The smell got to everyone after awhile. By the second or third day, it was raw down there. I was gagging. If we uncovered anything that resembled a body or a body part, we’d shovel it into a body bag—there was no other way to pick up what we found. We hoped they’d be able to ID the remains through DNA testing down at the medical examiners’ office.
On the fourth day, I started finding intact bodies, but everyone was naked. I was like, why don’t these people have any clothes on?
I talked to other firemen who were down there that first day when the buildings crumbled, and discovered an answer of sorts. They said that, as the Towers came down, firemen ran from the area but the force of the blast created a wind tunnel effect powerful enough to rip their bottles—the packs we wear for breathing—right off their backs. It lifted their jackets up and threw them aside like dolls.
What I’m saying is, this stuff we wear is heavy equipment and it’s strapped onto us tight. So if the blast could rip off our gear, business suits and regular clothes would be like nothing, like tissue paper. Like blowing bubbles away.
We couldn’t find any glass, or office furniture. No office equipment, either. I think there was so much steel and cement coming down in the collapse that everything was pulverized into powder from the force.
Everyone was asking, “Where did all this dirt come from?” Simple. Everything was destroyed from the force of all that heavy steel and cement collapsing. In the section of the Pit where I was working, the largest piece of cement I found I could pick up with one hand. Everything else was powder.
You had every type of material in the powder that you could imagine. A lot of crushed glass. Plus a lot of chemicals, which really gets me worried.
Both Towers had transformers, which carried PCBs to keep them cool.59 That stuff causes cancer. We lost quite a few firemen back in the ’70s in a telephone building fire—they were exposed to PCBs when the transformers in that building burned and the men weren’t wearing the proper equipment to protect themselves. The first year after that job, numerous guys died from cancer. Over the next five to twenty years, all the guys who’d responded to that fire died, all from cancer. The majority of them went within the first ten years.
I continued going back down to Ground Zero every day for two weeks straight until they called us off.
There’s gonna be a lot of people sick from this. And not just firemen.
I wasn’t wearing a mask the whole time I was down at the Pit. They issued us these paper masks that workmen use for painting, but they don’t stop anything. So I wore the hood that we wear around our heads when we go into fires. It reminds me of the headgear a knight would wear to protect himself in battle; it keeps the heat from our head. When we have our face piece on, it seals our forehead down to our chin and ears and keeps us from getting burned.
So that was my respirator, that’s what I found worked the best. I used it to cover my nose and I tucked it into my shirt. I didn’t feel like I was getting exposed to the dust in the air … but the way that I feel now, I don’t think that measure offered much protection. At the time, it kept me going. I guess that’s what’s most important.
From day one, everyone was complaining of the cough and the sore throats. We thought it was from inhaling the dust; we didn’t think of contaminants. But 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, so high they couldn’t register them. But we were also being told by the city and the state that everything was within a safe range, no one could be harmed. Looking back, that just wasn’t so—it wasn’t possible.
I’m not laying blame. Deep down, we knew that stuff was gonna harm us. But we were out there to find our brothers and civilian survivors. That’s what we get paid for, and that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to bring our family home.
But as time went on, the sore throats and the coughing got worse. I noticed it around three weeks after September 11: I was getting winded very easily.
Two weeks after the Trade Center happened, the department wouldn’t let anyone from the first, third, or eleventh divisions go back down. Two-thirds of the men we lost were from those divisions; we were all working on our days off to compensate for the holes in our ranks.
Then, going out on the normal runs, we noticed that a lot of us were getting tired very quickly. Some guys less, some guys more. On regular walk-ups, where I never had a problem before, I suddenly felt like I was gonna have a heart attack.60 I couldn’t catch my breath. But because we had so many memorial services going on, I chalked it up to the bad sleep patterns we were having, the way we were eating, the fact that I was out of shape, off my regular fitness routine.
But it never got better. In fact, it got to the point where every call we went on, I didn’t know if I was gonna make it or not, the way my heart was beating. I was gasping for breath.
I really started to realize I had a problem around four weeks after the eleventh. We were told we could go down to the medical office and get checked out, but I didn’t want to be out of work. If they put me on the sick list, they wouldn’t let me help out at the Trade Center.
Losing nine members in a firehouse is very hard. We had nine families we had to look after. In all, the department lost a lot of guys with over twenty years in. They could’ve retired. There was one guy I know of—September 11 was his last day working. He had forty years on. I think he was in Rescue Company 1. His son was in the fire department, too. They both were lost. That man’s wife lost her husband and her son in one day.
I can’t tell you how many memorials we’ve been to. On our days off, you get a printout that lists all the services going on. You go to as many as you can; sometimes you try to make two in a day. You want to show the families that you support them and that they’re being thought of, that their loved one is remembered.
