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. There, 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.
Within ten months of 9/11, science and detective work would identify 1,229 of those killed. In the years since,
