Unnatural Disaster (cont.)

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After 9/11: The Rescue
Unnatural Disaster (cont.)

The Caver
Those who came first were often the most affected, staggering away from the open wound in the city after exhausting themselves in a frenzy of digging. On day six, I met a man wobbling up the West Side Highway. He was glad to talk, though too spooked by his FEMA bosses to give his name. He had been sleeping in a rusting Land Cruiser parked nearby in the rubble; it was covered with caving stickers and an orange flag draped across the windshield that read emergency cave rescue. He'd aided the rescue efforts after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the San Francisco earthquake in 1989, so he didn't wait for an invitation. He raced up from Alabama in a straight shot, arriving on day three. He'd spent one long night crawling through the wreckage, hoping that his skills from a very different underworld would save someone's life here at the mouth of hell. But he'd found nothing. "It's indescribable," he said. "There's body parts everywhere. It's much worse than Oklahoma City. The San Francisco quake was a joke compared to this."

The caver tried, several times, to talk about the many shapes of death. His eyes were glazed. He waved his hands in front of his face. "It isn't like anything," he said. "It isn't like anything."

One rescuer compared the physical demands of the Pile to the 20-hour day he spent climbing McKinley.

Shift Work
When the planes hit, Peter Welles was at a construction site in Secaucus, New Jersey, talking to his wife on the phone. A qualified rescue caver and wilderness EMT, Welles grabbed his ropes and vertical gear and rode an evacuation ferry into the disaster zone. By nightfall he was scouting for a K-9 team, clambering into confined spaces, and rappelling into a cracked-open manhole.

Following what turned out to be a false report, Welles led members of FDNY Engine Company 39 down the escalators as far as level five, searching for a woman trapped near a restaurant deep inside the PATH train concourse buried beneath the Pile. They stopped when they encountered a "gaping hole" that dropped 60 feet down to the tracks. He went back up for more rope and then showed a newly arrived FEMA team from Maine the way into the station, but as they were planning their descent, more debris in the area collapsed. "We all hightailed out of there," he said.

Welles spent the rest of Wednesday and part of Thursday digging body parts out of the rubble and helped uncover the corpse of a fire chief. Eventually he took the ferry back across to Jersey, went home, and passed out. "I had a lot of training," he told me later, "and it was very depressing that we didn't help save anybody."

After the first ad-hoc days, many who tried to volunteer were turned away. There were just too many people to manage effectively. FEMA moved in, its task forces of firefighters and civil engineers, communications and hazardous-materials specialists, doctors and heavy-equipment operators, rope riggers and rappelling experts working in 12-hour shifts. The task forces set up shop in the Javitz Center, which was filled with forklifts and laptops, smelled of wood pallets and bad spaghetti, and gleamed with reflective yellow backpacks, blood-red cargo containers, and neon green medical coolers. So many dog teams were called in (350 in all) that Charley Shimanski, an official at the Mountain Rescue Association who helped coordinate relief from Golden, Colorado, joked that "the representation of the wilderness community was probably greater in the four-legged variety than the two-legged variety."

Still, wilderness people brought a wealth of survival intelligence. Dave Lesh, the assistant strike-team leader for Riverside-based California Task Force 6, a FEMA urban search-and-rescue crew, is a fire captain and an avid mountaineer. He compared the exhaustion of working the Pile and then sleeping only two hours a night to the 20-hour day he spent summiting Mount McKinley. "What applies is the stress, especially at altitude," Lesh said. "The person who can deal with [mountaineering] can deal with an emergency." Similarly, Carl Levon Kustin, the squad manager for Menlo Park-based California Task Force 3, told me that backpacking in the Sierra from the age of 15 had taught him the humility needed to confront the unimaginable. "You realize you are not in charge out there," Kustin said. "In a way, I'm outside here. I'm outside in a very different, urban environment. But it draws on you to use every bit of experience and know-how, to look at this and use your imagination to deal with something you've never seen before."

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