"We're in the way"
New York firefighters win a battle to search the World Trade Center site for their colleagues' remains, but the victory is largely symbolic.
By Noah Sudarsky
Nov. 20, 2001 | NEW YORK -- New York firefighters won a huge symbolic victory Friday, when they prevailed on Mayor Rudy Giuliani to let 75 of them, three times the number Giuliani wanted, continue to participate in cleaning up and identifying remains at the World Trade Center site. But the belated victory is probably little more than symbolic, and it's unlikely to change the nature of what the World Trade Center site has become: a massive construction job. It's probably hard for anyone who wasn't there in the early days to understand the intensity of the firefighters' fury at Giuliani's decision to limit their presence at the site, which led to fistfights and arrests Nov. 2, when firemen clashed with cops, sometimes violently. I went back to the World Trade Center site a week after that melee, for the first time in over a month, having been a search and rescue worker in the days after the attack. I saw a radically changed Ground Zero, and I could understand the firefighters' fury.
True, the work had progressed incredibly. Since New York City officials allowed cranes and excavators to replace bucket brigades and men with shovels, the massive mountain of wreckage where I once worked has disappeared entirely. In its place, there is a gaping, smoldering crater. Where rescue workers once scurried and crawled like so many work ants deftly delving for survivors, Caterpillar and Hitachi lifters with steel shears are plowing into the wreckage like a pack of hungry tyrannosaurs -- the mechanical jaws tearing indiscriminately into the remains of the WTC before lifting the rubble into dump trucks, along with whatever else is caught in their crushing embrace.
The violence with which these giant mechanical beasts plow through the wreckage is shocking to someone who did rescue and recovery work there. Like most firefighters, I still see Ground Zero as a massive killing field, and I cant help thinking that human remains in some form or another are being dumped unceremoniously into the trucks along with everything else.
"Its become a pick and dump operation," says an outraged Ron Werner, who was assigned to Ground Zero from FDNY headquarters in downtown Brooklyn. "There are torsos being found in Staten Island." Shaking his head when I start to ask more questions, the firefighter drove away in a six-wheel transporter. On Warren Street, near the AmeriCares tent that serves as on-site Transport Headquarters, I start a conversation with a firefighter who will identify himself only as Chuck about the changed nature of the operation. He has difficulty holding back a sneer: "Of course we dont have enough guys here." As for the site being a potential health hazard, he scoffs: "Thats bullshit, buddy. Theyre just blowing smoke so contractors can clear this up in a hurry and put up another building. Were in the way."
Although Giuliani and construction professionals at the site hail the progress, it is difficult for anyone who worked to find bodies at Ground Zero not to sympathize with the enraged firefighters, who believe that much of what's left of their dead brethren is being dumped by the excavators into rigs along with the mangled remains of the WTC -- only to be sifted through when the debris gets to the aptly named Fresh Kills landfill site in Staten Island. The FDNYs stubborn insistence on a return to the days of search and recovery is understandable. True, there is no one alive in the wreckage, but for firefighters that isnt the point. Initially, search and rescue workers might have been scouring every square foot of rubble to find survivors, but that illusion quickly wore off, and only the moral imperative of finding the dead remained.
At first, I had used adrenaline and a sense of urgency to burrow into the wreckage, to penetrate deep into the architecture of devastation, imagining that somewhere survivors were waiting desperately to hear a voice, to feel a hand, to be retrieved from their inconceivable nightmare. All I ever saw was pieces of what had once been human beings, and corpses battered and broken beyond recognition, their clothing shredded by the inconceivable violence of the fall.
Once I realized I wouldn't be working to liberate survivors, it was frankly hard for me to return. That wasnt true of the firemen I worked alongside of, who went back day after day for seven weeks, committed to finding the remains of the fallen and to bringing some dignity back to those who had suffered savage, unspeakable deaths.
Next page: A fireman named Gus risks his life searching for remains
