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What's Left Is Too Much To Take In

Les Payne

September 18, 2001

Watching the scene on television is nothing like standing next to the six-story pile that once was the Twin Towers. (Newsday Photo / Les Payne / September 18, 2001)

The Pile is the great unifier.

To stand before the smoldering, six-story heap is to be baffled as to how 110 stories of steel, glass and concrete came to this end.

It is as if some devil magician collapsed the world's tallest sword into the world's shortest hilt. Watching the results on television, no matter how disturbing, is nothing like viewing The Pile close up.

The police are everywhere and, one cannot help noticing in their grief, courteous. Chatting them up reveals what is dominant in the media coverage. This tragedy has inextricably linked the officers in blue to the city they police. With so many of their comrades brought down in the debris, they come as much to grieve as to police.

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"Is that building leaning, or is it an optical illusion of some type?" asked the Vietnam veteran standing with a police officer at what the media have taken to calling "ground zero."

"It's definitely leaning," said the officer, who pointed south as the direction that wary rescuers stand ready to run in case the lean of the building at One Liberty Plaza escalates into a tumble. The dark, 53-story structure has a modern exterior resembling Venetian blinds, and it tilts toward Broadway.

Four days ago, One Liberty Plaza withstood news reports of its imminent collapse. Since then engineers reportedly have declared it structurally sound. Still, the nervous rumors persist among the police and the workers about the mysterious buckling exterior of the ground zero building that creates the optical illusion of falling.

Nothing else is illusory about the restricted zone around the smoldering pyre where the double towers of the World Trade Center stood majestically a week ago.

A nasty white smoke billowed over the site for much of Sunday morning only to be relieved around 3 p.m. by an angrier, more purposeful black smoke stirred by the heavy Caterpillars - and the weeklong fires burning down below. Somewhere among the seven floors of shops and Port Authority parking garages below ground, these temperamental volcanoes are flaring out of reach and out of control.

Those nuisance fires won't go out until the debris they're feeding on is somehow removed.

To the nostrils of the Vietnam veteran, the smoke had the sting not so much of cordite but a gasolinic whiff he had not smelled since the Southeast Asia war. Downwind, at a certain distance from an air attack, U.S. soldiers caught a scent faintly akin to that issuing from the pyre at ground zero.

All along Liberty Street, weary workers in their double-filtered masks have fallen into a grim daily routine at the rim of The Pile. Some dig away the rubble by hand, guarding against collapses. Others truck the mix of dust and evidence. The Con Ed specialists run their cables while a few blocks over, a motor pool of 18-wheel trucks hums with the noise of enabling generators driven in from across the country.

The state, which laid in a passel of generators for an ice storm a few winters ago, has enough of the machines up at Stewart airfield. But they accommodate private-sector contributions driving up from South Carolina and more distant points.

In just this overabundance, the volunteer spirit around the rescue operation is a contagion. Doctors in their green scrubs offer medical aid and pass out eye wash to all comers. They carry signs urging everyone in the deep-smoke zone to wear masks.

Workers in these tragic ashes along Broadway are tempted with a smorgasbord of sandwiches, fruit, boxed donuts, salads, bottled water everywhere and an occasional upgrade of pasta and desserts.

Walking through the rubble the first night, Randy Daniels, New York's secretary of state, who is helping to coordinate the rescue operation, was overcome by the extraordinary human loss. He and the task force struggled through the blinding smoke and the six inches of cinder powder underfoot. As a TV journalist, Daniels covered wars in Rhodesia and Uganda and the terrorist demolition of Beirut but admits to never seeing such incineration as that ignited at the World Trade Center.

"It resembles," he said, "one of the top rings of Dante's 'Inferno.'"