Posted by Jane Fritsch (165.247.12.88) on September 17, 2001 at 15:45:44:
Against all odds, rescuers work on
A crane lifts two welders after they cut through a section of metal at the site
of the World Trade Centre.
By Jane Fritsch in New York
Losing ground in the battle between hope and harsh reality, rescue workers
spent a frustrating fifth day removing bodies and body parts from the pile
of debris where the World Trade Centre once stood.
They have found only five people alive, the last of them on Wednesday.
Almost 5,000 more, on some estimates, remain missing, presumed buried
under tonnes of steel and debris.
But there was a measure of optimism. Rescuers had not ruled out the
possibility that an area called the honeycomb, a vast underground
concourse, might be intact, a policeman at the scene said.
In other disasters, people have been found alive after as long as a week.
Searchers were going by smell yesterday, digging in the places where the
stench was the worst. Their cadaver-sniffing dogs had become useless,
overwhelmed by the pervasive odour.
When the workers did find bodies, and tried to extract them, they often
came apart.
"You can only stand it because there's no faces," said one rescue worker, a steamfitter. "You don't have to look at any
faces."
Workers attached large white buckets bearing the word "Photos" to the utility poles that remained standing.
Occasionally, people stopped what they were doing and dropped a picture in, of children, of holiday scenes, of grinning
couples.
A steady stream of body bags were removed from the smoking pile, then delivered to a morgue. Some bags were so
large it took as many as eight men to carry them; others were no larger than a football. Only the largest bags were
placed on stretchers.
Some bags seemed to hold the remains of firefighters; they had Fire Department escorts all the way to the morgue.
Early on Saturday, a police officer screamed: "Everybody silent! Hats off!" A small bag was carried away, presumably
holding the remains of a police officer. All in the area stood and placed their hard hats over their chests as a chaplain
blessed the bag.
The monotonous cycle was much as it had been the previous day. Heavy equipment would attack the pile for an hour or
so and stop. Then hundreds of people would pile on, shoulder to shoulder, to sift through a new layer of chaos.
But if the scene was the same, many of the characters were different. As officials exerted more control over the scene,
they turned away a number of volunteers, including medical workers who had set up makeshift first-aid sites to serve the
searchers. In fact, so many volunteers were turned away there was a shortage of people to do simple tasks on Saturday,
like sort supplies and serve food.
The National Guard set up checkpoints to keep people out and issued identification cards.
One non-union welder who had been working for two days to clear rubble was told he was no longer needed. After the
first frantic days, large construction companies and their union workers were assigned to specific sections of the debris
field. But on Saturday, tension erupted. Occasionally, workers from one section refused to co-operate with those from
another.
Mike Brown, the acting deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said, "Search and rescue
continues to be a priority." But he acknowledged that the task, the removal of 2million cubic yards of debris, was
immense.
The agency had supplied more than 11,000 respirators, 25,000 protective gloves, 25,000 protective suits, 70,000 tetanus
shots and 353,000 meals.
The New York Times