24 Hours at Ground Zero

October 14, 2001

Hundreds Toil at a Task Both Sacred and Hellish

It may now be the most talked about landscape in America - ground zero, where the World Trade

Center once stood. Once the home of gleaming towers that reached skyward, it is now a tortured

debris field, with massive steel girders cruelly twisted and tossed this way and that, amid tangles of wire,

steel rods, and pipes. Here, the fires that ignited almost five weeks ago still burn, But here also,

the grueling work of searching the rubble for some 5,000 victims of the Twin Towers attack continues

round-the-clock. Unless you are a volunteer, a crane operator, or a member of a search and rescue

team - on any given day 200 to 500 people labor there - few visit this spot for very long.

Beginning Thursday, one month after two hijacked jets crashed into the 110-story towers,

columnist Mike Kelly and senior photographer Carmine Galasso took in ground zero for 24 hours

straight, chronicling the emotional journey of the men and women who valiantly work to

account for all the missing.

As the harbor haze spars with a morning sun, some 200 men and women lock arms and look to the heavens.

It is 8:48 a.m., exactly 30 days to the minute since the first of two hijacked jets smashed into the World Trade Center. The only sounds are the ping of a hammer somewhere in a building and the measured cadence of a rabbi and a priest reciting the 23rd Psalm.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."

The men and women bow their heads for a half-minute, then turn and walk to their own valley of death amid the concrete canyons of lower Manhattan.

Ground zero.

There's an emotional poetry to this ashen landscape, where heartache is as much a constant companion as the smoke from fires that still burn. Among those who toil here, some call it a sacred place, some label it hellish - many see it as both. To understand what they mean, you cannot drop by for just a brief visit, the sort of walk-through that politicians and celebrities do.

Here, time evaporates, days melt. There is no darkness under the nighttime floodlights, little chance for silence amid the whir of electric generators and steely squeal of cranes.

Here, work counts. And the work is all about finding bodies.

"It's hallowed ground," says Port Authority police Sgt. John Gilburn. "You pray that you can find something so families can close this."

Shifts last 12 hours. But the excavation rolls on for 24, seven days a week, with no deadline - at least none that anyone wants to mention.

Those who come here insist they will keep up this pace until every grain of the million-ton pile of iron and concrete is examined for traces of more than 5,000 victims.

"Until we find them all," says a cop.

"Until we bring them home," adds a firefighter.

9:37 a.m.

Larry Mays, Port Authority cop and a man in mourning for 37 colleagues who perished in the towers' collapse, asks where God is.

Mornings are always a mix of expectancy, he says with a smile. What will the pile yield?

The day before, the rubble gave up the remains of a New York City firefighter - one of 348 lost here. Two days before that, workers dug out the body of Antonio Rodrigues - one of 37 Port Authority cops lost.

But such discoveries are rare. More often than not, rescue crews and families must settle for mere body parts, leading to a grim wish among those who labor amid the rubble.

"An intact corpse would make me happy," says Mays, 40, who lives in Waldwick. He winces at the harshness of his words.

Mays walks past the spot where the 110-story north tower once hovered over West Street. To his right, white smoke curls from a dark hole that drops 100 feet into a steely bed of wires, pipes, rods, and girders. To his left, a 30-foot, three-pronged girder sticks from the side of one of the World Financial Center's buildings like a pitchfork jammed into a barn wall.

The girder fell from the higher floors of the tower and jabbed into the granite skin of the sleek structure, about 150 feet up.

By the curb, sitting on a chair, New York City Firefighter Mike Miller stares at the ground littered with scraps of insulation and twisted wire. On a dirt mound sits an empty steel stretcher-like cage for carrying bodies. Nearby is a plastic bucket for sifting debris for body parts or personal items such as wallets or snapshots. A glove floats in the mud.

"I feel angry a lot," says Miller. "I can't believe it's been a month."

Mays listens, nods.

A former Bergen County sheriff's officer, Mays joined the Port Authority police eight years ago. He never really had much reason to doubt the Almighty, he says.

But then, the towers fell in a sun-blotting cloud on Sept. 11.

"My feelings about God were suffering at that point," he says. "Why would God allow this?"

Two weeks after the collapse, a crane lifted debris from a smaller trade center building that stood in the shadow of the north tower. A search crew entered and discovered three crosses in the charred wreckage, their inch-thick girders sheared off as if by design by larger beams that fell from the tower.

Construction workers pulled one of the crosses from the building and put it atop a concrete abutment.

"I thought maybe there is something more here," says Mays. "The devil might have gotten away with this one, but God is still here."

He points to a sign, spray-painted in orange on a fire-scarred door to the structure. "See what it says?"

"God's house."

The building is next on the list to be demolished.

10:30 a.m.

They search for the smallest of things - a woman's purse, a wedding ring, a wallet with baby pictures, a body part large enough for a DNA sample and identification.

Something for someone to keep or bury.

And yet, in this search for small blessings amid such destruction lies a fundamental sadness. Some pieces of this landscape survive, some do not.

But why? How do you explain why an electronic time-temperature sign remains intact in a building across from the trade center while windows there were smashed by falling debris?

A crew of Port Authority cops and Passaic County sheriff's officers trained in emergency rescues heads to the trade center's underground mall.

Down a stairwell, a clock at the Tourneau watch store is frozen at 9:58 a.m., a minute before the first tower fell. The store's windows are broken, its watches gone.

A steel girder pokes through a ceiling. Farther on, wires hang like strands of hair. A woman's purse sits on the floor. Receipts from a Coach store cover the floor.

Some of this world is strangely intact. A statue of Bugs Bunny still smiles from the Warner Bros. store, though Bugs is smothered in gray dust that gives everything the look of a fresh snowfall. A newsstand's Sept. 11 newspapers - also dust-covered - still await customers, along with displays of vitamins, magazines, and candy.

But nearby sit the signs of calamity - an overturned baby stroller, an office chair with no office, a brown teddy bear tossed carelessly, a crumpled red coat, keys, and a watch left on a shelf under a cash register.

"Smell the perfume?" asks Sheriff's Officer Don Cavallo.

The crew steps under a curtain of steel wires and into sunlight again.

What was once the ceiling is now the floor they walk on. And when the ceiling fell, it smashed a perfume store - and its dozens of scents.

A body-sniffing German shepherd named Loki whimpers. Too many smells at once. Nearby, an ironworker cuts a 4-foot-wide steel beam with an acetylene torch, its orange sparks floating like a meteor shower. A few feet away, another 4-foot-wide beam stands upright after plunging downward from above.

"We don't know how far it went down," says Cavallo.

Port Authority Police Officer Richard DePietro, who grew up in Fort Lee but now lives in Point Pleasant, gazes down into a 100-foot cavern where clouds of smoke float upward.

Behind him, sheriff's Sgt. Jim Hearney gazes a few seconds at a coat on the ground. "You find all sorts of odd things, and you try to think of why they are there," he says. "I found a briefcase with a ham sandwich inside. Did the person just drop it and run? Did he get away?"

The landscape does not give up answers easily.

The crew heads back inside, down a hallway, through a door, down a set of stairs - and another and another.

Four levels below, in total darkness, dust floats in beams cast by crew members' flashlights as they enter a delivery area.

Cavallo swings his flashlight to the right. A green van sits there, unscathed by the violence above, but for a window smashed by rescuers looking for victims in the immediate aftermath of the collapse. Hearney and another crew member, Lt. Anthony Manzo, point flashlights to the left - a white delivery truck. Next to the truck stands a stepladder.

Such discoveries underscore the sad irony at the core of the trade center tragedy and survival.

"We found another cavern with a car that wasn't scratched," said Port Authority Officer Michael Kuligoski. "Three feet away, we found a man crushed beneath a ceiling. Had he made it a few more feet, he would have been safe."

12:30 p.m.

Supplies for the workers seem to sit everywhere, a testament to someone's generosity. And if it's not here, a volunteer can usually fetch it.

All manner of crackers and energy bars cover a table. Cases of soda and water sit nearby, along with bags of mint candies, boxes of gloves, socks, and T-shirts.

A Pennsylvania boot company donated 1,000 pairs of heavy-duty footwear. Chilly Willy's and Cool Carl's, an ice-making company from Westchester County, N.Y., delivers up to 30 bags of ice each day - no charge. A tractor company gave dozens of all-terrain getabouts.

Hot meals are vital.

Local restaurants contribute dinners. But that's hardly enough. A Salvation Army tractor-trailer from Florida, outfitted with a kitchen, can cook 9,000 meals a day.

