On Sept. 11, Dr. Toko Morimoto worked her regular schedule at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, located miles north of the disaster area, from 1 p.m. until her shift ended the next morning, when she volunteered at the site of the World Trade Center disaster.
Committee of Interns and Residents/SEIU
Dr. Toko Morimoto
“I was determined to go to the World Trade Center. I showed my ID to the police officers and told them that I am to be at the scene to help out the medical site there. I was led to Stuyvesant High School, about three blocks away from Ground Zero, where there was a major medical treatment area. I was given a respirator mask and goggles.
“Outside, it was a gorgeous day. Inside, it was dark. Dust and suds and smoke covered the area—shutting off any sunlight. All of a sudden, I had slipped into a war zone. It just did not look nor feel real. I was hyperventilating and scared, underneath my goggles and mask.
“Once I scoped out the whole Ground Zero area, I was able to regain my focus by remembering my mission: I am here to provide medical care. I didn’t have time to be scared.
“Originally, I hoped to help a survivor. I walked in the rubble with firefighters hoping to hear ‘There’s a person alive here!’ However, I only heard, ‘There’s a body.’ I realized my role was to help firefighters who get injured—though I never stopped hoping for a survivor.
“While I was at Ground Zero, I was surrounded by people—firefighters, welders, EMTs, police officers—with the same mission, so I never felt alone. People would pass by me, tap on my shoulder and say, ‘Thank you for being here.’ I felt the strength and warmth of what America is all about. Never have I felt, seen and been surrounded by such enormous compassion, and never have I felt so proud to be a part of this country.”
Iron Workers
Kevin O'Rourke, Bob Benesh and Dennis Milton
(Not pictured)
In 1969, Kevin O’Rourke was an apprentice Iron Worker, learning his craft by helping build the World Trade Center’s twin towers that for more than a quarter of a century dominated the New York City skyline.
On Sept. 12, O’Rourke, a member of Iron Workers Local 40, was crawling under the rubble of the collapsed pedestrian bridge that had connected the two 110-story towers, trying to calculate the best way to lift the twisted iron and tons of rubble and maybe, just maybe, find someone alive.
That same day, Bob Benesh, a business agent for Iron Workers Local 580 in New York, was digging through the rubble near the collapsed Marriott Hotel, shoulder-to-shoulder with about 40 other rescue workers. He said he heard a cry from someone: “She’s alive.”
“I couldn’t believe it. Her eyes were open. She didn’t say a word. But she was alive,” Benesh said.
Carefully, emergency medical technicians and rescue workers removed the last survivor of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack that claimed more than 6,000 lives.
Members of the Iron Workers, first from New York and soon from around the country, played a key role in rescue and recovery efforts. Trained in skills to build sturdy buildings, the hundreds of Iron Workers volunteers put those same skills to use to begin clearing 1.2 million tons of concrete and steel quickly and safely.
“I can’t tell you how proud I am about the way our members responded,” says Iron Workers President Joe Hunt. “They were some of the first people on the scene and I know they weren’t thinking about it, but they were risking their lives too.” Thousands of Iron Workers signed up on a national waiting list of volunteers.
“We’d clear a small area by cutting the steel columns in parts and moving them out with a crane. That would allow police and firefighters to search for survivors and the dead,” says Local 580 Business Agent Dennis Milton, who also worked on the towers in the early 1970s.
“You have to be very careful when you start pulling this [debris] out. It was great that there were so many volunteers, but when it comes to the hairy stuff, you’ve got to have the experienced people,” Walsh says. “We want to get the job done and we know how to do it.”
Someday, Walsh says, all of New York City’s Iron Workers will go back to building buildings again.
NY State Nurses Association/United American Nurses
Joyce Buffolino, RN
Joyce Buffolino, head nurse for adult emergency services at New York Bellevue Hospital Center, says when she first heard the World Trade Center was hit, “very quickly things started to escalate. We started putting emergency plans into effect. We were thinking mass trauma, sadly, because of the nature of the collapse” and because Bellevue is the fourth-closest hospital to south Manhattan.
“The first patient by ambulance was a firefighter who was hit by a person falling from one of the buildings. The firefighter kept repeating, ‘They never thought it was going to collapse,’” she says. “To see the pain in his eyes....” Buffolino says, her voice trailing off.
“Before he came in, we were already making up our own scenarios. But people falling from buildings? No, you couldn’t think up that scenario.”
While hospital staff ultimately treated 276 victims, compared with 150 following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Buffolino says workers had “geared up for mass trauma—and it never happened.”
“We were all ready. There was nobody to help—we weren’t getting the people we thought we would get. We were overwhelmed with doctors and nurses, but not with people from the World Trade Center—and that was the sad realization.”
