The Heroes of Ground Zero
MEN OF ENGINE COMPANY 50
Ladder Company 19 These firefighters from the South Bronx, exhausted after working 12 straight hours at the site of the World Trade Center attack, paused briefly to have their picture taken as they finished their shift. They were reluctant to be singled out, and made it clear they feel that the sacrifices of their lost colleagues are what should really be recognized.
FIREFIGHTER
Auphy Dixon Dixon, 45, is a Mount Vernon, New York, fireman. His fiancée, Sandra Campbell, who worked as a computer analyst on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower, was lost in the September 11 attack. Upon receiving word of the catastrophe (Campbell had actually phoned Dixon’s firehouse to say she was being evacuated, but he had stepped out), Dixon left work, drove to Brooklyn, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and made his way to Ground Zero. “I stood right at the area where me and Sandra often stood looking across the street at the towers, and I cried. I cried like I never cried before.” He wandered a few blocks in shock. “Then all of a sudden I heard this voice. And this voice said, ‘Dixon, I’m all right. I’m O.K. All I want you to do is to take care of everything. I love you.’” He adds, “She was a beautiful person. That’s all I can say.” Dixon, rescue gear in tow, would return to the site again and again in the following days to volunteer his services. Minutes before this photograph was taken, he had helped recover the remains of two victims.
VICTIM’S MOTHER
Nelly Braginsky On the morning of September 11, Alex Braginsky, 38, a financial-systems manager for Reuters, was attending a conference at the Windows on the World restaurant, atop the World Trade Center’s north tower. He has not been heard from since. An only child, Alex had been born in the former Soviet Union, immigrating to the U.S. in 1979 with his mother, Nelly, now a Forest Hills travel agent (shown here at an impromptu shrine outside the 69th Regiment Armory). “She escaped that horrible regime trying to save her son,” says Marina Kovalyov, a family friend. “That son, who she was always proud of. The best student, the best schools—I mean, just the best human being you can think of.” Remarked Nelly, a week after the tragedy, “[Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani said there’s little hope, but I’m still waiting. Everything I ever needed I needed for [Alex]. Now I only have pain in my heart.”
STEAMFITTERS
Jackie Madden, Brendan Barry, Sal Palazzola, Brian Madden Among the most urgently required skills in the World Trade Center rescue effort was the ability to saw, hack, and torch through the site’s twisted metal wreckage. These four Queens-based steamfitters were doing installation work in upper Manhattan when they heard that the Twin Towers were on fire. Not long after the buildings collapsed, the Maddens, who are father and son, along with Barry and Palazzola, offered to pitch in, hoping that they might find victims alive. At press time, though, the effort had shifted from rescue to recovery, but Brian Madden was still at Ground Zero, where fires continued to smolder and sentiments remained raw. “Those buildings are a part of New York,” he said, refusing to use the past tense.
PENNSYLVANIA FIREFIGHTERS
Ron Makos, Rob Cain, Barri-jami Arnold, Mike Lenner The men of the Nancy Run Fire Company, a volunteer department named for a creek near their station house in Bethlehem Township, Pennsylvania, live almost 100 miles from Manhattan. They didn’t have to come to Ground Zero, but when they saw TV reports that New York had sent out a call for more firemen, 15 of them made the trip. They worked shifts of 12 hours or more on the massive mounds of rubble, using saws, crowbars, and buckets in their attempts to find survivors. “It’s probably going to stay with us the rest of our lives,” says assistant fire chief Arnold, explaining how a spirit of cooperation ruled the pile. “Cop, ironworker, or firefighter—you were just there to help, and everyone fused together as one.”
THE MAYOR
Rudolph Giuliani briefing the press. The mayor of New York City was at a breakfast meeting when informed that a jet had collided with the World Trade Center’s north tower. By the time United Flight 175, from Boston, had struck Tower Two, 18 minutes later, Rudy Giuliani was on the scene. Trapped in the smoky ruin of 75 Barclay Street after it was partially destroyed by the south tower’s collapse, he had to escape through an underground network of tunnels. Later, as the second structure fell, he sprinted up West Broadway, surrounded by aides, reporters, and his terrified fellow citizens. Never once did he lose his composure. In his regular press briefings, such as this one near the Family Assistance Center at Pier 94, he delivered the facts and administered psychological salve to a population that was overwhelmed by waves of shock, grief, rage, and dread. For New Yorkers—and a nation—the knowledge that Rudy was in charge was a source of solace and strength. Within days, the reassuring influence of Rudy the Rock (as he was christened by French president Jacques Chirac) had resonated around the world.
