|
|
THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
|
A sense of mission, exhaustion replace a city's initial panic
By Brian McGrory, Globe Staff, 9/13/2001
A tank rolled through with five more gunmen. A higher-up screamed, ''Man your weapons!'' The officers trained their sights on sights unknown.
Indeed, all across the crooked, criss-crossing streets surrounding the area where the World Trade Center towers once stood, a sense of controlled bedlam permeated the day.
The images weren't of the catastrophes of Tuesday morning or even the frantic search operation of Tuesday night, but small, subtle signs of loss, respect, and resilience - a charred ballcap adhered to the roof of a buried car, a city cop wishing luck to a federal agent approaching the rubble with a body-sniffing dog, a man in a full hazmat suit and gas mask gripping a thick roast beef sandwich.
The panic of Tuesday morning was over, the fear had largely vanished, the shock was wearing off - much of it replaced by a sense of quiet mission and deep exhaustion, and all of that covered by a sickly brown layer of grime.
At the core, cranes pulled and peeled gnarled hunks of wreckage from the twisted piles of steel and concrete rubble as another building collapsed nearby. Firefighters hosed down the buildings in a series of steady streams. Cadaver-sniffing German and Belgian shepherds nosed at the piles of ash.
But it was in the concentric circles outward, much of it eerily void of noise and traffic, where the cacaphony of emotions was laid bare and the heartbreak presented itself as vividly as the mangled police cars that had been unceremoniously dumped beside the Brooklyn Bridge.
Squinting at those cars yesterday, one beefy New York City police officer, a cigarette stuck in the side of his mouth, bowed his head and said, ''Each one of those represents a brother dead.''
The rest of the world seemed a blur of action, with FBI raids in Boston and Florida, pledges of unity from foreign capitals, and US military warships patrolling the Eastern Seaboard.
But in Lower Manhattan, the site of thousands of dead, the quiet was washed by a sense of utter isolation. Police had sealed the area beneath 14th Street. Non-emergency traffic was prohibited. The power was mostly out. Cellular telephones barely worked.
As the light came up yesterday morning, much of the deep soot and dust that covered the area had been turned to a thick grimy sludge by sanitation trucks that had thrown water on the filthy streets.
The sky was a magnificent shade of Hawaiian blue - a sharp contrast to the dull hues of the streets below, many of which looked as they would in a faded black and white photograph from times gone by. The one cloud, the lingering plume of smoke above the ground where the World Trade Towers used to be, eventually spread and drifted, partially blocking out the sun.
The inescapable smell was of a stale fire or an old attic. The unmistakable noise was of rumbling trucks. The feeling was that of a military camp. Few of the thousands of police officers and firefighters who drifted about seemed to talk with each other. Perhaps after the day of horrors, there was nothing that words could really say.
The roads and parks around City Hall, just a few blocks from the carnage, are typically some of the busiest on Manhattan. But yesterday, the area was restricted even to most reporters, and was largely just a gathering spot for dignitaries and rescue workers taking a short break.
The plaza around City Hall looked like an abandoned dump, with discarded water bottles and empty boxes of Heater Meals - ''mushroom gravy, mashed potatoes and beef'' - nestled into the layer of ash. A lone worker shoveled soot from the steps of City Hall, his shovel grinding against the ground like a distant ache.
The day was arguably one of the most brilliant of the year, the pale September sun beaming from a cloudless New York sky. But everywhere, there was dust, silt, soot, grime, sludge and muck - covering the leaves on the bushes surrounding City Hall and smeared across the elegant small-paned windows of the regal building, on people's clothes, in their hair, burning in their throats and on the white masks that covered their mouths.
Police officers gathered in small groups to man checkpoints into what they called ''the frozen zone.'' All the while, caravans of vehicles thundered in various directions. Empty MTA buses headed toward the carnage to retrieve workers, dump trucks rolled down the street, one after another, with crooked steel beams rising happenstance from their immense beds. Each band of equipment would leave a beige wave of soot in their wake, like a jet stream against an ice blue sky, causing police to turn their heads in self-defense.
Gangs of firefighters walked down the silty streets, six and seven across, axes and shovels slung over their shoulders, looking like groups of West Virginia coal miners returning to the shafts. Other rescue workers piled in the back of pickup trucks like roving bands of renegades in a banana republic.
In a cordoned-off area beside the Brooklyn Bridge, a tractor dumped the remains of a charred police car that had been demolished in the explosion, the hazard lights inexplicably blinking. Another dumped police car, its roof torn off, was filled with cinderblocks and charred papers that had rained down from the towers, including a statement from a broker who bought a stock called AremisSoft. Another charred government car had a torn cap stuck to its roof with the insignia, ''New York City OEM'' - Office of Emergency Management.
The untouchable touchstone in the day was the constant plume of grayish-black smoke that billowed into the sky. Police officers at the hundreds of checkpoints around Lower Manhattan watched it because, for many on the outer rings, there was nothing else to see.
By late in the afternoon, that cloud had grown and drifted and blocked out the sun. At the street level, the smoke thickened and blackened. The ladders and cranes and streams of water vanished within, then appeared, then vanished again.
Out on Duane Street, caravans of Con Edison trucks thundered past the checkpoints to help return power to the area. Sanitation trucks rolled through, gas trucks, replenished rescue workers. One police van, emerging from the core, stopped at a checkpoint and beeped at the city cops standing near a barricade. A young cop approached the van and the passenger handed him a pizza box out the window.
Around the corner, a bodega sold bottled water and warm soft drinks by candlelight. Nearby, a car had the following, message etched on its soot-covered trunk: ''I love USA. Vengeance.''
And in one classic New York moment, a young NYC police officer manning a checkpoint near the rubble turned to a brother cop and said, ''You know what makes me sick?'' As he posed the question, black smoke rose behind him and an ambulance siren sliced through the air. Then he said, ''The Nassau cops must be getting $75 an hour in overtime for this.''
This story ran on page A2 of the Boston Globe on 9/13/2001.
|
