I wrote the following days after 9/11 and shared it with a few friends and family by email. At the time, I was working at Bellevue Hospital in clinical trial research but because of my counseling background, I volunteered in the hospital's outreach efforts during 9/11. I did a little editing and inserted photos that captured what Ground Zero looked like when I was there.
I was on a crisis counseling team of four from Bellevue Hospital and had waited seven hours to be notified where we would be going--NYU Downtown Hospital, located near the Brooklyn Bridge in lower Manhattan. Due to its location, this hospital was one of the first ones to treat people who had been injured. We were driven there by police van. All of lower Manhattan below 14th street had been blocked off. Around the area of the hospital , only a few dump trucks, Con Edison workers and a few National Guardsmen could be seen.
Inside the small hospital, we were greeted by an administrator. She said she could use counseling herself and spoke how no one had provided any support services since Tuesday (9/11). They didn’t have a psychiatric department and she told us how relieved she was to see us. Behind her desk, the administrator said that staff had not had time to process what was happening in any formalized way. She also said they still had no water and electricity was now powered by a generator and this was the first day they had phone lines. Like the other staff we would meet, she had a good sense of humor about what she had been through already. It was nearing five-thirty in the afternoon and most of the day staff had left.
Another administrator brought us upstairs by elevator to the maternity/child care ward. She told us the residents probably needed counseling but they had already left for the weekend. Only two were there and they shook their heads when we offered our counseling services. Even the nursing staff said they "had it together". The most we could do was offer our 24-hour crisis hotline number. Since part of this hospital’s catchment area was Chinatown, 70% of the patients on this ward did not speak English. Some were in labor as we spoke.
Next, we went to the Intensive Care Unit. Each room had glass walls and a white curtain in front. The Unit Chief of the ICU told us about one patient who had part of her buttocks taken off and had skin grafts that were not successful yet. She was engaged to be married but had lost her engagement ring on the way to the hospital. We saw her fiancé standing at her bedside, holding her hand and speaking softly to her while her arms, stuck with tubes, were flailing around. She had thick, bushy black hair and black-rimmed glasses. The doctor said a camera crew from Dateline had interviewed her this morning. My team leader, a psychiatry resident, approached this patient. I went up to the fiancé and asked if he wanted to talk. He said he didn’t want to right now.
A nurse, sitting at a desk in front of a darkened room with the curtains drawn, said the man in the room was available. I looked in. In a chair next to a made-up bed, a man in his mid-forties sat with his eyes closed. Another nurse walked into this room and started talking to him. He opened his eyes and replied back to her. I waited for this nurse to finish with him and then walked in to introduce myself.
He smiled and seemed to welcome me. He already had been interviewed by 20/20 and Good Morning America in the morning. On a small monitor screen that hung in the opposite corner behind him were his vital signs in numbers and jaggedy lines. On his bed was a copy of the day’s Times. Tubes were lodged into his forearm and hand. He wore a couple of hospital gowns. A gauze pad looked like it had been scotch-taped to his head. More gauze pads were on his bare, left shoulder and dark, specks of blood were on his nose, arm and torso. A couple times during our conversation he would press a button at the end of a tube that gave him a small dose of morphine.
His name was Ed. He’s from Connecticut and has a wife and two boys, aged six and ten. He’s a broker at AON Insurance and worked on the 102nd floor of Tower 2. Each day he would drive his little BMW to work. He had been working at the World Trade Center since 1994, within a year from the time of the World Trade Center bombing. His company had 1500 employees working there.
On Tuesday morning he heard an explosion and felt the Tower shake. He was told to evacuate the building by stairs even though it was Tower One that was affected. It seemed like a routine drill. He didn’t know the explosion was a plane. People took their time down the stairs, talking to one another. By the time he reached the 78th floor, evacuating had become optional. Some people took the elevator back upstairs and returned back to work.
Then the second plane came, doing the most damage from the 93rd to the 87th floor. Even though Ed was on the 78th floor, he was knocked down. Upon getting up he realized he couldn’t move his right arm. Shrapnel had penetrated his stomach and he was bleeding. The woman he had been talking to just before the second plane now lay on her back. He asked her if she was okay. She had a blank look on her face and didn’t say anything.
He found the stairs and hurried down until he reached the thirty-fourth floor where he could take an elevator down to the ground floor. Before getting into the elevator, he told firemen and police officers there were still people upstairs who needed help. As he said this, his voice went to a whisper.
Then he told me he was triaged outside immediately and taken to this hospital where he arrived at 9:30 that morning. He said he couldn’t believe the Twin Towers were gone and wanted to see an aerial view of what it looked like now.
I gave him the crisis hotline number and found my team on the other side of the hallway, talking with the Unit Chief. Her husband was there too. He was an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor at Bellevue.
The Unit Chief talked about what it’s been like to walk around the area of “ground zero” and described the kinds of volunteer workers she’s encountered and how the more confident you act in pretending you know what you’re doing, the less likely you’ll be questioned by anyone.
Then she asked us, “Do you want to check it out?”
