NYC AREA HOSPITALS

As wounded arrive, a search for loved ones

By Dick Lehr and Tatsha Robertson, Globe Staff, 9/12/2001

EW YORK - Isaias Rivera, an evangelical pastor and television technician, went off to work yesterday at Tower 2 at the World Trade Center. Just another day.

Then he was gone - and his relatives were suddenly confronted with the search for an answer to the darkest of questions: was Isaias Rivera alive or dead.

''My brother has been running from hospital to hospital looking for him, but we can't find out anything,'' Rivera's stepson, Pedro Lopez, said late yesterday afternoon.

''All that's running through my mind is that he's in trouble.''

The Rivera family's panic belonged to a city's swelling chorus of despair, as New Yorkers, along with a nation, awaited word of how many had died.

It's a death toll that includes hundreds, maybe thousands of the workers who went to do their jobs yesterday in and around the twin towers and many of the rescue workers who, after disaster struck, went in and tried to save them.

Emergency and public officials could not provide any hard numbers about the dead, and, in press conferences throughout the afternoon, said it would take days to tally the casualties. But fire and police sources said last night that as many as 200 firefighters and 80 police officers are believed to be missing and may have died.

One official said late yesterday that 5,000 of the injured or dead were expected at a mobile hospital set up across New York Harbor in New Jersey's Liberty State Park. ''Every hospital in the state is in disaster readiness mode,'' said Ron Czajkowski of the New Jersey Hospital Association.

Hundreds of injured were treated at hospitals, arriving either by foot or by ambulance, but many more were believed dead in the remains of what had been the 110-story World Trade Center towers, and on surrounding streets. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said at least 600 people had been treated at hospitals by mid-afternoon and another 1,500 ''walking wounded'' were taken to the New Jersey location.

In the absence of information, people such as Lopez awaited word, scrambled from hospital to hospital, jammed telephone and cellphone lines, all trying to track down the fate and whereabouts of a relative or friend.

In the surrounding neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, schools and community centers were converted into waiting areas. The Greenwich Village campus of the New School for Social Research became a clearinghouse yesterday for people looking for possible victims.

That's where Pedro Lopez, 30, came to find out about his stepfather, Rivera. Rivera, said Lopez, was also in the World Trade Center when it was bombed in 1993. Ever since that terrorist attack, Rivera had trouble sleeping.

''It's like lightening striking twice on that building,'' Lopez added. ''As more time goes by, we don't know what to think.''

Theresa Menino also came to the campus to check on her 56-year-old brother, a securities employee who worked in the first tower when it was hit. Initially, she had gotten good news. She said her brother called her as he was leaving the building and assured her that he was all right.

But then the second tower collapsed. Suddenly Menino was in a panic, unable to reach her brother, who is married and has one daughter. As of early evening, she still had no word from him.

''All he said was he's all right,'' Menino said about his first telephone call. ''Then we were cut off. I haven't heard anything and I'm thinking the worst.''

Hospitals in lower Manhattan, New Jersey, and Connecticut threw open their doors to the injured. The two closest trauma centers, St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital Center, admitted hundreds of patients by mid-afternoon, most of whom suffered from smoke inhalation, cuts, burns, shock, eye abrasions from falling concrete and broken bones.

But even with all the injuries an eerie calm prevailed during the afternoon at one of the hospitals nearest to the twin towers, as hospital officials awaited the worst to come. The number of casualties was expected to leap dramatically once rescue workers began working their way through the remains of the fallen twin towers.

''It's frustrating because we're not seeing a lot of patients,'' said Dr. Pat Cirullo, an anesthesiologist at St. Vincent's Hospital ''We should be seeing 10 times this amount.''

New York hospitals had a terrorism coordination plan, and doctors reported it was working well yesterday. Eric Manheimer, chief medical officer of Bellevue Medical Center, one of the city's largest emergency rooms, said 150 people had been brought in as of mid-afternoon. Of those, 20 were critical, including a small child, and two were dead on arrival. Most had suffered from brain and orthodepic injuries, he said.

Outside, a line of about 200 people snaked all the way around Bellevue Hospital, waiting to donate blood.

Trauma centers in New York spent the afternoon holding hourly conference calls to coordinate medical coverage. Some patients were sent to New Jersey hospitals on ferries. Plastic surgeons were in particular demand, said Louis Marcos, president of Bellevue Hospital.

Doctors went through this once before, with the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, but on a much smaller scale.

''This time the death toll its going to be much higher,'' said Marcos.

Cindy Rodriguez of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. Information from wire services was also used.

This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 9/12/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.