The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [3]
Michael and I walked around for hours with our first aid kits and saline bags, treating firemen with burned, sooty eyes and small open wounds. We climbed over remnants of smashed jewelry stores and unmanned banks, desperately looking for someone trapped but still breathing. It was a pitch-black night: The soot lay like a blanket across the sky and the power had gone out. We felt like the only people left on earth.
In the late evening hours, we came upon the American Express building, which had been converted into a small disaster-response staging area and morgue. The ground was soaked in mud and water, which oozed over my flip-flops, through my socks, and around my toes as I stumbled to help a fireman. His eyes were bloodshot and full of soot; he looked like the walking dead. He had been working in the Marriott hotel and was the last one to run out before the south tower had come crashing down on top of it. All of his friends were dead. He sat on the ground in despair, a broken man. I whispered words of comfort and stroked his hair as I cleaned his eyes.
The wind created ashy tornadoes that danced around us as we tried to wash the soot out, making our task even more challenging. On top of that, I realized that although my eyes were fully open I couldn’t see anything—my eyes were filled with dirt, too. So Michael and I sat face-to-face on a pile of rubble to blindly clean the muck from each other’s eyes.
“Darling,” I said, “you take me to all the best places.”
“Only the best for you, my dear,” Michael replied.
As soon as our eyes were fresh, we ventured back into the action.
At 11 p.m. on the evening of September 11, 2001, Michael and I arrived at Firehouse 10. Miraculously, it had been left standing, even though it sat directly across the road from the World Trade Center’s southeast corner. Someone’s splattered head lay in the rubble just two feet from the main door. Inside, everything was covered in ash, and exhausted firemen lay on the ground, overcome with grief. Firehouse 10 had become their de facto resting place.
Michael and I decided to set up a mini triage station there. We rigged flashlights above our heads with ropes tied to the ceiling and sat on the floor with our bags of saline. Every few hours I would look up to see another fifty weary firefighters wandering in to have us wash out their eyes. They spoke of friends who had died and of how much they loved their wives. One fireman ranted about having lost his fire hat, though it was clear to me that it was not really his hat he was upset about losing. I kissed their foreheads before sending them back into hell.
Neither electricity nor cellphones functioned, so there was no way for any of us to contact our loved ones. This was a huge source of anxiety for many of the firemen, who desperately wanted to get in touch with their families but couldn’t bear to leave the disaster area. Fortunately, earlier in the day when I was waiting at City Hall, I had managed to get calls out to my parents in Australia and to close friends, telling them that I was okay and not to worry. Many days later, when I finally returned home, my answering machine was filled with messages from other friends, including a few ex-boyfriends, wondering if I had survived.
The next morning around dawn, Michael and I moved our triage station out of Firehouse 10, which was simply too chaotic and crowded, and set it up in a broken bar called St. Charlie’s, located only a block away on Liberty Street. We needed a base to work out of and protect us from the elements, and the bar was the perfect size and location. With a little shove on the front door, we got inside. We cleared a space on the ground and set up our few possessions. Then we found a can of spray paint and made a sign to put outside the front door. It read GROUND ZERO FIRST AID STATION. Eventually,