The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [35]
The difference now was that they were in pitch darkness, at something like ground floor level, in what was rapidly to become known as “the pile.” Jonas began hearing radio transmissions from firemen buried elsewhere: “Just tell my wife and kids that I love them.” “Mayday. Mayday … I’m trapped and I’m hurt bad.” The messages gradually petered out, for the men were dying.
Jonas kept sending his own Maydays. “It was a waiting game,” he remembered. “We were trapped in there for over three hours … I heard one fireman on the radio saying, ‘Where’s the North Tower?’ and I’m thinking to myself, ‘We’re in trouble if they don’t even know where the North Tower is.’ ” Deep in the rubble, Jonas had no way of knowing the reality evident to everyone outside, that the tower had simply vanished.
He realized the truth only as the dust began to clear, when a beam of sunlight penetrated the darkness. It was coming through a hole that was to prove the group’s salvation. “I survived,” Jonas thought as he emerged. “All my men survived. And we have this small victory that is within us, that we brought somebody else out with us … We had a nice void. We had a nice little pocket. There’s got to be hundreds of them. There’s got to be a lot of people getting out of here.”
In fact only three others were to be rescued. Port Authority engineer Pasquale Buzzelli had plunged down, also on a stairway, from the 22nd floor. The fall reminded him for a moment of an amusement park ride. Then he was hit on the head, saw stars, and fell unconscious. Buzzelli came to three hours later, covered in dust and reclining on a cement slab fifteen feet above the ground, there to be rescued by firemen. His only physical damage, a crushed right foot.
Two Port Authority police officers, Jimmy McLoughlin and William Jimeno, were found not by professional rescue workers but by two former U.S. Marines. Determined to be in the front line, they donned military fatigues, talked their way into Ground Zero, and clambered around hollering: “United States Marines! If you can hear us, yell or tap.” After an hour of shouting, a muffled cry came back. The pair summoned help, and rescuers had Jimeno on the surface by midnight. McLoughlin, who was seriously injured, was extracted early the following morning.
There would eventually be an army of rescuers from all over the country, professionals with technical skills, volunteers with a contribution to make—and some who were no help at all. Every city has its cranks, but none outdid the fellow who jumped overboard, early in the aftermath, from a ferry evacuating people to New Jersey. The man then began swimming—back in the direction of the Trade Center. “I thought,” he said as he was hauled out, “I could swim over to New York to help people.” Not everyone on board wanted him rescued. “Shoot him!” someone shouted. “He may be a terrorist!”
HOSPITALS IN MANHATTAN and beyond, expecting an “onslaught of patients,” had rushed to activate their disaster plans. Off-duty personnel, including a busload of surgeons attending a medical conference, dropped what they were doing and offered their services to the Fire Department. The expected flood of injured, however, never materialized. With most of those brought to hospitals released by midnight, the surgeons wound up loading water supplies.
On September 11 and for long afterward they found not survivors, not the injured, only the dead. Cadavers sometimes, but more often mere scraps of humanity. Those who found them saw things they will never forget.
“A person’s torso, just no legs, no head, no arms, nothing, just chest and stomach area … Then like fifteen feet away I found a head to go with the torso … we tagged it.”
“People had I-beams [steel joists] through them, and things like that.”
“A woman’s severed hand. You could