Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  Eventually, I realized that, as a skilled paramedic, there was nothing more for me to do. I was just an extra set of hands down there. If I stayed on, all I’d be doing was collecting rubble. So I left.

  I was probably down there about seventy hours total. About thirteen or fourteen hours the first day; seven hours on the second. Third day? Maybe seven or eight. I had my normal shifts at the hospital and I went to those as well, but in-between I’d go down to help. I couldn’t sleep anyway.

  After the fifteenth, I didn’t go down anymore. My skills as a paramedic could be utilized elsewhere. People were still having heart attacks in other areas of the city. People still slipped and fell and needed attention. The world moves on, after all.

  In all, fourteen EMS workers were lost on 9/11. For that, I felt this mix of emotions, part of me saying, “Shit, I’m glad to be alive.” But another part of me feeling a tremendous guilt and saying, “How come them, and not me? How come there’s guys in the rubble who have families and here I am, a single guy with basically no ties?”

  I understand that’s a normal grief reaction. Survivor guilt. To be able to identify with that? It’s a normal grief to have.

  When I was walking around in the rubble, I bumped into this fireman who took one look at me and said, “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”

  I said, “What?”

  He said, “Take a look at your shield number.”

  My number is 9110. A strange number to wear at Ground Zero.

  The coincidence of it. I feel that, in some strange way, when I was given that shield number, I was meant to be there.

  52 A paramedic’s job covers all the basics of emergency care: oxygen, splinting, long boarding. They give the same emergency care in the field as would be given in an ER. They carry drugs, intubate, perform cardiac procedure, and administer IVs. The City system (911 dispatcher) is under the jurisdiction of the New York Fire Department. Calls from dispatch are routed to independent hospitals and paramedic staffs. A common shift for Roger lasts eight, twelve, or sixteen hours maximum. How many calls come in on a sixteen-hour shift in New York City? “One,” says Roger. “Or twenty. You just don’t know. There’s no such thing as a typical day. You might treat some kid for asthma, or you might have three cardiac arrests, a couple of shootings, a few very bad car accidents … or the World Trade Center.”

  53 Three blocks from the World Trade Center, at 170 William Street.

  54 “Crich” is short for Needle Cricothyrotomy, a procedure that involves puncturing the cricothy-roid membrane and creating an airway tube. It’s a similar procedure to a tracheotomy.

  55 Firemen Dan McWilliams, George Johnson, and Billy Eisengrein raised a U.S. flag amid the rubble of Ground Zero on the afternoon of 9/11. The act created an instant media sensation, a moment of inspiration in the wake of the attack. Many people couldn’t help but notice a similarity between the image of the three firemen and the one depicted in the United States Marine Memorial, commonly referred to as the Iwo Jima Memorial, near Arlington National Cemetery. The incident eventually sparked controversy, however. A bronze memorial statue was commissioned from photographs of the firemen raising the flag. McWilliams, Johnson, and Eisengrein—all white men—were replaced in the sculpture by a white man, an African American man, and a Hispanic man. New York Fire Department spokesman Frank Gribbon stated that, “given that those who died were of all races and ethnicities, and that the statue was to be symbolic of those sacrifices, ultimately a decision was made to honor no one in particular.” Opponents to the statue claimed that politics should play no part in a historic memorial.

  56 The Sphere by Fritz Koenig, a sculpture in the plaza at the base of the Towers.

  SALVATORE S. TORCIVIA

  Salvatore S. Torcivia, thirty-five, is a New York City firefighter.

  Sal served as a New York City police officer for nine and a half years before switching to the NYFD. “I wound up with the fire department because it was more of a brotherhood,” he says. “And I was slotted to work the September 10/11 Monday night shift, a twenty-four-hour overtime tour from 6:00 P.M. to 9:00 A.M. But I gave it up to George Cain, may he rest in peace.”

  A total of nine firefighters were lost from Sal’s ladder company.

  Sal coughs frequently as he talks, turning his head to one side and hacking from deep within his chest. But his incredible attitude and buoyant good humor is infectious.

  I DROPPED MY sons off to school that morning and took my daughter to the YMCA for her first preschool class. One of my best friends was there because he had his son in the same school class. He took me aside and said, “Sal, I just heard a plane hit the Twin Towers.”

  I was thinking he meant a two-seater plane, you know? One of those little jobs. So I said, “Do you know what size?” He said no.

  I figured it was nothing, so I got in my pickup truck and headed for home. I had Q104 on, and I heard the announcer say that another plane just hit. That’s when I said to myself, what do you mean, “another one hit?”

  At home, I put the TV on, and there I was looking at everything that was happening, totally in shock now. I called my father and told him, “Dad, I just want to let you know, I’m heading into work. If you don’t hear from me, don’t worry. They might need me.”

  My father told me he was on the phone with my sister, who was, at that moment, standing outside the Towers; she works in one of the banks opposite the complex. “She says people are jumping, Sal,” he said. “Things are falling. Thank God you didn’t go to work today.”

  I said, “Tell her to get out of there right now.”