Before this happened, a line-of-duty funeral would have anywhere from five to ten thousand guys showing up for a funeral. Now? You’re lucky if you get a hundred, because there’s so many services going on. We’re spread too thin. You’ve got guys being laid out upstate, in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx. I think Staten Island’s lost close to a hundred guys out of the three hundred or so total firemen lost.
So yeah, a lot of us were starting to feel sick. But we wanted to wait until most of the services were done before getting ourselves checked out.
Finally, a little over two months after September 11, it was like four o’clock in the morning and we were walking up the FDR Drive, responding to a car fire. We went on foot because we couldn’t get through traffic, there were too many cars blocking the roadway. After walking about ten blocks with all my gear and equipment, I thought I was gonna pass out.
I went to my officer and told him, “Boss, there’s something wrong. I don’t know if I’m having a heart attack or asthma.” I never had asthma before. My heart was strong as an ox. They got some paramedics to check me out, and everything showed okay on my EKG. Nothing wrong with my heart. My lungs were clear. But they said, “Definitely follow up with a pulmonary doctor.”
My regular doctor’s a pulmonary specialist, so I went to him. He gave me a breathing test. I’d just taken one back in August, but this one came back dramatically lower.
See, there’s a certain volume you push out when you breathe, which can be measured in liters. A person my size and weight should be pushing out 4.5 to 5 liters of air in an exhalation. Suddenly, I was pushing out a little over three, and I’m in shape. I decided to go for more tests.
I went to the fire department surgeon and they gave me a breathing test. The department usually gives you a full medical every six months to a year to make sure your heart’s okay, your lungs are clear. You get a blood workup, the works. This time, they found out I’d dropped around 40 to 45 percent of my breathing capacity since the last time I was tested. They said, “Let’s put you on some inhalers and see if that helps. Maybe you developed work-induced asthma from all the stuff down there.”<
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I was on the inhaler for a week but it wasn’t helping, so I went to see another specialist. He ticked off all the airborne particles that got into my body down at Ground Zero—wood, glass, metal, cement, and who knows what other chemicals combined in the dust. He said I hadn’t just inhaled it, it wasn’t just in my lungs and bronchial tubes. I’d ingested it. That crap was in my stomach, my bloodstream, and the nasal passages in my head. Plus, the combined effect of everything is keeping my tissues constantly inflamed and infected.
For the past four weeks, I’ve been on three types of inhalers and three different kinds of steroids. But nothing seems to be helping.
Some days are worse than others. I’m the type of person who enjoys getting four hours of sleep. Before the eleventh, four hours used to give me plenty of rest. Now? I can’t get enough sleep; I always feel tired. The doctors told me, “Since you’re not breathing enough air, you’re breathing in more frequently and it’s making you tired.” They also say it’s a form of depression, and I’m sure that’s part of it, but the physical fatigue is crippling sometimes.
Normally, I just buzz along. I like to food shop. I cook, I clean, I do things around the house. My wife labeled me “Mr. Mom,” but I do these things because I like doing them. They used to call me the Energizer Bunny. “When are you going to sleep, Sal? When are you going to stop?”
Now I get winded just pushing a shopping cart along.
From what I know, there’s 400 to 500 guys with breathing problems. I heard that number from the medical officers down at the Bureau of Health Services, and from other members of the fire department with similar problems. And there’s about four guys with lung damage so severe that it actually shows up on a chest X-ray—without even going for an MRI or a CAT scan, it’s showing up on a regular chest X-ray. That’s a very bad sign.
Researchers from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory recorded seismic signals consistent with those produced by small earthquakes when the planes hit the Trade Towers. They note, however, that these vibrations were not sufficient to collapse or significantly damage the buildings adjacent to the WTC. These structures more than likely sustained damage when they were struck by debris falling from the Towers or the massive blast of air pressure generated by the collapse.
There’s guys who went in for the blood workup and got it back with three or four different viruses showing up. Guys that had a scope stuck down their throat—the doctors saying there’s a bunch of crap down there that you can actually see with the camera, but they don’t know how to get it out yet. That’s why they’re treating us with the inhalers. Hopefully the bruising and inflammation on the bronchial tubes will soothe and the body will heal itself.
Yeah, I’m a little angry. But what am I gonna do? I’m happy I’m alive. The one guy who took my spot working that day, George Cain, is gone. I’d only known him a year, but I felt close to him. He was a really great guy. We were always around each other.
We lost a lot of guys, but I was close to George. Whenever I think of him, it hurts.
When I finally got to close my eyes that first night, I had my one and only dream about George. I was hanging out in the firehouse. George and I were on a fire truck, in the engine, just driving around and around.
Then, suddenly, we were at a car accident which another fire company was at. The car was on fire, and we went in to rescue a kid who was trapped inside. We got him out, too. That felt real good. We did all the EMS stuff on him, and then we put the fire out.
When I woke up, I started looking for George and everyone else—all the other guys—looked at me funny: “He’s not here,” they said. It was so painful. At that point, we knew he was missing. It was so unreal for the first two weeks to know that he’s not coming back.
