothing. It’s all gone. Now it’s … how do you call that? Too much “headache.”

  One thing I saw, this announcement two weeks ago on Channel 7. The government asked, “Who lost their loved ones?”

  In Washington, D.C., the director of this charity office says he will give $1.5 million to people who lost their loved ones. And this is a good thing. Because you know, loved ones cannot come back. You lose a son, who in turn has a daughter four or five years old; it affects everyone, everyone in the family.

  Money should go to help these families, because that son helped the whole family with what he earned, you see?

  47 Joseph’s shop is typical of many small industries in that district. Backpacks and suitcases are laid out on display in front of the shop. You can walk inside the tiny store to view more wares: wallets, belts, handbags, and the like. Joseph will greet you with an instant hello and a warm smile, beaming from the dusky moon of his face. He speaks with the frankness and honesty of a merchant who spends his life talking to people and getting to know them for who they are rather than who he wants them to be.

  48 He means the curb.

  49 Joseph shows his hands, the palms of which have been ground up into raw purple wounds. He shows his knees, which are the same.

  NICK GERSTLE

  Nick Gerstle, twenty-four, worked for Verizon as a construction technician and splicer.50 On September 11, he saw a rare opportunity to make a very important contribution.

  I WAS AT WORK in Brooklyn when we heard about the attacks over the radio. Our foreman called us up and told us to go to one of our COs—the central offices where huge computer networks handle the telephone switching. There are dozens of COs around the city—that’s how the telephone network is built in New York. Cables connect your home or business to central offices, then the central offices connect to other central offices, like tentacles of nerve fiber going in and out of a massive brain.

  When I pulled into our central office, I asked my foreman if there was any kind of volunteer effort being organized within our company. He said, “It’s too early, it just happened a few hours ago. Watch the TV, and if they need you for the Red Cross, you can volunteer that way.”

  Well, that wasn’t enough for me.

  I just went down there. I didn’t know if the trains would still run to the Trade Center or if I’d even be allowed to help. But my company’s certified me every year in CPR and first aid—that’s one of the things that motivated me to act. And I’m a pretty big guy. I knew they’d need people who were used to working with their hands and could move things, especially people with the knowledge that I have and the training Verizon provided me. Even if they had me just handing out cups of water, I’d have still done it to make a difference.

  I took the N/R subway and had to change trains a couple times to make it into Manhattan. The train ran above ground into the city as we headed in from Brooklyn, and as we went over the bridge, we could see the smoke billowing out from the Towers. It was horrifying. People were looking at it in awe and crying. Mothers were crying because they knew their families—their kin—were in the buildings.

  The first stop that let off in the city was Canal Street. As soon as I got out, I got a sense that nothing was as it was supposed to be. Basically, it was like Lower Manhattan had turned into some kind of war zone. From Canal Street down to the Trade Center, I had to find “holes” in the police barricades where I could convince authorities to say, “You can go through with that pass.”

  I kept showing my ID and telling them I was first-aid certified. Some cops would let me through, some wouldn’t. If they wouldn’t let me past, I’d walk a block away and try another police officer. Like that, I worked my way closer and closer downtown.

  Finally, I made it to a temporary triage center by a college near the Brooklyn Bridge. When I went in, there was no power, just emergency workers who’d gotten injured. I asked for gloves and the people in charge gave me a little mask—not the type that would stop anything serious, but it still helped.

  I knew that in order for me to go into the zone, I needed protective gear. I scrounged around and picked up a firefighter jacket from a Burger King down on Church Street near the Trade Center; someone had made it into, like, a temporary rescue center headquarters. I also got some heavy-duty gloves. I needed all this because otherwise, I just had the shirt on my back.

  As I walked down Church Street … I can’t even begin to describe it. Three inches of layered soot on the street. The surrounding area was wet from fire hoses. It was like the war zone you see in that film Terminator 2.

  There I was on Church Street, waiting with hundreds of firefighters and a small group of volunteers. There were marines standing next to us; they were suiting up and getting ready to go into the debris field.

  The area wasn’t organized at all. It wasn’t like someone was in charge and giving orders, like, “You, you, and you! Go there!” It was more like, “Okay … hell. I’m going in.” Whatever you could find, whoever you could get to go in with you, you just did it.

  I remember some of the guys who were preparing to go in. There was a volunteer fireman from Maryland who told me he’d heard what had happened, put a siren on his car, and driven from Maryland to New York in an hour and a half. That trip usually takes four hours, so I gotta imagine he was doing a hundred miles an hour the whole way.

  I remember another volunteer, a Hispanic guy fr
om Long Island. He didn’t go into the rubble with us, he knew his fire company was responding and he was going to wait for his equipment to arrive.

  Half an hour later, when I finally got into the debris myself, I found that group of marines again and linked up with them. This was a good thing. They needed all the help they could get, because they’d found two Port Authority cops who were trapped fifteen feet under the rubble.

  You could see one cop’s hand sticking out of the debris. The hand was alive and wiggling. The cop called up to us and said that his partner was down there with him and wasn’t doing so well.

  “I kept showing my ID and telling them I was first-aid certified. Some cops would let me through, some wouldn’t. If they wouldn’t let me past, I’d walk a block away and try another police officer. Like that, I worked my way closer and closer downtown.”

  There were three marines with me, and we tried talking to them. “Hey guys. Don’t worry.”

  I remember one of the marines saying, “By this time tomorrow, you’ll be somewhere on a beach, sipping a drink.”

  We started digging. We didn’t have any tools, so we used our hands to dig away at the rubble.

  I looked down into the hole at the two men and said, “Anybody order pizza?” I was trying to lighten up the mood, you know?

  I’m glad I had the fireman’s jacket and gloves. Some parts of the rubble were very hot. Some of the I-beams sticking up out of the rubble were glowing, even. I was scared but at the same time, there was so much camaraderie you didn’t feel the fear. We were right there on the rubble, under it sometimes, and we heard these guys saying, “Don’t let us die! Please! Don’t let us die!” That keeps you motivated.

  And I thought while I was working, don’t worry, guys, I’m right down here with you. I won’t let you go, because if you go, we all go.

  Like I said, the hole those cops were in went down about fifteen feet. It was a small hole with a huge I-beam sitting on top, holding up the concrete and rubble so it wouldn’t collapse in on them. We formed a line from the rubble pile to the street and began bringing tools in. It was an unbelievable landscape, you gotta picture it. Amidst the smoke and rubble and darkness, flickers of light from fires all around.

  When the professionals finally arrived, I told them I was a volunteer, and they ordered me out. They said they needed space to get the trained emergency personnel in. I said, “Okay, I’ll go,” but I stayed next to the hole.

  Then I started to feel nauseous. I couldn’t breathe. I suddenly felt like I was only able to use 50 percent of my lungs. It was around twelve o’clock noon.

  A fire lieutenant asked me if I was fine. I said, “Yeah. Yeah.” But ten or fifteen minutes later, he saw me again. This time I was gasping for air, down on one knee, and he said, “Hey guy. You gotta get out of here.”

  I wanted to stay there as long as I could, but I’m glad he told me to go.

  The core fires under the colossal pile of debris left on the World Trade Center site by the Towers’ collapse would burn for more than five months. The intense heat of this inferno resisted any attempts by firefighting crews to extinguish it.

  When I was evacuated, they still didn’t have the two cops out. They were just starting to bring them up.

  I started stumbling out of the rubble, gasping for air. I swear to you, I couldn’t fill my lungs. If it wasn’t for the line of firefighters giving me air from their oxygen tanks on two occasions, I don’t think I would have made it back out of the debris field.

  It was a long way back; the rubble was a mammoth field of smoking hills. The hole where the cops were was in the middle of the Trade Center area. And all the way out, I had to jump over fallen I-beams and climb over things. If it wasn’t for the thick gloves they gave me, my hands would have been burned. You had to be careful not to step in holes, too, because you didn’t know what was down there. A lot of times, I looked down and all I saw was glowing red fires.

  The firemen’s air tanks were so heavy, and I was so weak that I dropped it the second time I was being given oxygen. I was so exhausted.

  There was one last hill before me. When I got to the apex of it, I could see firemen below moving everywhere. It was like looking down from a plane and seeing these little ants. And it was a great feeling when I saw it. Home free. Almost.

  Once I got down the hill, they had gurneys ready. Firemen helped me, giving me their shoulders to lean on. I collapsed on the gurney and two doctors started working on me as they hustled the gurney out at about fifteen miles per hour, heading toward a triage area.

  I was exhausted, but I was amazed. I’m a pretty heavy guy. At times, they had to lift me up to get me over the debris, but they did it. They moved me like I weighed nothing.