  From home, I went back to the YMCA. I wanted to tell my wife, Adrienne, that I was leaving; she was waiting for my daughter to get out of class. I searched the whole place but I couldn’t find her. I didn’t want to leave without telling her, but I had no choice. So I told my friends, “Tell Adrienne I had to go into work.” Then I grabbed some clothes since I knew I’d be down there a while. I could tell that just by seeing the devastation on the TV. Hell, I packed enough clothes to last me a week, and started driving.

  My truck’s got four-way flashers on it, which allowed me to tuck in right behind a police escort while I was still on Staten Island. I wasn’t worried about breaking the law or nothing. Those police weren’t about to do any car stops; they obviously had to get someplace fast, and I wasn’t causing any problems. We ducked in and out of empty streets. Everything was a ghost town. They took me right up to the Verrazzano Bridge, where somebody checked my ID and let me through.

  Everything was going well until I got to the Battery Tunnel. That’s where the police stopped me and said, “Everything’s closed off. No getting in or out of the city.”

  “That night, around midnight, we found our truck…. It was abandoned, parked a few blocks away from the Trade Center, covered in filth, and totally empty, like it was waiting for the guys who’d rode her down….”

  There was a bunch of firemen waiting in their trucks, getting ready to get through the tunnel. They’d set up a temporary command post; I think they were Battalion 32 from Red Hook, Brooklyn. Since I had nothing else to do but wait, I started looking around, seeing what I could do to help, and that’s when I ran into a police captain from the 76th Precinct—also in Red Hook—who used to be my captain from the 60th Precinct when I was a cop in Brooklyn.

  We shook hands and he said to me, “Sal, I could really use you right now. Help me get people out of the tunnel.”

  He meant civilians who’d run from the Trade Towers and fled through the Battery Tunnel on foot. They were everywhere. So we corralled them as they came out the mouth, took them aside, gave them water, and soaked their faces. We checked everyone to make sure they were okay and pointed out ambulances to anybody we thought needed them.

  After doing that for about a half an hour or so, someone told me that the Brooklyn Bridge was open. So I hopped back in my truck, grabbed another off-duty fireman, and drove him to his firehouse in Manhattan at 24 Truck on the We
st Side. Then I went back to my own firehouse, which is 16 Engine, 7 Truck—on 29th Street between 2nd and 3rd—where I proceeded to get into my gear. The captain of my engine was there, plus the lieutenant from my truck.

  We loaded up my pickup truck with guys and equipment and also commandeered one of the fire department’s Chevy Suburbans; we loaded that up, too. Then we drove down to the Trade Center.

  The fire department had told everyone to stay at their firehouses and wait to be called, but we knew both our companies were down there already and weren’t going to sit around on our hands. We didn’t have any fire apparatuses on us, but we didn’t care. We just wanted to get there and help.

  We drove as close to the Trade Center as we could; I’d say we parked about six blocks away from the Towers off the West Side Highway. From there, we got out and walked the rest of the way down.

  Sure, we’d heard the Towers had collapsed. But I was still, in my mind, thinking that just the top part had come down or something, the upper stories where the planes had hit. I couldn’t believe, you know? I couldn’t have it make sense that the whole building came down. Both buildings.

  We were walking through this disaster area, trying to find where the new temporary headquarters for the fire department was. We couldn’t believe the amount of rubble there. I kept looking up, but there were no Towers standing. Either one. Which put me in a state of shock. We all were.

  We saw one of the battalion chiefs and approached him, asking, “What do you want us to do?”

  He said, “Find whatever tools you can and start digging.”

  We found an area and started working. Digging, just like he’d said. And we searched the rubble that first day, trying to find survivors, anybody. But just looking at the Pile, my first opinion was, “No one could have survived.”

  They told us where the command post had been situated: off the West Side Highway by Battery Park City. We figured that’d be the place where we’d have the best chance of finding survivors. Uh-uh.

  We kept coming up with bodies of the deceased and body parts. It was awful.

  At one point later in the day, they pulled us off the main Pile when they thought another section of the building was coming down. We all pulled out and waited, but nothing happened. So we moved back in and started digging again. This time, we found more and more civilian bodies.

  I remember losing my bearings a lot on the Pile; it was hard to keep track of where you were. With all the geography gone, I couldn’t remember what street I was on, what building used to stand where, nothing. Everything started to look like a big pile of rubble.

  I’d say I started helping out that morning at 9:30 on the Brooklyn side of the tunnel. By the time I got down to the Trade Center itself, it had to be around 10:30. And I worked in the Pit from 10:30 to 6:00 at night. But then I had to stop.

  I did as much as I could until I became dehydrated and started cramping up real bad. I said, “Let me go to one of the ambulances to get an IV, something for the cramping.” I hoped to pull in, get patched up, head back out, and continue working. I ran into a gentleman named Roger Smyth, a paramedic from NYU Downtown hospital who hooked me up with a couple IVs, gave me a few bananas, and got me back on my feet enough for me to continue until 11:30 at night.

  That first day while I was getting the IV, another building, a hotel, started rumbling and everyone started running because they thought it was another collapse. It was scary. I was still so cramped, I couldn’t get the needle out of my arm. Another fireman from my house had to help me pull it out as we ran for cover. We watched the building come down, just barely out of range.57 After that, I guess the higher-ups decided they didn’t really know what they were dealing with, so they moved everyone out.