TRAUMA TEAM
Belinda Ellis, Dr. Eduardo Gonzalez, Louis Garcia Garcia, right, was likely the first paramedic to rush to the World Trade Center. His wife, Marcy—a cop working downtown who happened to be staring up at the Twin Towers when the first plane hit—had alerted him on her cell phone. Arriving at the foot of the inferno within two minutes, Garcia, 37, packed six victims into his ambulance. “Four had second- or third-degree burns,” Garcia recalls. “Two were screaming, two were in shock.” He and his partner, Steve Craver, were “back to take more people by the time plane number two hit.” A week later, in Trauma Room One at Manhattan’s St. Vincent’s Hospital, Garcia was joined by colleagues Ellis (a nurse who treated patients at Mary Immaculate Hospital that first day) and Gonzalez (head of St. Vincent’s emergency unit, whose response squads tended to more than a thousand victims that week).
THE BUCKET LINE
Daniel Kelegian, Philip Gambino, Harry Mikedis, Steve Mikedis These four men, who grew up together in Jackson Heights, Queens, joined the bucket brigade, a row of volunteers shuttling pails of metal, concrete, and rubber that were once Tower One of the World Trade Center. Now and then, instead of a bucket, a body bag would make its way down the line. The Friday after the disaster, Kelegian, Gambino, and the Mikedis brothers—who are all in the construction business—passed along eight body bags. “We went there to volunteer,” says Kelegian, 29, “just because we’re Americans.”
THE FORCE
Police Officers, Lower Manhattan. By the Saturday after the attack, crews were busy readying the New York Stock Exchange, located five blocks from Ground Zero, for business Monday morning. These six officers from the 103rd Precinct, stationed behind a barrier at Broad and Beaver Streets, were among dozens charged with securing the Wall Street area during the cleanup. Minutes earlier they had led a mass sprint to evacuate the district after an unidentified truck was parked in front of the N.Y.S.E. building itself (visible in the background, a large flag across its façade). Pausing for a portrait was about the last thing on their minds, and they did so grudgingly, without giving their names. “We’re just doing our jobs,” said one.
WELDER
Bob English Around his neck hangs an ID tag. It belongs to English’s girlfriend, Tracy Rogich, an employee of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading firm whose offices were high up in the W.T.C.’s north tower. On September 11, Rogich was late for work. It was her birthday, and she lingered at home, making beds for expected houseguests. Around a quarter to nine, she arrived at her office building just as American Airlines Flight 11 plowed into it. She survived. English, 45, a welder from Haddonfield, New Jersey, went to the volunteer center on Manhattan’s West Side three days later. “I felt I had to help in any way I could,” he said. “I thought, There but for the grace of God go I.”
UNITED IN GRIEF
Annie McCarthy (holding Shane), Mary Jean McCarthy O’Leary (holding Michael). Neither of their husbands returned home that day. Robert McCarthy, 33, was a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald; he worked on the 104th floor of Tower One. Gerald O’Leary, 34, worked as a sous-chef in Cantor’s corporate dining room, three floors below. They were also neighbors and best friends, living in Stony Point, New York. It is there that their wives, Annie, 30, and Mary Jean, 35—the latter having lost both her husband and her brother (Robert was married to Annie) on September 11—tell stories, watch wedding videos, and look at photographs, anything to keep memories of Rob and Gerry alive for themselves and for their sons, one-month-old Shane Robert and one-year-old Michael Patrick. “Over my couch,” says Mary Jean, “I have a big wedding picture. And Michael points and says, ‘Daddy, Daddy.’ He knows that something’s wrong, that Daddy’s not here. I just say, ‘Daddy loves you so much and he’ll always keep you safe.’”
VILLAGE VOLUNTEERS
The Sixth Street and Avenue B gardeners. This group of community gardeners from the East Village signed on to clean up Battery Park, the setting for this photo, just south of the World Trade Center. “It might not have been Ground Zero,” says organization vice president Joanee Freedom, standing 10th from left, “but it was as close as we could get, and it was cathartic for all of us.”
HOSPITALITY PROVIDER
Deborah Larissa Kemmett Playing the hostess at a trying time is no frivolous pursuit; exhausted relief and rescue workers were only too happy to be greeted by the smiling face of Kemmett, who tirelessly wove through the evacuation-center crowds around 34th Street, offering vital replenishments.
NATIONAL GUARDSMAN
Prasad Navina For days, Navina, a mortgage consultant from Queens, helped test the air’s toxicity—taking only two days off (to witness the birth of his first child, Elicia). Shortly after the attack, amid rumors of war, his National Guard unit was called into service.
IRONWORKER
Joe Quattrocchi Quattrocchi, a welder from Brooklyn, wielded an acetylene torch at the disaster’s epicenter, which he found “surreal, like a desert with rolling hills and valleys, like something out of a horror movie.”
