Unnatural Disaster (cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> Unnatural Disaster (cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine

Page:

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

The Doctor
After midnight on day eight, I found Dr. Bill Trolan in the base area of California Task Force 3. Trolan's team had just finished an 18-hour shift. As a trickle of teammates came to him for sleeping pills, Trolan sat, slightly stunned, and puzzled at the way a love of sports, the outdoors, and medicine had combined to bring him here.

A mountaineer and skier with a wiry, powerful build, Trolan, 45, had helped organize the first Eco-Challenge races and had competed in the Raid Gauloises three times. In the field during adventure races, working with limited time and whatever was at hand, he'd learned to improvise. On the Pile, climbing harnesses were routine, with slippery steel, granulated concrete, and loose wires standing in for ice, mud, and shale. Trolan seemed to take comfort in the way the familiar rules of the wilderness applied. "Three points of contact at all times," he told me. "Slow is fast, like in climbing. In the holes, it's like caving. You have to look in four directions: above you, to the sides, and behind. You have to look back to learn your way out."

Trolan lost a companion on Aconcagua once, a case of pulmonary edema, and he's nearly lost his own life in the mountains. He called these "accepted risks" that prepared him for disaster work. I made the mistake of asking him what he saw in the holes. He started to answer, then fell into the same repetition I was hearing whenever the conversation turned to what could not be said.

"Put down your pen, put down your pen," he said. I did, and he told me some of the things he'd had to do in the last day. "I thought I was prepared," he said. Minutes later, telling an unrelated story, Trolan began crying quietly.

Crawling Out
It was 2 a.m., the start of day nine, when I left Trolan and walked home. California Task Force 3 was due back on the Pile in five hours. Down at the tip of Manhattan, you could see the ghastly white cloud, still churning up from the smoldering wreckage after more than a week, glowing from the arc lights of the night shift.

I thought of that first caver, one of many who had come and gone, doing what he could. As he was getting ready to leave, he'd said, "I'm going to drive out the highway until I get to some piece of rural America, and the first patch of green I see, I'm going to pitch my tent and sleep for days." Then he walked back to his Land Cruiser, took down the orange emergency cave rescue flag, and went home.

Page: