The forces that had wrenched and burned the steel were almost beyond comprehension. The air was filled with smoke that carried the unmistakable odor of burning human flesh, and everywhere I looked I could see piles of pulverized concrete and other debris. On the smoldering piles of rubble closer to the center, I saw a hellish whirlwind of smoke and ash swirling over mountains of concrete rubble, glass, and structural steel beams. The gigantic size of these buildings started to register in my imagination — even their collapsed remnants dwarfed the huge grappling cranes that had been brought in to help remove the debris, and the workers scrambling back and forth across this eerie landscape looked like tiny insects.
On the edge of sixteen acres of devastation, we, too, were dwarfed by the massive trucks of all shapes and sizes that rumbled past. Some were bringing in supplies and equipment to help with the recovery effort. Others were military troop transport vehicles filled with rescue workers. Tanker trucks came in loaded with fuel for the cranes and bulldozers — and, of course, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles carried men and women who were trying desperately to contain the fires still raging in the belly of this monster.
“Monster” was not too strong a word, I thought, watching the pile of debris belch fire. It almost seemed to be moving of its own accord as the wind whipped any flexible object back and forth while loose pieces of the buildings' skeletons lost their grip and crashed down, sounding like thunder when they landed. Whenever any person or object touched the ground, huge clouds of gray dust billowed up and seemed to stay suspended indefinitely, first rising, then blowing back and forth in response to the bizarre combination of air currents created by the fires, the wind, and the trucks whizzing by in all directions.
It was impossible to hear anything over the machinery, so the three of us communicated by hand signals. As my FBI “tour guide” signaled me to follow him, he also pointed downward, indicating that I should watch where I stepped. I looked down and saw that the ground was covered with a matrix several inches deep — coarse sand, glass, bits of electrical wires, and large sections of twisted steel. To my horror, I also saw bits of bone.
I shouldn't have been surprised. Bone fragments as well as body parts had flooded the morgue all morning long and, now that I had a better idea of the magnitude of the destruction, I knew in my heart that these fragments might be all that was left of many of the lives lost on that terrible morning. An overwhelming sadness entered my heart, and I had to fight hard to hold back tears. I was literally yanked back to attention when someone grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the way of a Humvee coming toward us in reverse at breakneck speed. The driver, in camouflage, a helmet, and goggles, barely glanced in our direction as he maneuvered his vehicle up onto the deserted sidewalk and continued on his way.
As we got closer to the site, I was struck by the intense, determined activity of the recovery workers. The devastation seemed huge — yet you could feel that the people here wouldn't rest until they'd cleaned it up. Huge cranes and other heavy construction equipment dug into the massive piles of material, while firefighters and Port Authority officers scanned the mass of twisted metal and concrete with a sharp eye out for any evidence of human remains. Whenever anyone spotted a body or body part, he or she would wave to equipment operators to halt immediately. Then one lone man or woman would move in, crawling over the mountain of debris to gently extract the remains and put them in a bag. If someone found a whole body or a large recognizable section of a body, he or she would store it in a conventional body bag — but very few of those were needed. (By the time I left my third tour of duty in January, the final count of whole bodies recovered from the site was slightly more than two hundred.) The remains were more likely to fit into two-by-two-foot red plastic bags or even small freezer-size plastic zipper-lock bags.
We continued to walk around the entire site, over to where Coast Guard boats were patrolling the river, past a makeshift memorial to the victims — one of hundreds that had sprung up all over the city — then past a parking garage still filled with cars that had been parked there on that fateful morning. By now, they were all coated in a thick layer of the sand-like debris that also covered the streets and sidewalks, as if some volcano had erupted and showered everything with ash. We stopped for a moment in a small church that seemed to have escaped damage even though it was frighteningly near the destruction's epicenter.
Firefighters and other rescue personnel were scattered across the rows of pews, some sitting quietly with their heads bowed, some on their knees in prayer, and others walking up and down the outer aisles gazing at the pictures and handmade posters taped to the walls — desperate messages from the victims' families and friends, pleading for information and hoping against hope that the person in the picture had somehow made it out alive. I couldn't look. I knew then and there that the only way I could do this job was to insulate myself from the names and faces there on the wall. In that instant, I surrounded myself with the invisible defensive cocoon that I had spun from experience and kept hidden in my soul for such times. I knew that now, more than ever, my private wall was the only thing that would make it possible for me to deal with this overwhelming human tragedy.
It had been years since I had prayed inside a church, but I stepped up to the altar, lightly placed my fingertips on the cross, and shut my eyes. When I finally looked up, I turned on my heels and headed for the door with a new sense of purpose. As I headed back to the morgue, I now understood that I had to do this job. Not for myself, not for DMORT — but for the victims and the people who loved them.
On the way back, my FBI guide explained to me the third leg of the recovery effort, one that I'd never actually see for myself but which was an integral part of the work I would do here. When human remains were spotted in a particular place at Ground Zero, he explained to me, they were recovered and sent uptown to the OCME disaster morgue. Then, workers excavated the rubble and debris from that same location and sent it over to the Fresh Kills landfill at Staten Island on barges. Trucks on Staten Island off-loaded this material and workers spread it out on the ground so they could examine it once again for any traces of human tissue. Indeed, some body parts were so small or so camouflaged by their coating of pulverized concrete that they slipped by the spotters at Ground Zero and were only separated from the rubble at the Staten Island facility.
Eventually, forensic experts from around the country worked around the clock for more than eight months on Staten Island, separating bone and flesh from more than sixty-one million tons of shattered metal and concrete. By the last few months of the effort, they had created a huge assembly-line operation with conveyor belts and commercial sifters. They'd also built a semi-permanent tent city that offered the workers some shelter from the weather, housed the cafeteria and a dining area, and served as space for office work and evidence processing.
As I returned to the morgue, I realized that my vision of the disaster had shifted. Before, I had been looking for an explanation of why the results of the towers' collapse were so horribly uneven — how a relatively intact body could lie side by side with a tiny bone fragment. But once I saw the magnitude of the destruction, I realized that there was no point in seeking such answers for the mechanisms of injury. We just had to accept things as they were and deal with the results.
And soon it would be my turn to deal with those results on my own. Today was Wednesday. On Thursday I'd be taking over the night shift triage station in the morgue. I had only tomorrow to get ready.