Extract from The Third Wave

 

At 5:30pm, World Trade Center Tower Seven collapsed. I had been watching it burn since the morning and was just one block away when I found myself running for cover for the second time that day. By then, the fires were burning freely and the crazy air was filled with wind and ash.

 

After that, the officials cleared us out once more and announced that nobody would be allowed back into the Ground Zero area, since they thought many more buildings would collapse.

 

It was getting dark when a slick black car with four men inside pulled up to our area. A suit-clad arm emerged from behind the tinted windows and placed a loudspeaker on the car’s roof. A radio broadcast began. It was President George W. Bush telling us that we were now at war. The crowd was spellbound. Hundreds of rescue workers surrounded the car, hanging on every word. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the car quietly vanished.

 

At this stage, only a small group of exhausted firemen were being allowed back into Ground Zero. But who was going to take care of the firefighters, I wondered? Emergency Medical Technician Michael Voudoras and I hid behind a group of firemen, using them as cover to sneak back into the danger zone. We were determined to help them and eager to look around for anyone who had been buried alive. As we stepped into the ash and flames, I silently recited the same prayer that I had prayed all day: if it was my time to die, then I was ready. Up until then I had had an amazing, fulfilling life, for which I was grateful. In welcoming and accepting the thought of my death, I felt no fear at all.

 

Michael and I walked around for hours with our first aid kits and saline bags, looking for someone trapped but still breathing. It was a pitch-black night: the soot lay like a blanket across the sky and the power had gone out.

 

In the late evening hours, we came upon the American ­Express building, which had been converted into a small disaster-­response staging area and morgue. The ground was soaked in mud and water, which oozed over my flip-flops as I stumbled to help a fireman. His eyes were bloodshot and full of soot; he looked like the walking dead. He had been working in the Marriott hotel and was the last one to run out before the south tower had come crashing down on top of it. All of his friends were dead. He sat on the ground in despair. I whispered words of comfort and stroked his hair as I cleaned his eyes.

 

At 11:00pm on the evening of 11 September 2001, Michael and I arrived at Firehouse 10. Miraculously, it had been left standing, even though it sat directly across the road from the World Trade Center’s south-east corner. Someone’s head lay in the rubble just two feet from the main door. Inside, everything was covered in ash, and exhausted firemen lay on the ground, overcome with grief.

 

Michael and I set up a mini triage station there. We rigged flashlights above our heads with ropes tied to the ceiling and sat on the floor with our bags of saline. Every few hours I would look up to see another 50 weary firefighters wandering in to have us wash out their eyes. They spoke of friends who had died and of how much they loved their wives.

 

Neither electricity nor cellphones functioned, so there was no way for any of us to contact our loved ones. This was a huge source of anxiety for many of the firemen, who desperately wanted to get in touch with their families but couldn’t bear to leave the disaster area.
The next morning around dawn, Michael and I moved our triage station out of Firehouse 10, which was simply too chaotic and crowded, and set it up in a broken bar called St Charlie’s, only a block away on Liberty Street. We needed a base to work out of and protect us from the elements, and the bar was the perfect size and location. With a little shove on the front door, we got inside. We cleared a space on the ground and set up our few possessions. Then we found a can of spray paint and made a sign to put outside the front door. It read ground zero first aid station. Eventually, our little hangout became home to any Ground Zero workers who stumbled across it.

 

Just about every shop window had been smashed by the collapse of the Twin Towers. The only store that had remained locked shut was the athletic shoe store on the second floor of the World Financial Center. So, in a strange twist of fate, the one thing I most desperately needed—a solid pair of running shoes—was the one thing I couldn’t get. By the evening of 12 September, my waterlogged feet were in dire need of protection. When two firemen walked by with a dead body on a stretcher, we blessed the body and then took off his shoes. I needed them more than he did now.

 

We ran purely on adrenaline as the hours raced by and our fatigue increased. It was tough work, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. I could never have lived with myself if I had. Every second that passed could mean life or death for someone buried beneath the rubble. Even a million rescue workers wouldn’t have been enough to help. Some volunteers left to get supplies or meet loved ones, but they always came back. Most refused to leave until they collapsed in exhaustion and had to be carried out on stretchers.

 

On the morning of 13 September, we could still hear people buried alive under the rubble making tapping noises, and this kept us going. Tragically, we had no way to get down to them. Ironworkers dug for hours but made only a small dent in the seemingly bottomless pile of steel.

Many of the friends I had worked with during my days as an investment banker had been in the World Trade Center buildings when the planes hit. Initially, finding them had been my primary motivation for going down to Ground Zero. I quickly discovered that that was the case for many of the volunteers I met. But after only a short time, we each realised that it didn’t matter if we knew the victims or not; we wanted to help everyone. ‘Nobody goes home until we all go home’ became our quiet motto. Even after the tapping noises stopped, we never gave up hope.