  On 9/11, 343 firefighters and paramedics, 23 NYPD officers, and 37 Port Authority officers were killed.

  It was probably a good move. I’d heard nothing but explosions all day, like bombs going off. It makes sense, looking back. The fires from the planes’ jet fuel was still burning. Air conditioning and refrigerator units in the nearby buildings were going off like firecrackers, exploding from the super heat. Also, I believe the Secret Service had their armory in one of the Towers. Someone later told me that all the explosions we heard was actually ordnance going off deep beneath the rubble, but I never got the long or short of that.

  Late in the evening, the [fire] department called off any worker who’d been on the Pile all day. They said, “Take a break. We’ll get a night crew in here. Come back in the morning.”

  They’d already tried that a number of times. Most of the time, we ignored them. But by the end of that day, a lot of guys were physically spent. Me? I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. By that point, I figured I’d be no good to anyone if I kept on working. And anyway, we had a fresh bunch of guys waiting, so me and a few others figured, “Let them jump in and we’ll be back in a few hours.”

  That night, around midnight, we found our truck from Ladder 7. It was abandoned, parked a few blocks away from the Trade Center, covered in filth and totally empty, like it was waiting for the guys who’d rode her down to come back and head for home.

  That was a sad time. I went back to pick up my own truck, and a few other guys drove our fire truck back to the house. We started cleaning the debris off her; it took us until around five in the morning. That truck was covered from head to toe with pieces of cement, paper, lots of dust, lots of rubble. We moved fourteen full bags of garbage off that rig. She’s a tower ladder truck with a bucket that three guys can stand in at once to operate a nozzle and control a fire, or get to a window for a rescue maneuver. The collapse of the Towers had damaged the ladder controls, and the truck’s radiator was clogged up good with about two inches of soot and garbage. Other than that, she was still running.

  A friend of mine who has a business in Coney Island told me something interesting later on. He said, “Papers from the Trade Center were falling like snowflakes by my store. You get that? As far away as Coney Island they came! When I saw them, I thought, ho boy! The buildings in Coney Island have started to burn.”

  They found inches and inches of soot on cars all over Brooklyn.

  What I’m saying is, Coney Island’s a nice distance from Manhattan, maybe fifteen miles or so. So, yeah, I kind of consider that unbelievable. Debris from the Towers landed all over the city. Imagine that.

  When the Trade Center collapsed, the fire department initiated what we call a recall. Anyone off-duty, on vacation, or out sick had to report into work, no matter what their condition was. We needed manpower, and we needed it badly. We lost so many guys.

  That first day, we worked around the clock. The second day, too—so that was forty-eight hours straight combined. Then they broke us into two shifts. You work a twenty-four, you’re off twenty-four.

  For days, the fires were out of control. You kept dousing water on the blazes, hoping you could keep them at bay. One of the buildings we covered had to be thirty stories tall, and I’d say 90 percent of the floors were on fire. We didn’t know if it was going to come down on us or not. On that one, the fire burned for a day and a half, but the building was left standing after all was said and done. It was strange.

  “Our fellow members of the fire department, close friends, were missing. We were doing whatever we thought it would take to find them, very often putting ourselves in harm’s way.”

  So I guess I’m trying to say that, while we were working to pull bodies out of the rubble, we had all this other stuff going on around us.

  How do you fight a fire like that? You just keep trying and hope for the best. By that point, we were all in reaction mode, automatic pilot. Our fellow members of the fire department, close friends, were missing. We were doing whatever we thought it would take to find them, very often putting ourselves in harm’s way. But the camaraderie—I can’t even describe it.

  Myself and this other fireman from my house, Jerry Bonner, we stayed together almost the whole two weeks. A lot of gu
ys were doing the bucket brigade—Jerry and I did that in our downtime.58

  But most of the time, we searched the voids and tunnels of the debris field, hoping to find some sign of life. It was such a large area and we didn’t have enough radios to go around, so you couldn’t, for instance, report in, “Okay, I’m searching over here or over there …” All we had was a can of spray paint.

  We’d mark wherever we went, over the rubble and under it. If we found something that looked promising—a space that looked big enough for someone to hide in—we’d start digging ourselves and send someone out to start a bucket brigade. But we never pulled anyone out alive.

  We found a cop who was later identified as part of the police academy photo unit this way. Half his torso and one of his legs was missing.

  At times, you knew there were remains where you were digging—the smell was unmistakable. But you couldn’t find anything. The bodies were totally crushed, plus they’d been ground up into the dirt and the rubble. That’s what we were smelling.

  I was a cop for ten years, and I saw a lot. Sometimes we’d get a DOA call and get to the location—an apartment, let’s say—and the body’s been sitting for two or three weeks because the deceased had no family. The body’s decomposed, but you had to wait until the medical examiner got there to remove it.

  But this? This was like nothing I’d ever experienced, and nothing prepared me for it. Even when we found someone’s remains, nothing was recognizable. And that was so very sad. How many thousands of people were we talking about, all there in one place, decomposing?