ON ALERT
U.S. Army National Guard Sergeant Dennis Cusano. Cusano, of Glenville, New York, stood guard over Pearl and Wall Streets, steps from Trinity Church, which was chartered in 1697.
VOLUNTEER RESCUE WORKER
James Heward Says Heward, of the Maryland Fire Network, seen here coming off a 14-hour shift at Ground Zero: “They had crews from Mississippi, Alabama, Texas. Firefighter-E.M.T.’s [emergency medical technicians] from an Indian reservation in South Dakota. That made us feel real proud. We weren’t the only ones pitching in; the whole country was.”
THE SENATOR
Charles E. Schumer Five days into the ordeal, Schumer addressed the press outside New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory. After President Bush agreed to provide $20 billion in aid for New York, Schumer remarked, “I wanted to hug him, but he’s the president.”
HOSPITAL CHIEF
David Campbell Says Campbell, C.E.O. of Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers:
“We had the equivalent of six E.R.’s set up within 45 minutes of the first blast. We became a central source of crisis support and information for the entire city.”
CRISIS COUNSELOR
Leslie Garber Never before had Garber evaluated—and comforted—more people in distress, many suffering not just from the immediate experience of horror and loss, but from an oppressive “sense of vulnerability—a fear [of] the future.” Her co-workers at St. Vincent’s Family Support Center assisted 6,600 relatives in their search for lost loved ones.
FLIGHT ATTENDANTS
From American, Delta, Jet Blue, and United Airlines. That Sunday, they gathered in Kew Gardens, New York—for decades, home to thousands of flight attendants—and set off for Manhattan with masks and gloves (for the rescue workers) and flowers (to honor the missing). Mobbed by well-wishers upon their arrival, they were quickly escorted by the National Guard to West and Canal Streets, where they found a quiet spot by a bike path. Here, they held hands, said prayers, and shared a moment of silence for their friends and brethren who had perished on four ill-fated flights. “We wanted to pay tribute,” says United flight attendant Joe Eakin, “to those who got up in the morning and thought they were just going to have a normal day, and ended up part of history.” Their industry has been scarred in other ways as well; at press time, nearly 100,000 airline-employee layoffs had been announced. Even those whose jobs have been spared, such as Eakin and his partner, fellow United attendant Gustavo Taranto, will never be the same. “Yesterday Gustavo had to go out for the first time,” Eakin explains. “I was being strong for him, and he was being strong for me, but I know we were very apprehensive about saying good-bye. I got on the computer and tracked his flight all the way to Seattle to make sure he had landed.”
FLIGHT ATTENDANTS
From American, Delta, Jet Blue, and United Airlines. That Sunday, they gathered in Kew Gardens, New York—for decades, home to thousands of flight attendants—and set off for Manhattan with masks and gloves (for the rescue workers) and flowers (to honor the missing). Mobbed by well-wishers upon their arrival, they were quickly escorted by the National Guard to West and Canal Streets, where they found a quiet spot by a bike path. Here, they held hands, said prayers, and shared a moment of silence for their friends and brethren who had perished on four ill-fated flights. “We wanted to pay tribute,” says United flight attendant Joe Eakin, “to those who got up in the morning and thought they were just going to have a normal day, and ended up part of history.” Their industry has been scarred in other ways as well; at press time, nearly 100,000 airline-employee layoffs had been announced. Even those whose jobs have been spared, such as Eakin and his partner, fellow United attendant Gustavo Taranto, will never be the same. “Yesterday Gustavo had to go out for the first time,” Eakin explains. “I was being strong for him, and he was being strong for me, but I know we were very apprehensive about saying good-bye. I got on the computer and tracked his flight all the way to Seattle to make sure he had landed.”
FLIGHT ATTENDANTS
From American, Delta, Jet Blue, and United Airlines. That Sunday, they gathered in Kew Gardens, New York—for decades, home to thousands of flight attendants—and set off for Manhattan with masks and gloves (for the rescue workers) and flowers (to honor the missing). Mobbed by well-wishers upon their arrival, they were quickly escorted by the National Guard to West and Canal Streets, where they found a quiet spot by a bike path. Here, they held hands, said prayers, and shared a moment of silence for their friends and brethren who had perished on four ill-fated flights. “We wanted to pay tribute,” says United flight attendant Joe Eakin, “to those who got up in the morning and thought they were just going to have a normal day, and ended up part of history.” Their industry has been scarred in other ways as well; at press time, nearly 100,000 airline-employee layoffs had been announced. Even those whose jobs have been spared, such as Eakin and his partner, fellow United attendant Gustavo Taranto, will never be the same. “Yesterday Gustavo had to go out for the first time,” Eakin explains. “I was being strong for him, and he was being strong for me, but I know we were very apprehensive about saying good-bye. I got on the computer and tracked his flight all the way to Seattle to make sure he had landed.”
