DAY FIVE:Sept. 15
After another long day of chasing down stories for Newsday yesterday I got home to the great, terrific news that one of my stranded friends and family had managed to get aboard an airplane, which actually left JFK. This, after days of failed attempts to exit the city and concern that the only way back to California might be a very long drive. My niece, Angela, brought hope to the whole stranded lot of folks who came to share my birthday celebrations last weekend and haven't been able to get home. She landed safely in LA in the wee hours this AM. Now everybody is heading to airports, hoping to make it home.
My brother, Banning, has top level security meetings in China. The only way to get there was to drive straight through last night from DC to Chicago, and catch a flight to Beijing from there. En route, he called to say that his missing friend, a General who was in the Pentagon when it was hit, survived. That was a tremendous relief.
Pres. Bush and Mayor Giuliani keep talking about "restoring normalcy", and I can certainly relate to the concept, but we are a long way from reaching anything in NY that could be considered "normal". I doubt that a year from now we will have such a thing. With each day more subway stops open up, and the town is begining to move again. But most bridges and tunnels remain closed, and the airports are nightmares of long lines, cancellations and angst. Businesses are not yet predictably open, and many are obviously having trouble getting their workforces in from outerboroughs of the city, or the suburbs. Every imagineable sort of office has stepped up security, and Manhattan now seems to be a sea of humans wearing ID badges.
All of this is increasingly reminiscent of tel Aviv during the Persian Gulf War.
All over the city candlelit shrines have spontaneously appeared. Handmade signs expressing condolences or calling for strength and hope can be seen everywhere, even in seemingly unlikely spots such as treetops. As temperatures droppped by about 25 degrees yesterday, bottoming at about 49 degrees last night, bundled souls were still out placing candles on the Promenade, in full view of what once was the World Trade Center. In my Brooklyn neighborhood all of the stores ran out of candles, as well as large felt markers and poster board.
Yesterday I found my friends in the city health department. They are a solid, warm-hearted group of professionals, but I'd had a hard time tracking them down because their building, located across from City Hall, had to be abandoned on Tuesday. The entire city health department command post is now squished into two floors of the old public health laboratory, across from the morgue in which body parts are piling up. The health department folks are working with laptops and cell phones, piled on the floor or atop tables in an old medical library. They are monitoring from this slapdash facility for possible bioterrorism, epidemics, trends in the health of the rescue workers and so on. Their exhausted forces were only supplemented yesterday afternoon by three dozen scientists from the US Centers for Disease Control. I guess the CDC folks couldn't get into the city any sooner, as all airports were closed.
At the Medical Examiners Office, where the City morgue is located, tensions are soaring as NO intact bodies are being found. They are -- LITERALLY -- identifying the dead based on scraped tissue samples off concrete slabs. The police officers who do the official tagging and labeling of the samples are getting so emotionally disturbed by the experience that they are rotating them out of the office every other day. Nobody expects to find any more intact bodies. The people were either pulverized, cremated or blasted to bits. Literally every single piece of debris pulled from the site is now being inspected for flesh or hair, that is then submitted for DNA analysis. The scale of the DNA laboratory work is staggering -- it will make the Human Genome Project look like peanuts.
I was awakened at 7 this morning by the head of the DNA forensics lab, who patiently answered my questions about how, exactly, they are going to process and run DNA tests on some 500 MILLION tissue samples they expect to receive from the site. Imagine that. The scale of this is staggering. It will be the largest forensics operation in world history.
The resuce workers are now facing a serious morale problem, as a result, because they not only aren't finding anybody alive, they aren't even finding bodies. The dogs are confused out there --- every object they sniff smells like human, because nearly everything out there DOES have human on it. One almost feels as though the entire debris pile ought to be buried in a massive memorial someplace. It's hard to know what is the best way to show respect for the dead under these circumstances.
All over the city -- particularly around the FEMA comand post area --- families have posted heart-wrenching signs begging for information about their loved one. Most a color xerox 81/2X11" posters with color photos of the missing person. They beg for information, offer rewards, offer phone numbers, plead for support. The signs are impossible to ignore, and equally impossible to really contemplate. They are deeply painful.
New Yorkers are responding with nearly unbelievable outpourings of generosity, assitance and courage. Every morning hundreds of construction workers line up early at FEMA headquarters, set up inside the jaboc Javits Center, to volunteer for digging operations. Wedlers, ironworkers, steelworkers --- these men are coming in from all over to help, risking their life and limbs for no pay. I spoke with some today who drove all night from Massachussetts and upstate Connecticut to make it in the morning lineup. These are the working class of America -- rugged, tough-talking guys who usually mill about cursing their foremen and talking about women in ways we females would rather not hear. But now they tell me they are patriots, construction soldiers, on the front lines against terrorism. That's how they see themselves. Many had painted their hard hats with patriotic slogans, wore Stars and Stripes neckties or bandanas, and , if they were ex-military, had their combat medals pinned to their construction T-shirts.
At every emergency response site I have witnessed truckloads of donations pouring in. A young African American fellow wearing a crucifix baseball cap approached me outside FEMA this morning asking if I knew where he should dump the 22,000 pairs of socks his parish purchased last night, following Giuliani's press conference mention of the need for clean socks for rescuers. Only goddess/god knows how the rescuers will go through 22,000 pairs of socks. But it's typical of how people are responding. Everywhere I see little old ladies handing out handmade sandwiches they've spent the night putting into little baggies, along with juice boxes. A gang of teens was running through Manhattan today passing out free American flag kerchiefs that have some wierd crystal stuff inside which you rub against and get a heat effect on your neck. Nice idea on a chilly day.
OOPS! Office says I have to bike over to 55th and 12thave to interview the Mayor.
I'm outta here.
Stay well. Stay safe. Stay strong. Be defiant.
Laurie garrett
