I was at Ground Zero a month after it happened, in the Red Zone, as a guest of the Dept. Police Commissioner. When I stepped in the unmarked police van, we drove to the site. There were multiple security "circles" around the Red Zone. At the outermost circle, there were hundreds, probably thousands of people waving at us - holding signs of "thank you" for the police, fire fighters and rescue workers. Wow. Breath-taking. I wasn't a cop, but it was touching sensation.
They drove us through the security circles and when we reached the pile, the driver asked us to leave our cameras in the van. I stepped out of the van, took a breath, and nearly threw-up. In one breath, I had the "taste" of the towers, ash, soot, and who knows whatever else in my mouth. They gave me a dust mask, which I ended up keeping - although they were supposed to be returned.
It was still on fire. I was asked by the Dept. Police Commissioner to assess the technical requirements of an emergency response scene; however, it's fair to say I didn't get much done while walking around the pile. I was told that the buildings crashed with such force, up to 1/3 of each building impacted underground and were so compressed, i-beams were white hot --- even a month after the collapse.
The pile was still smoking heavily, and the ground crew had just setup a cross out of two i-beams from the rubble. I started calling people on my cell phone to share what I was looking at-- as if I was a commentator. Friends, family, about 5 mins for each person... I was calling whoever came to mind, trying to describe the surroundings.
I remember walking around the pile, looking around me. The area reminded me of an atrium--- just a wide open space in a jungle of skyscrapers--- in disbelief how two planes could do so much damage.
I was standing near the pile of the south tower when I came across a fire fighter.... a huge fellow....hunched over in a ball. Thinking he was hurt while moving something, I walked up to him asking if I could help him and he didn't respond. When I got closer, he was crying uncontrollably. I've never seen an ogre of a man cry like this. While moving rubble, he had moved a sheet of metal and found the remains of a woman, apparently looking like she was thrown into a person-sized blender.
I walked around the site for an hour, taking notes, looking around. A vivid memory of mine was an adjacent building looked as though it was cut in half with a knife. It almost reminded me of a sand castle you would build as a kid that was too close to the ocean. When the wave hits, half of it would disappear. The building was perfectly cut in half...perfectly. One half of the building was fine, the other half had offices with keyboards hanging off the edge, where a desk once stood.
My original purpose for being in NYC that day was to meet with the city during the height of the anthrax crisis. At the time, they weren't sure how to handle the anthrax scenes. The HAZMAT teams all perished in the WTC, and they didn't know whether to make the info public or not. They thought since my company helped the Navy with a live distance learning project, we could connect the Mayo Clinic with training officers called the NYC InTac Team to do an "Anthrax 101" course and secure the areas.
There I was on the top floor of the Police Academy building in Manhattan, with everyone there but Guilliani listening to everyone panic. I thought anthrax was a shitty rock band from the 80's. I had no clue what I was witnessing at the time.
Ultimately, FEMA came in and secured everything up - which was good. It was too much responsibility on my shoulders, I'm glad it ended that way. When I left the Red Zone pile, the Mayo Clinic doctor I was with and the other individuals in my group stopped by for a beer near Penn Station. There was a group of firefighters covered in Ground Zero soot, all sitting solemnly at a few tables pushed together.
We took care of their tab and sent a round of beer over - and that's how my memory of that day ended.