We walked outside with face masks and plastic eye shields, light blue “booties” over our shoes and surgical gloves in our pockets. The unit chief, her husband and two nurses walked us up Williams Street, where police officers checked our ID cards. Then we headed to Fulton Street followed by Church Street.
Like midtown, I usually hate this part of Manhattan because it’s so noisy, impersonal, and has Way too many people. But now the streets and stores were deserted except for the Con Ed workers and the occasional squad car. I couldn’t get my breathing right with the face mask. My glasses kept fogging up behind the plastic shield and I could barely see unless I tried aiming my breath down to my neck.
The air was cold in my short-sleeved shirt. We had left our belongings in an office in the hospital and hadn’t thought of getting our jackets. Our booties collected the gray, muddy soot from the streets. The dust on the streets and sidewalks had mostly disappeared thanks to the rain, even the buildings looked like they had been, well, dusted.
We walked around a bend in the road and headed to Church Street. I recognized the Borders store on the ground floor of World Trade Center 5. I had bought my Dad a Borders gift certificate when this was their only store in Manhattan. What had been shining silver was now black and dark brown, like a blackened restaurant grill.
The other short, wide building, WTC 4, was just as charcoaled. To the left of it was, what looked like, the shell of Tower One. Long pieces of steel, three stories high, bent outwards like flower petals. A crane had attached itself to one of the pieces and I could see a worker cutting into the steel. Bright orange sparks fell.
Workers were everywhere, walking in groups of threes and fours, wearing hard hats, face masks dangling around their necks, eyeing us as we stood there. One dump truck after another drove in reverse down a road to the right of WTC 5. At the end of this road, where other dump trucks were parked, was what once had been Building #7. Now it lay in a heap as if a giant child had smashed it into a pile of rubble three stories high with girders sticking out of the pile like legs. The sun began to sink behind the worksite, giving it an eery glow. This was more than just surreal. This was apocalyptic.
We reached the vicinity of ground zero near seven. I later learned a three-hour break had started for the workers. Flood lights were being placed into position, tested and soon brightened what remained standing and the rubble. Behind National Armed Guards who stood in fatigues and helmets, firemen were bending quickly, moving together. It was hard to see behind the buildings. The Unit Chief from NYU Downtown pointed out where each of the buildings had been. Behind the two smaller buildings lay the remains of Tower 2 which I couldn’t see. White smoke rose from somewhere in the area.
Our hospital escorts left us. We synchronized our watches and agreed to meet at the corner of Church and Fulton at 7:30. I walked around, watching the workers relax on the sidewalk. I singled out a few and asked them how they were doing after introducing myself. “Good,” each one said to me. “Thanks for asking.” Not one person I spoke to had much to say to me--firemen, police officers, National Guard, Red Cross, Con Ed, construction workers. All of them were polite. Many had been working all day. Since this was three days after the event, there was a different emotional tone around me. They were more focused on getting the job done than reflecting.
I met a few who were just starting their work shifts. One complained there shouldn’t be a three-hour break, considering there could still be people alive. Another thought the work being done on Tower One’s long, steel petals was too risky. Some men were holding video camcorders up in the air to capture the sunset behind the destruction. Another argued everything was going too slow. Others shrugged their shoulders for seeing a couple bodies in the rubble earlier in the day.
Time went fast and darkness appeared while I walked in those “booties” over my shoes and adjusted my face mask. At one sidewalk, cases of Poland Spring water were stacked on top of one another like at Costco. Large aluminum foil containers offered rows and rows of sandwiches, hot dogs, and hamburgers. One tented area provided heated foil containers of pasta, lasagna, meat sauce, nearly anything you wanted. The person overlooking this tent had brought all this food with him from Chicago and had just arrived in New York last night. At least five times Red Cross workers tugging milk crates full of clothes offered me a sweatshirt. Volunteer workers by the food kept offering me something to eat. I couldn’t.
Across the street from the destruction, a few windows had been broken and a tint of dust covered the Century 21 building. Next to it, the Millennium Hilton hotel looked more like what the area had looked like after the Towers had collapsed. Under its front awning, the dust and soot resembled those tv depictions of a deserted building in a ghost town. Out of one broken window in the hotel, a set of curtains dangled in the air.
It was now 7:30 and we left for the hospital. We gave a fireman a ride back into midtown where he could catch the PATH to New Jersey. The farther we walked from the area, the darker the streets and sidewalks became. Fewer people passed us in work boots and ID badges around their necks. I barely made out the Strand bookstore’s red flag hanging from the top of its entrance farther down the street. A week ago I had walked down this crowded street to the Strand in search of a book.
At the hospital, we found our belongings somehow and called for the van. Within half an hour we were in busy, bright midtown. I was dropped off at a subway station and waited for a downtown Q train to Brooklyn. People stood with me on the subway platform, some with American flags sticking out of their backpacks while others draped the flag around their shoulders like a towel. During the train ride over the Manhattan bridge, I watched the lights from the brightened smoke of Ground Zero rise above the silouhette of darkened buildings where the Twin Towers used to be.