  I checked into the hospital later on, and that’s when I heard about those two cops on the TV news. They got them out just fine and man, that felt good to hear.

  At the hospital, I was treated for smoke inhalation. Apparently, I’d burned my lungs and throat pretty badly. They gave me some steroids to reduce the swelling.

  They’d torn my shirt off when I was admitted, and I needed a new one before they’d let me out. I didn’t want to wait, but they told me, “No, no. You have to wait.”

  I said, “Okay,” and sat down for forty minutes.

  They finally gave me a clean shirt and I was about to leave when Mayor Giuliani walked in. One of his aides saw my fireman’s jacket and said, “Wait right here. Mayor Giuliani wants to see you.”

  The mayor’d come to console injured firemen, and here I was, a telephone worker who looked like a fireman. I guess I had some explaining to do.

  Giuliani was really nice, with a smile that made you feel like he was your dad. He looked at me for a couple seconds, shook my hand, and said, “Tell me what happened.”

  I told him my story. That I was a volunteer who worked for Verizon and how I was part of the group that helped rescue the two Port Authority cops. He started pumping my hand, saying, “Wow, you’re a really great person.”

  The NYPD and FDNY commissioners were there, too, and they both congratulated me.51 I guess it’s true that the NYPD commissioner doesn’t smile at all. He had this stern look on him the whole time. I’m sure he had a lot on his mind that day.

  I told him that, and I remember what he said to me. He said, “What’s your name again?”

  I said, “Nick Gerstle.”

  “One more time?”

  “Nick Gerstle.”

  Now I know why he asked that. A day later, he had a meeting with Verizon Vice Chairman Larry Babbio and told him that he’d met me, and that I was a hero. That’s the story I heard through the corporation, at any rate.

  Remember, I’d taken off work without leave, so I called my foreman and said, “Hey, I’m over here at the hospital and my lungs are messed up.”

  He said, “The whole company already knows about it. I’ve got VP’s calling me about you. Don’t worry about it.”

  I was discharged around nine that night, and I went to my sister’s house in Queens. We watched the rescue efforts from there. But I thought, I can’t be here, what am I doing here? I want to go back and help.

  So Wednesday night I left at six, took a train, and got to Ground Zero around eight o’clock. I stayed there till six or seven the next day. The fireman’s jacket helped me get downtown through the barricades again. While I was walking past Canal, I saw a police van going to the site and I waved him down. They thought I was a fireman, and that’s all it took for me to zip through all the blockades.

  By Wednesday, things were much more organized. We weren’t inside the smoke this time, we were outside the rubble. They didn’t want anyone going in because it was too dangerous.

  After that second adventur. I went home, fell asleep, and didn’t wake up for a long time.

  Right now, it’s December [2001] and I’m back at work repairing special circuits, the lines that go to stockbrokers and businesses. We’ve set up a temporary facility we call “Verizon City
” where we’ve been working since virtually the day after the attacks—it’s a camp downtown in an old parking lot that our company’s real estate people came upon and said, “Hey, we need this space.”

  Our company’s built construction trailers and a garage for service vehicles and tools. A lot of lines are down, and we’re working to make sure data gets through. A lot of translation problems in the lines have to be re-programmed. It’s tedious work, a lot of paperwork. We estimate that the whole restoration will take most of 2003.

  Me? I’m just happy to be here and helping.

  There weren’t that many people pulled from the rubble; I think only four people were rescued that way of all the thousands who were killed. Such a tragedy. And that makes it an even better feeling for me that I was able to help rescue those men.

  Before? I was just another person. Now, I’m a good person. If something happens, I know I have the guts to jump in there and help.

  What did I take away from this experience? That’s easy. Do whatever you can do to help. Don’t think. Don’t wait for approval. Just go do it.

  50 Phone cables run on poles or underground. A splicer climbs to the top of a pole or crawls beneath a manhole cover to gain access to a problematic line. He locates trouble in a cable, which might contain a bundle of up to 1,200 wires, and repairs it by hand.

  51 Bernard Kerik and Thomas Von Essen, respectively.

  ROGER SMYTH

  Roger Smyth, thirty-five, moved from Belfast, Ireland, to New York City in order to work as a 911 paramedic.52 “The job suits me,” he says. “It’s never predictable.” When he speaks, his voice rolls out in a clear, lyrical northern Irish drawl.