A season in Hell

Among the rescuers at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center collapse, where worlds and lives are ground to dust.

By Christopher Ketcham

Sep 19, 2001 | Body No. 1 shattered all illusions of finding survivors. He was a curly-haired guy with a paunch and puffed red lips, and he was sleeping on his stomach with his arms over his head, lying very naturally, except he had no buttocks or legs. The firefighters, 10 of them, pulled his head up by his hair to show his face, turned him over, a coroner flash-bulbed him, and no one said a word.

I was the only reporter there when they dug him up at 1:15 a.m. Wednesday morning, 15 hours after the towers fell. There was ash and asbestos in the air, and gray drifts of millions of sheaves of paper, and mud in paddies where the tangled hoses had burst or the water had streamed from the ruins. Firefighters lay in makeshift forward triage units set up in buildings named after the Dow Jones Company and American Express, old strange names, inappropriate now. Now this was Zone 1, Ground Zero, and in the fiery hours of the night of Tuesday, Sept. 11, I slipped past the National Guard perimeter with a Red Cross team, handing out water bottles in the smoke, holding flashlights while medics gave eyewashes to the blinded firefighters. I was stumbling, not knowing how to help, so the medics stuffed my pack with gauze and saline and water and masks, and I tried not to get lost in the unreality and the darkness.

At 10 a.m. that day, attack plus one hour, there was an exodus of ashen New Yorkers on the bridges to Brooklyn, girls in suit-pants and heels, and men half-naked in tennis shoes, an orderly flight all in all, but there was fear and awe and silence. I was riding in on a bicycle over the Brooklyn Bridge, against the wave, and cops were saying "Turn back, they might blow the bridge too" -- a false rumor, the day was full of them -- and F-15 fighter jets pulled long pounding low-altitude arcs over Manhattan. The fallen towers spread soot over the sun, which went out blood-orange and then shone in very blue sky, and the day turned hot. Flurries fell, the sun silvered the flakes: ash on every shoulder and every head, whole ash men; men with bloody eyes bandaged; wet towels over mouths; much thirst, and already the asbestos-filled air making throats hurt and skin heat up, and who knew if there wasn't something else in the air, anthrax, radioactivity.

When the towers burned in the moments after the collision and before they fell so impossibly and unthinkably, there were people jumping from 70 and 90 stories up, terrified of the fire, which burnt, the firemen say, at 6,000 degrees. A man and woman held hands and leapt. You could watch the heavy ants falling, and many children stood at the windows of schools nearby. Their teachers, too shocked, did not pull them away.

Trucks full of masked volunteers, a dozen ambulances howling, racing south, and in the plaza of the federal courts, scores of men and women frantically nailing plywood planks over long two-by-fours lined parallel 2 feet apart.

"They'll need a lot more stretchers than this," a dusty man said walking up. He tells me there are gangs stealing bicycles in Zone 1, busting open Fed Ex trucks, taking advantage of the chaos. Another man saw what was being built. "Oh, God!" he cried and put his hands to his head and leapt backwards.

Rumors of 20,000 dead.

At 7:45 p.m. Tuesday, all power gone from lower Manhattan, 20 blocks of darkness and men running, and the fires stirred winds through the canyons of the buildings, kicking up poisonous dust storms of glass and lime and concrete; 4 inches of ash on cars abandoned with doors open. We wore goggles and facemasks and everyone was in shadow, with flashlights, watching the ground, and the streets looked white as deserts; "the longest night," the firefighters had said, and we had no idea what they meant or how many they'd lost until the first ruins of the towers rose before us like bombed churches in mist, little red fires at its heart, and we could hear the cries for surgeons among the rubble, someone needed an amputation. And all around were burnt hulks of ambulances, cars, dump trucks, fire trucks -- crushed when the towers fell.

"Eyewashes! Eyewashes!" the medics cried out, fanning in teams of two, and the firemen thanked them. And then, into a wall of smoke and out, we entered the very bottom of Ground Zero, and for a moment the medics did not cry "Eyewashes!" This was Hiroshima in miniature: rubble and girders and twisted metal stretching into haze and dust, framed in Roman ruins of delicate charred lattice walls six and 10 stories high, white-pale in arc lights or disappearing in purple plumes -- and over the rubble of 200,000 tons of steel and 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 43,000 windows and 23,000 fluorescent light bulbs, the firemen trawling, stumbling, digging, blasting water, thousands of men among the sharpened steaming warped metal that flipped up underfoot, like bear-traps, tore at legs and popped into chests.

And you knew then that this dig would take weeks, and you'd mention this to a fireman sweating in ash, and he'd say, "Weeks? Fuckin' months. Fucking forever."

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