Grim reality follows surreal day of terrorist Trade Center attack
By Larry McShane, Associated Press, 09/12/01
NEW YORK -- After a surreal day where the world watched as the World Trade Center crumbled, rescue workers burrowed through a smoking mix of soot and rubble Wednesday in a hunt for thousands of bodies from the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
The grim task in the lower Manhattan neighborhood where the twin 110-story towers once rose was interrupted by brief epiphanies of life, when a fortunate victim was pulled alive from the wreckage of the steel and glass buildings.
But workers braced for more recoveries than rescues. By Wednesday afternoon, four people -- three police officers and one unidentified woman -- were pulled alive from the wreckage piled where the 1,350-foot towers once stood.
"The best estimate we can make is that there will be a few thousand (victims) left in each building," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said at a morning news conference.
One volunteer, Peter Coppola, said he had found four dead bodies in his 24 hours of searching. "The air down there is totally toxic," he said.
Port Authority Police Sgt. Jay McLaughlin, who was buried between the two collapsed towers, was pulled free at 7:35 a.m. -- nearly 24 hours after the first of two planes hijacked by terrorists who slammed into the Trade Center.
McLaughlin was rushed by ambulance to a Manhattan hospital.
Bulldozers and other heavy machinery were on site, as were workers lugging shovels and picks. The rubble was taken by boat to a former Staten Island garbage dump, where the FBI and other investigators were searching for evidence.
Specifically, the mayor said, they were hunting for the plane's black boxes for clues about exactly what happened in the final terrifying minutes aboard the hijacked planes.
The mayor said 202 firefighters and another 57 NYPD and Port Authority police officers were missing. Also among the missing was John P. O'Neill, head of security for the World Trade Center and a former FBI expert on terrorism.
O'Neill headed the investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole, along with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
There were 55 confirmed fatalities -- a number that will multiply and exceed the 168 killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Another 1,700 injuries were reported.
"I really think this is a situation we're going to be living with for a while," Giuliani said.
Rescue workers reported bodies buried beneath the soot on the streets of lower Manhattan, along with body parts scattered in the rubble. The four hijacked planes that crashed on Monday carried 266 people.
"You don't know what to say to the families," Giuliani said. "You don't know whether to give them hope or not."
Giuliani was among those who escaped the tragedy uninjured, bolting from a building barely a block from the site when the first of the twin towers collapsed.
The ordinarily busy area around the Trade Center remained like a war zone, the streets littered with burned-out cars and firetrucks, along with half-melted police cars.
Smoke continued to pour upward from the site where the towers once stood, their absence a jagged scar in the city skyline. Smaller fires still burned. Twisted metal piled 50 feet high filled Vesey Street.
"It's like Beirut," said Wilson Franco, a Civil Air Patrol member working in the area near ground zero. "It's horrifying."
On the street, scattered madly, were reminders of the mundane tasks interrupted by the terrorist attack: a sheet of public relations phone numbers. An insurance invoice. A list of state regulations for security trading.
Trees and bushes wore a thick coat of the inescapable gray soot. Robots and bulldozers plow through the haze as workers lugged body parts to a Brooks Brothers store-turned-morgue.
A message, scrawled with a finger on a sooty window, offered a prayer: "God Bless the Dead."
Despite the non-stop television coverage, people still viewed the attack with disbelief.
"I never thought I'd see the World Trade Center pass me by in a dump truck," said Craig Chester, 29, a volunteer in the search and rescue mission.
By Tuesday morning, 120 dump trucks filled with rubble were taken from lower Manhattan as workers -- battling fatigue and smoke inhalation -- continued digging.
Asked if the towers might be rebuilt at the site, Port Authority Chairman Lewis Eisenberg said it was too early to say. The World Trade Center was targeted by terrorists twice in the last eight years.
People still clung desperately to the hope that their missing friends and family members were somehow alive. At St. Vincent's Hospital, where hundreds of victims were treated, a sobbing Annelise Peterson walked in a daze, clutching pictures of her boyfriend and brother.
Peterson asked if anyone had seen either. No one could tell her yes.
In addition to the volunteers working at the scene, two corporations pledged $14 million to the families of city workers killed in the tragedy. General Electric donated $10 million, Giuliani said.
All of Manhattan below 14th Street was still shut down, and incoming traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge was banned throughout the morning rush hour. Both were expected to open in both directions Thursday morning.
A national ban on air travel kept Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports closed, although the airports were planning to reopen Wednesday night, the Port Authority said. Wall Street was shuttered for a second day.
The New York Yankees canceled their Wednesday and Thursday night games, as did all of major league baseball. Students in the city were given the day off from school.
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