DAY FOUR:Sept. 14:
It has been raining hard for more than 12 hours, and the city is quaking under the additional traffic burden that precipitation has created. Getting anywhere within Manhattan is an ordeal, regardless of what mode of transport one chooses. Most of the primary subway routes and road arteries in and around the city are shut down or have been damaged by the WTC devastation. And everyone in the city knows that the weight of all that water, mixed with dust, asbestos and concrete, will render resuce missions virtually impossible.
Phoney bomb threats continue to plague the city, and it is becoming a major cause of anxiety and rage. This morning someone actually claimed to have placed a bomb inside NY Hospital and the morgue, forcing evacuation into the rain of all the injured firefighters and police, hundreds of patients and all the bodies thus far removed from the site. It is almost impossible to imagine what kind of sick mind would think such hoax calls are funny, "justified" or exciting. My colleague, a columnist here at Newsday, just said on the phone to his boss, "We need a secretary to take care of the death threats. I can't get my job done --- these guys are clogging up the lines."
Yesterday I spent a fair amount of time with search and rescue workers, and there was a thrill of excitement in their ranks when a woman said her husband had managed to get a cell phone call out of the rubble, and he and nine other policemen were alive in the debris. Firefighters scrambled madly, risking their own lives to rescue the men. And now we know that woman, an obviously psychologically twisted individual, made it all up.
In this atmosphere all rumours are dangerous. Six of my friends and family remain stranded in NY, unable to fly or train back to the West Coast. Yesterday one of them, Kathy McAnally, tried to board her scheduled flight out of LaGuardia. After several hours, during which police nabbed suspects carrying false IDs at JFK, she was sent back to Brooklyn. And the airports all shut down again. Last night all my sofas and beds were full with stranded friends. I don't think I will ever again throw a mega- birthday bash.
I have been assigned indefinitely to the "bodies beat"; morgue, body bags, infectious diseases.........I suppose it makes sense that somebody who covers epidemics will be ok with shattered body parts. Still, it's hard to handle severed limbs being matched up with torsos via DNA matching.
For part of my story I spent time at FEMA's staging area, talking to brave firefighters. As I was getting ready to leave I noticed a familiar face -- Daniel Zwerdling, who I haven't seen since we worked together at NPR some 12 years ago. He was exhausted, like everybody else, and I realized that we reporters are going to have to start pacing ourselves. We're in for a long, long haul. We'll still be digging bodies out of rubble, and attending funerals, after Halloween.
Last night some of my stranded pals and I ate dinner at 10pm, after I got off the "body beat", at a sidewalk cafe in my Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. As we awaited our food a throng of more than 100 young people --- teens and college students --- silently paraded by, in honor of the dead. When they reached the Promenade, which is a block and a half from my home and overlooks Manhattan --- and the hole that was the WTC ---- the group created candlelit shrines and placed prayers for survivors. It was so moving that I was left speechless as I looked at these spontanseous displays of solidarity and grief.
American flags are everywhere. People are wearing them, they fly from antennas, stores are festooned, flags on sticks poke out of backpacks and from bicycles. New Yorkers seem to feel a sense of defiance and pride in holding onto the Starts and Stripes.
I know that friends and family in the Washington DC area are going through similar traumas. My brother, Banning, was scheduled to meet at the Pentagon Tuesday morning with an associate...a General. Banning fortunately heard the terrible news before he got there, but --- have they found your friend, the General, yet, Bannning? Is he alive? Our leading sports columnist, Shaun Powell, lost his brother in the Pentagon on Tuesday, and in today's Newsday he has an emotionally wrenching remembrance of his younger brother, who was last seen by an associate flying in the air, carried by the concussion of a terrorist jet.
I must return to the "body beat". Be well. Be strong. Be defiant.Laurie Garrett
PS, My brother's friend, referred to above, was found, alive. But the General that was seated next to him was blown to smithereens in front of his eyes. And here's a personal kicker. Saturday was my fiftieth (GULP) birthday. I have a HUGE three day long bash, and about 200 people came to the major party Saturday nite. People came from all over, and many dear friends flew in from the west coast. Now my home is full of stranded partyers. That's to explain the references above.
