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After 9/11: The Rescue
Unnatural Disaster
Hundreds of wilderness experts rushed to Ground Zero—and found a maddening, hellish new frontier.

By Patrick Symmes


	Left to right: physican Bill Trolan, caver Carl Levon Kustin, and wildland firefighter Bob Tooker after an exhausting shift

At the corner of Nassau and John Streets, five blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, the usual look is pinstripes or pearls, not tan canvas shirts, evergreen pants, and lug soles with aggressive treads. But there was Phil Musgrove, a Forest Service deputy logistics chief from Pendleton, Oregon, gazing up at the remaining towers of the lower Manhattan skyline.

"Never in my entire life," Musgrove said, "did I think I'd be standing in New York City in a Forest Service uniform."

Like a lot of people who earn their living protecting man from nature—wildfire experts, search-and-rescue specialists, cave "extraction" pros, and dog-team handlers—Musgrove, 49, was making his first visit to New York under the desperate circumstances following the terrorist attacks of September 11. The blond, 30-year firefighting veteran normally spends his time marshaling supplies, equipment, and crews to combat sprawling blazes out West. But two days after the World Trade Center towers collapsed, he found himself in a Sheraton hotel in New Jersey. There, along with 50 other Forest Service personnel, he was put to work orchestrating the flow of food, water, tools, and people into the massive search operation at Ground Zero. Now, on the seventh day after the attack, Musgrove stared at the silent and empty buildings of a war zone. "It's unbelievable," he said. "Unbelievable."

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A sense of disorientation and disbelief was quite normal among those who confronted this scene. From the very first minutes of the catastrophe through the slow denouement over the following weeks, many of the best-trained search-and-rescue workers from across the nation were thrown into a brutal maelstrom for which their experience was scant preparation. The scale of the catastrophe blurred the distinctions between what is urban and what is wild. Parts of New York became wilderness, not metaphorically, but literally. Stripped of power, water, and light, with its bridges, subways, and tunnels closed off, Manhattan in those first days held "frozen zones" as dark as any forest, as dry as any desert, and, with skies and avenues empty, as quiet as any outback. Only the natural acts of fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes could be used for feeble comparison. Time and again, the vocabulary of the outdoors was unleashed in jarring ways—like when a Colorado fireman compared the scene to an avalanche "because we're not finding anybody alive under there."

By early October, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had put 20 emergency response teams totalling 1,240 people on the case. That was in addition to the thousands of New York City fire department, police department, health department, and EMS personnel working the area daily; the cadres of New York State National Guard members, Forest Service workers, and FBI agents who joined FEMA in setting up a tent city and staging area in the Jacob Javitz Convention Center; and the thousands of volunteers and local emergency teams who answered the call. At its height, the number of workers and support staff surpassed 7,000.

In the face of the unimaginable, these people—among them wilderness firefighters from Texas and mountaineering doctors from California, K-9 cops from Kalamazoo and a crew of Zuni smoke jumpers from New Mexico, as well as amateur cave rescuers who drove by themselves from all across America—focused their skills on the vast heap of wires, cement, steel, and detritus so unfathomable they labeled it simply the Pile. They witnessed scenes that were impossible to describe, and though they made many selfless efforts, they gradually had to realize that search was not, in the end, going to lead to rescue.

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