Laborers
Pat Mahon
Pat Mahon was one of the first people called in after the terrorist attack on New York City’s World Trade Center. The 30-year-old demolition worker and his fellow members of Laborers Local 79 worked around the clock to remove a bridge between the two towers, then stayed on, working 12 hours or more each day to help recover bodies.
“We lift the steel out and take out the debris. When we find a body, we stop and call in the firemen and police,” he says. “One day we found 20 bodies. Television pictures don’t do justice to the magnitude of this tragedy.
“It broke my heart. We can build a new building, but we’ll never bring those people back—all those innocent people just going to work in the morning.”
One body that has not yet been found is that of Mahon’s friend who worked on the 105th floor of the north tower. “I just hope we can find all the bodies so all the families can find some closure,” he says.
The tragedy has been particularly rough on Mahon’s two children, ages six and eight. “They’re afraid I’m going to get hurt or die on the job. I haven’t been home a lot and they are really happy to see me when I come in. And after seeing so much death and destruction all day, it really means a lot to me to see them.”
SEIU
Gabriel Torres
When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, Gabriel Torres, a security guard in nearby Building Five, saw “people running all over.” He called his mother, who works for the New York Police Department, to find out what was going on.
“I told her if anything happened to me, to tell my wife that I love her. I told my mother that I love her. Then I had to go. I didn’t know if I would ever see my family again.”
As he said goodbye, the second plane hit the south tower. Building Five, across a plaza from the twin towers, filled with black smoke. Torres, an SEIU Local 32BJ member, immediately began helping people evacuate. Blinded by the smoke, they followed one another’s voices, holding hands as they walked through the building. When two firefighters asked Torres to help them navigate through the building to find people in need of assistance, he led them to an underground parking area beneath Building One—and that’s where they were when the ceiling began to fall.
Trapped under the debris, they dug their way out until they saw light and realized they were in “a big hole”—what had been the plaza between Buildings Five and Six.
“There was nothing but rocks and smoke around us. We couldn’t go any further,” he says. The three men were rescued two hours later.
Torres, 29, whose injuries include a leg wound so deep he could “see the bone,” knows he is among the fortunate: 64 SEIU Local 32BJ members who worked at the World Trade Center—janitors and window washers, security personnel and cleaners—never made it out.
Five days after the terrorist attack, Torres’s son turned two years old. “We baptized him on his birthday,” Torres says. “I’m lucky. If anything had happened to me, he wouldn’t remember his father.”
Teamsters
Christopher Hope
Two days after the Sept. 11 terrorist bombings, Christopher Hope, a United Parcel Service driver and member of Memphis-based Teamsters Local 668, was part of the relief effort headed to New York City, driving a tractor-trailer 1,100 miles with a load of communications equipment needed by the Red Cross.
“There are 200 drivers in my building, and to know that I’m the first one they asked to go, that was a great honor,” recalls the 15-year UPS veteran. “It was an opportunity for me to help in a little way.”
The Red Cross gave Hope disaster relief placards to affix to his rig. On the highways, motorists blew their horns in support and gave the thumbs-up sign.
Arriving on the outskirts of New York, Hope was at the wheel Friday morning—when getting into the city took more than four hours. “We could view everything from the Brooklyn Bridge,” he says. “To see everything on television is one thing, but to actually be in the city, it was unreal. The only thing that kept me from crying was the traffic— I didn’t want to run my bumper into someone.”
Finally at the devastated World Trade Center area, Hope was awed by the amount of relief work going on: “I told my supervisor, ‘Why don’t we go over there in our brown uniforms and help pour concrete?’ We knew we couldn’t. But I did want to stay and continue helping. I haven’t been the same since I’ve been home. I’m glad that I could be of service.”
NY State Psychological Association/AFT
Noemi Balinth
Despite immeasurable suffering and destruction in the days following the Sept. 11 tragedy, rescue workers did not have to look far to find support and comfort with professionals like Dr. Noemi Balinth. A member of the New York State Psychological Association, an AFT affiliate, and the Red Cross-affiliated disaster response network, Balinth was a volunteer counselor on the scene at New York’s Shea Stadium. There, rescue workers who had volunteered from across the country came to get a shower, a hot meal and a few hours of sleep.
“We didn’t sit people down and ask, ‘How are you feeling?’” says Balinth, a psychologist. Instead, counselors would “hang out” with the rescuers, who gradually began to talk about their thoughts and experiences. At that point, counselors discussed how feelings of detachment and avoidance are normal initial reactions to devastating events—as are feelings of emotional volatility and agitation, and difficulty in eating and sleeping.