With so much dust and so many parched throats, water is perhaps the most popular drink, with coffee a close second at night.

Mike Simpson, 40, a Salvation Army worker from Yuma, Ariz., says he goes through eighteen 39-ounce cans of coffee a day. "And that doesn't include all the tea and hot chocolate," he says.

Besides the Salvation Army and the Red Cross - and their loyal cast of supporters - the trade center excavation has become a magnet for a whole new legion of volunteers and others offering help.

Tom McHale may be one of the most unusual.

By day, he works in Newark as a Port Authority police detective assigned to the Joint Terrorist Task Force - one of the groups currently running down leads in New Jersey about followers of Osama bin Laden.

After work, he exchanges his sport coat and tie for jeans and a hard hat and reverts to an old skill - one acquired before he became a police officer, husband, and father of four daughters.

"I may be the only cop who is also an ironworker," says McHale.

With the laser-beam gaze of an intense baseball pitcher, McHale, 40, concedes that he feels pulled in many directions.

"I'm torn between both places," he said of the task force in Newark and the trade center site in lower Manhattan. "I'm needed on the investigation. But I left guys here. I ran and left guys here."

The chain of events on Sept. 11 hardly portrays him as a coward. A Port Authority detective, he happened to be near the trade center, working on a two-decade-old investigation of the radical Black Liberation Army with New York City investigators.

When he heard that the first plane had struck the trade center, he sped there. After guiding workers to safety, he was ready to join a team of cops that went into the underground mall - near the Warner Bros. store and its Bugs Bunny statue, not far from a Borders bookstore where a poster by the door announces that former General Electric CEO Jack Welch will be there Sept. 11 to sign copies of his new book.

But his pager went off. It was his 19-year-old daughter calling. She was worried.

McHale stayed upstairs to call her back, while the other cops went down - and the first of the two towers fell.

"And then I ran," he says.

Not far, however. McHale helped set up a temporary morgue a block away, and then stayed to rescue cops, firefighters, and others from the debris after fires died down. His closest colleagues on the team that went into the underground mall all escaped.

"But one guy," says McHale, "is missing."

He concedes he didn't know the officer well. He pushes his hard hat back on his head.

Then he starts to cry.

4:22 p.m.

Emotions here come with all sorts of stories.

Andrew Infante, a Port Authority construction supervisor from Piscataway, sits in a tent down the block from ground zero and wipes away tears.

Of all the Port Authority officials here, he is one of the most crucial. He supplies tools to construction crews building temporary offices for Port Authority officials - from cops to engineers - left without work space when the trade center collapsed.

But Infante, 52, carries another burden. His 47-year-old brother, Anthony, a Port Authority police inspector from Chatham, rushed to the towers to help workers escape and never came out.

"He was the guy I played golf with," Andrew says. "I went to Yankee games with him."

He looks out the tent flap toward the smoking debris.

"There are 5,000 souls in there," he says. "What is really heart-wrenching for me is that no one was found alive after the second day. Five thousand people and not one family got good news. It just pulls me apart."

To channel his grief, Andrew helped build a 30-by-20-foot stage overlooking the site for families to come and meditate.

"It was," he says, "my labor of love."

Down a gentle slope from the stage, Officer Doris Caridi, a 21-year Port Authority police veteran, kneels down and rakes the debris with a gardener's hand cultivator. Around her are three dozen cops, firefighters, and others.

Caridi is one of the few policewomen trained in the specialized skills of emergency rescues. But she digs each day in the debris pile now, wearing a respirator to ward off potentially harmful fumes. She rises at 3 a.m. to get here by 6 a.m. from her home in Suffolk County.

"It's sacred ground," she says. "The dust on your uniform is sacred. This is an obligation. This is a duty."

She stands on the side, as 11 cranes lift ragged piles of pipe, girders, and wire. Fifteen minutes pass and the cranes pause - and Caridi and other rakers rush in.

Whole bodies are rare here. Mostly, she looks for pieces, or for personal items such as purses or wallets. The other day, she found a pink teddy bear.

So far today, she is coming up empty-handed.

Then, she notices a flat piece of gray material the size of a dinner plate - possibly a piece of a plane fuselage. She passes it to another police officer.

Nearby, workers find small bones.