MAINTENANCE TEAM
60 Broad Street Cleaning Staff. Not since 1933 and the Great Depression had the Big Board been shuttered for as long a stretch. On this Saturday morning, the custodial crew from Harvard Maintenance, pictured near 60 Broad Street, lent mops and spirit to the cause, preparing the building for the Monday reopening of Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. From left: Gladys Soto, Matilda Cabrera, Maria Berisha, Gladys Lopez, Janet Martinez (seated), Neris Molina, Islandia Johnson, and Liduvina Feliz.
THE MOURNING
Police Officers, in prayer. On Monday, September 17, six days after the disaster, a white van pulled up in front of a makeshift memorial outside St. Vincent’s Hospital. Six police officers got out, each carrying a bouquet. Without saying a word, they placed the flowers under rows of photos of the lost, bowed their heads in prayer, and wept. Less than a minute later they returned to their van and drove off. There are literally hundreds of such shrines throughout the city.
MILITARY PATROL
Top: Mike McCormack, Army Guard; Chris Nickel, Air Guard. At Door and Wheel: Bruce Jones, Civil Air Patrol; Thomas Piekarski, Air Guard. Following the attack, the National Guard units stationed at the Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach, New York, were put on high alert. Says Captain McCormack, who had worked as an E.M.S. command supervisor at the last four major plane crashes in the New York area: “I know what burnt flesh smells like. That’s all that was in the air. But knowing what it was didn’t make me veer off the task at hand.” The sight of the wasteland was especially shocking to Piekarski; just two weeks earlier, he had taken his sister, who was visiting from Iowa, to the World Trade Center observation deck. “To be on top of that building, and then to be standing there on the pile of rubble, was beyond words,” he says. By week’s end, Piekarski’s division, the 106th Rescue Wing, was poised to head overseas, its fate uncertain.
REUNITED SURVIVORS
Arturo Griffith, Aroon Ramcharan “My God,” exclaimed Griffith, “I thought you were dead!” For seven days—until this reunion at St. Vincent’s Hospital—neither of these men thought the other had survived. Griffith, left, a Tower One freight-elevator operator, had last seen his old friend Ramcharan, a bottled-water deliveryman, on a descent to the building’s basement only minutes before the attack. By the time the first jet hit the tower, Ramcharan was already outside. He saw the collision, then watched in horror as workers leapt to their death from the windows above. Griffith’s elevator, meanwhile, had gone into a free fall from the fifth floor. Knocked unconscious, his left leg broken, Griffith was dragged to safety by rescuers. His wife, Carmen, was also an elevator operator in Tower One; she survived with second-degree burns, struggling down 78 stories by leaning, for support, on various Good Samaritans. But for 48 hours, lying in different hospitals, husband and wife each believed the other was dead. Says Carmen, from her bed at Brooklyn’s Long Island College Hospital: “We met at the Trade Center in 1980. We fell in love at the Trade Center. Our life is the Trade Center.”
MEMORIAL KEEPERS
Karrah Flores, Melissa Watkins “It was my way of volunteering,” says Flores, 24, left. “I’m not a mason, I’m not a welder.” She was among a handful of young New Yorkers, many new to the city, who tended the memorial at Union Square. Returning every day, sometimes spending 12 hours or more, they kept the candles lit and looked after the objects left by mourners and those who still bore hope: the peace banners, the flags, the crosses, the teddy bears, the fireman’s hat offered by a man whose brother, a carpenter, worked on the 105th floor of Tower One. For Watkins, 20, a student who collapsed and blacked out when overtaken by smoke near her New School University dorm, keeping these flames going was “my reflection and my therapy.” It was also her way of honoring the stranger who, in a few precious moments, woke her up, told her to hold on to him, covered her face, and guided her to safety at a nearby deli. “If it wasn’t for that man, I definitely would have given up,” Watkins says.
PATRIOT
Raven Sturt, Playing Superman. On the morning after, Mohamed Amine Al-Homsi draped the American flag from the fire escape of his apartment on East 26th Street. Al-Homsi, who left war-torn Lebanon in 1977 and became an American citizen this year, has loved the Stars and Stripes since childhood, when he would sneak away from his family to see Westerns and war movies. On Sunday, September 16, Al-Homsi took the day off from his work—as a designer and maker of leather goods and furniture—to spend time with his eight-year-old godson, Raven, above. Many children in Manhattan that week were dressed as superheroes.