“The message I send is that these are normal reactions to abnormal events,” says Balinth, past president of the association and one of hundreds of Psychological Association members who volunteered. “That’s very reassuring to people.”
Balinth, who had volunteered following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 on Long Island, also spent a day at a Red Cross family support center in Manhattan, where family members could gather and deliver DNA samples of their lost loved ones.
There, she counseled rescue workers whose strength had been based on the hope they would find people alive. Balinth says when she reassured volunteers about the “grim part of their jobs”—helping families know the truth about what happened to their relatives—the volunteers found some comfort.
UAW
Tim McGill
Tim McGill of UAW Local 863 in Sharonville, Ohio, was one of 45 union members who turned out for a union- sponsored blood drive at the Ford Motor Company transmission plant Sept. 19—and among thousands of union members who gave blood across the country for victims of Sept. 11. A few days earlier, Local 863 activists stood at the plant gates collecting money for the Red Cross’s Relief and Rescue Fund—and in two mornings, they raised more than $5,600, which Ford matched dollar for dollar. Local 863 also joined with neighboring Local 674 (General Motors) and Local 647 (General Electric) to sponsor a blood drive open to the public at its union hall.
Seafarers
Capt. Kirk Slater
In the days and weeks after terrorists piloted hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center, Capt. Kirk Slater found himself closely studying the faces of commuters onboard his New York Waterways ferry from New Jersey to Manhattan.
“You get to know people by their faces. They take the same boat every day. I can’t help but wonder about the people I took over there that morning, how many were in those buildings. We’re all looking for familiar faces,” says Kirk, a Seafarers member who has captained the SIU-crewed commuter ferries for eight years.
Kirk and two SIU deckhands aboard the 150-passenger West New York already had made several runs to the World Financial Center terminal Sept. 11 when the first plane hit. He headed back to the terminal for a day-long rescue effort.
After two trips, “I looked up and saw the second plane go right into the Trade Center.” Soon after, Slater says, he “heard this rumble.”
“The first building came down, came down fast. It was a crystal-clear day, but this huge [debris] cloud was approaching us. I had a full load, so I got out of there fast. But it engulfed us, like the worst fog,” he says. The day’s wind patterns kept the debris cloud from cloaking the Hudson River shore, but many rescue boats were forced to use radar to navigate safely.
When Slater returned to Manhattan, his ferry filled with victims. “We had to use the man-overboard ladder, steadied up against the seawall, and bring down injured firefighters, including one who was having a heart attack,” he says.
Following the tragedy, Slater and his crew transported rescue workers, “including a lot of ironworkers and EMTs,” and rescue and recovery gear to the disaster site.
Now guiding the ferry along its regular passenger route, Slater says it will be a long time before he stops looking for familiar faces.
Transport Workers
John Samuelsen
When John Samuelsen headed to the site of the World Trade Center disaster instead of to his office at Transport Workers Local 100 Sept. 12, he spotted dozens of Local 100 track workers—including many who had just gotten off the night shift. Like him and thousands of other union members, they had spontaneously volunteered their skills to help with recovery efforts.
“They hadn’t waited to hear from their unions or management,” says Samuelsen, a subway worker by trade. “I was proud of that.”
Samuelsen, chairman of New York City’s 2,000 track workers and the father of two, including a three-week-old infant, says the initial recovery work called on human fortitude more than anything. While Local 100 members volunteered or were assigned to weld, maintain equipment or drive trucks later that day, the first work was strictly by hand, he says. As firefighters and police officers searched for survivors, they pulled away rubble they then passed through a human chain made up of Samuelsen and hundreds of union members. Meanwhile, TWU Local 1400 members kept traffic flowing through the tunnels to the city and other Local 100 members kept city transit moving so relief workers could access the area.
“My initial reaction was feeling totally American, and violated,” he recalls. “And then I felt anger.” Samuelsen returned five days later to survey the extensive damage to the subway track—which many of Local 100’s 37,000 members were already at work rebuilding.
Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union/United Food and Commercial Workers
Andre Johnson
Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union Local 338 in New York City, thankful that no member was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, swiftly created a food bank for the families of the victims. Union members took turns standing outside unionized food stores across Manhattan handing out fliers and asking shoppers to buy a few extra canned goods and nonperishable foods to donate to the families.
Helping out is what being a union member is about, says Local 338 member Andre Johnson, who volunteered to collect food. “It’s all about understanding and coming together to try to do something as workers for each other. It’s about respect for each other.”
“I can’t put into words how I feel,” Johnson says. “Everybody’s family has been affected. Unions stand for togetherness, and we need to stay together because this is going to be a fight for a long time.”