But that's all. "We're hardly finding anything," says New York fire Lt. Jackie Sullivan, as he places the body parts in red plastic evidence bags for DNA sampling. "But if we can find something that brings a family a little closure, that's worth it."

Doris Caridi stares at the pile. The wind shifts and a telltale sweet-and-sour smell wafts by.

"You're looking at a giant grave," she says, pausing.

"Yep. It's frustrating. I just want to get all these people in there home."

11:20 p.m.

Denise Behrens spends the evening taking in soles - of boots.

With so much dust, some of it suspected to contain asbestos, site managers insist that everyone pass through "boot washers" when they leave.

On this night, Behrens, 28, a marketing and event planner by day for Reuters News Service, volunteers to squirt a hose at the bottoms of hundreds of boots.

"When the towers went down, I had to do something," she says. "I've never been more proud to be an American or a New Yorker. Despite everything that happened, it made us stronger."

2:20 a.m.

Joe Libretti got to bring his brother home.

Libretti works on a crew that runs a 200-foot crane. When his crane was brought to the trade center rubble, he could have sought work elsewhere - for good reason.

Libretti's brother, Danny, a firefighter, was missing in the pile.

A few days ago, Dan, 43, was pulled from the rubble, only 200 feet from Joe's crane.

After making sure that his brother was taken care of, Joe, 44, went back to work.

"As an ironworker," he says, "I've seen a lot. But I've never seen what I see here. But you know something? You are happy to find something for someone. You know somebody will have some peace."

Port Authority police Sgt. Frank Giaramita puts it another way: "The dead have become the living. If you find anything, it's like you find a live body."

So far, fewer than 10 percent of those lost in the trade center attack have been found and identified.

Dan Libretti's funeral is scheduled for this week, and Joe's friends tell him he shouldn't feel obligated to come to work afterward.

Joe refuses.

"I started it," he says. "And just because I found my brother doesn't mean I should walk away."

Joe still keeps a cigar attached to his hard hat - for his brother to smoke.

You could also say Willie Quinlan refused to walk away.

Willie, 54, helped build the Twin Towers in the early 1970s. Now, he works with Joe Libretti in removing the debris.

"It's such a disaster," he says.

Quinlan stands on a muddy patch of ground where debris has been scooped up. Above him, bathed in white floodlights, a seven-story section of the outer skin of one of the towers reaches into the darkness, like a cathedral without a roof. Higher still, a crescent moon rises.

"I can't explain how I feel about it," he says. "It took so long to build it, so little time to bring down."

3:10 a.m.

Just off West Street, three Port Authority cops sip coffee at a kitchen set up by the New Jersey State PBA and manned on this night by Plainsboro police officers.

The air smells of hot dogs - from a gas grill that burns all night. Someone mentions that the Yankees lost to the A's. The cops nod, sleepily.

Then a radio pops to life - FBI agents are being summoned. Workers picking up debris think they have found a "black box" - the cockpit voice or flight data recorder from one of the hijacked planes.

FBI agents check. No black box this night. Just debris.

4:35 a.m.

Jeff Noel, 40, a Salvation Army worker from Ontario, Canada, had never visited New York City, much less seen the World Trade Center towers. But he came to work in a kitchen anyway.

Inside a tent, volunteers set out trays of scrambled eggs and hash browns on a table. Outside, Noel places a plastic liner in a trash can.

Trucks roll by, carrying tangles of steel and other debris, and Noel thinks of the spirit he sees in the eyes of the cops, firefighters, and others who come each day for a bite to eat.

"You've got the worst of the worst head-to-head with the best of the best," says Noel. "And the worst is losing."

He remembers the previous morning, and the silent gathering of workers, the locking of arms, and the reading of the 23rd Psalm with such lines as "the Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want."

"Awesome," he says.

6:49 a.m.

Two dozen Port Authority cops gather for morning muster in a new home - a prefabricated building on a basketball court a block from the debris pile.

A sergeant quickly reads assignments for each man, sending some to a nearby command post, some to a temporary morgue, others to checkpoints on nearby corners.

Then Lt. Michael Brogan asks to speak.

He reminds the cops that a month has passed since the towers fell.

"We're at war," he says. "Like it or not, we're at war. We're bombing the Afghans, and they don't like it. One of the first casualties were our brothers and sisters."

Outside, beyond a fence and a line of trucks waiting to haul away debris, white smoke rises.

The pile still burns.