George was a marathon runner, a rock climber, and an avid skier. He traveled all around the country. He was a health-food nut. I’m saying this guy was in phenomenal shape, and he lived for being a fireman. He loved the work so much, he’d put in for a transfer to a busier company up in Harlem because he loved going on calls, no matter how dangerous it was.
Most firefighters are like that. People ask us, “Aren’t you scared to go out on a call?” No. That’s what we’re waiting for. We love the job, and a call means we finally get to do something, whether it’s a car accident, someone’s stuck, or someone’s sick. It makes us feel useful. It’s a good feeling to help someone.
Why do we do what we do? That’s hard to say, unless you’re a fireman. People say, “Why do you run into a burning building?” It’s about helping the people in need, simple as that.
When I heard about the plane crashes, I knew that guys in my company would be on their way down there. These guys love what they do and they always do a great job. Always.
57 Here Sal is probably referring to 7 World Trade, a building which was part of the Trade Center complex that collapsed early in the evening of September 11 from damage sustained by the crumbling Towers. Thankfully, the building had been evacuated much earlier as people fled the initial attack, So no one was reported injured or killed when 7 World Trade came down.
58 During the first few days after the collapse of the Towers, rescue workers and volunteers formed lines going into the debris field. The man at the head of the line scooped debris into plastic buckets and passed the buckets back for dumping. Some of these lines reportedly ran as long as fifty people.
59 PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls, chemical liquids used as insulation in electrical equipment until they were banned in the 1970s for being highly toxic.
60 Climbing stairs in buildings while on call.
NICOLE BLACKMAN
Nicole Blackman, thirty-three, is a tiny, raven-haired woman with a striking voice. It can climb through multiple octave ranges of expression with startling ease and grace.
Like many hardcore Manhattanites, Nicole dropped everything when the Towers fell—her work, friends, home, and habit—to pull the city loose from the grip of tragedy. Her story is a love letter to volunteerism, the ethic that impressed the world with the tenacity of the Big Apple and its citizens in the days following 9/11.
I THINK IT was the day after. I was on the phone with a friend of mine, Sue, who lives down in TriBeCa. I called to check up on her because she’s one of the only people I know who lives in that area.
She said she was spending time at a volunteer center whose mission was to provide an information clearinghouse for downtown residents: what to do if your power was out, what to do if you couldn’t get back into your building, that sort of thing. Everything was changing so quickly that the community opted to organize on its own. It was the only way to guarantee self-preservation.
Sue said that several relief services had infiltrated the area and were setting up way stations to help the rescue workers coming down the West Side Highway. Volunteers were staffing up to hand out sandwiches, breath masks, and bottles of water.
I said, “Well, do they need anything?”
She said, “Last time I was there, they needed sandwiches. They have nothing to give these rescue workers, and they’re hungry.”
“Great.”
I immediately started emailing and calling friends. We got together at someone’s apartment and put together a big production line. There were five or six of us; someone had the bread, someone else had cheese, another person had turkey, and we started making sandwiches. We wrapped them all up and printed out labels so everyone knew what they were. And we didn’t use mayonnaise; we didn’t want them to go bad.
“… several relief services had infiltrated the area and were setting up way stations to help the rescue workers coming down the West Side Highway. Volunteers were staffing up to hand out sandwiches. breath masks, and bottles of water.”
We didn’t really know where to bring our cache, though. We tried bringing it down to St. Vincent’s hospital, but when we got there, they told us they weren’t accepting food donations. After all the effort we’d gone to, that was dishearteni
ng.
Finally, we started walking around downtown, hoping to give the sandwiches to anybody who seemed like they could use them. We found this restaurant called Fiddlesticks that had a sign out front talking about rescue efforts. We went inside and the employees said, “We’re storing food here for the hospitals because they don’t have room.”
Remember, it was the twelfth of September. Everyone still thought there’d be tons of survivors from the Towers, and we thought they would need supplies.
People throughout the city were trying to donate food, but nobody knew where to bring stuff. The people at Fiddlesticks saw this development and said, “Bring the food here and we’ll store it as long as we can.” They had this giant cold storage in their basement.
I began to wonder—who’s organizing all this? Who’s in charge? But there really wasn’t anyone. The rule at that point was: make it all up as you go along.
So we dropped our food at Fiddlesticks and I thought, fine. At least our sandwiches will go to someplace useful.”
After that, I started walking across town, heading toward the West Side Highway. I ran into a friend of mine who was sitting in an outdoor café, smiling and having a cigarette with his dog curled up at his feet.
He asked me what I was up to and I explained to him what I’d done with the sandwiches. He gave me this withering look and said, “Listen, girl. I’ve spent a lot of time in Paris. This kind of stuff happens all the time in the rest of the world. You can’t get yourself all crazy about it.”
Tower Stories Page 24