DAY NINE:Sept. 19:
An interesting divide is emerging in New York, not so much along class lines as geographical. For those who live uptown of Canal St., or Chinatown, it is possible to feel little more connected to the disaster than motivated TV viewers worldwide. The smoke has thinned so that what little reaches Times Square or the Metropolitan Museum of Art is hardly noticeable. Subway disruptions are now almost nonexistent above 14th St. And no businesses up there are more inconvenienced by the World Trade Center catastrophe than are their competitors in, say, Kansas. Except, of course, tourist industries.
Downtown and along the Brooklyn waterfront it's quite another matter. Whether people live in tony TriBeCa, pricey Battery City, the rundown Bowery or Brooklyn Heights life remains far from "normal", and the disaster is a permanent visual assault. The telltale acrid stench, while diminishing, is still ever-present. Roads and highways remain closed to all but emergency vehicles. Store and cafe owners fret that they will soon be out of business, for lack of customers.
And, most of all, one feels at war. Downtown Manhattan is full of soldiers, police, firefighters, sirened vehicles, armored personnel carriers and monster vehicles that lift and tow several-ton weighted objects. Barricades and armed individuals determine one's route, whether by foot, bike or -- rarely -- automobile. Camera crews and photographers from all over the world are crawling all over the place, looking for a "fresh angle" on the story. There is a quiet tension in the air, especially wherever pedestrians can catch a glimpse of the horrible, twisted remains that have quite literally become a sarcophagous for some 6,000+ people. I simply can't shake the comparison: the remains of the World Trade Center look like Dresden following the WWII US bombing raid. Or Hiroshima.
As any of my fellow overseas reporters know, there is another striking resemblance to war: the forced frivolity. In TriBeCa, SoHO and other nearby areas diners sit out on the sidewalk, chitchatting away, with the carnage in view. I heard someone on NPR this morning compare it to Sarajevo, and I think that's apt. It's like laughing at a funeral: others may find it grotesquely offensive, but for the laugher it may be the only psychological defense against otherwise overwhelming grief.
This morning a contact from FEMA's staging area here called me, awakening me from a pretty lousy sleep at 7 am. He asked if I could bring over copies of Newsdays, especially issues loaded with photos of the rescue worekrs. "You know, the guys haven't rescued anybody alive since September 12th," he said, "And they haven't found more than a handful of intact bodies. It's so depressing they are starting to lose it. These guys are really, really down. We were thinking of putting up a Wall of Fame to boost morale. Think you could help us out?"
I told some of our photographers, and they jumped at the chance to help, by printing up blow-ups of some of their best shots. And tonight I'll head over after I've finished the last edit for tomorrow's paper and leave the Newsdays with FEMA. It's an eerie site, in many ways. Rescue Squads are comprised of the best trained elite of fire departments and EMT from all over the world. Nearly all of them are men, and they are Big Guys -- beefy he-men who blithely lift the likes of me in the air and toss us into amubulances without breaking a sweat. Many are ex-military guys who are accustomed to sleeping on cots in makeshift quarters. But the Javits Center is a vast, cavernous convention center with three story-high ceilings, glass walls and concrete floors. The entire 2-city-block sized complex is under 24 hour flourescent lighting, and bathed in sunlight during the day. The rescue squads are living in areas that are curtained off, squad by squad. They sleep on a mat, placed on concrete, trying to keep their eyelids from letting the bright lights in. They eat, bath, and sleep inside the Javits Center. Except when they are outside, risking their lives, in Ground Zero.
Even without the tension and hard work of Ground Zero, I don't think I'd last more than a couple of days in those living conditions. It's a testament to their exhaustion that they can sleep at all, especially those who work the night shift and try valiantly to sleep during the day, when the Center is swarming with activity, ringing phones, media and shouted orders of one kind or another. In "normal" disasters they may rested contented after a hard day, knowing they managed to pull someone out of the wreckage, alive and grateful.
But not here.
These guys just weren't trained to spend day after day hunting for body parts. Especially when, as members of a fairly small fraternity of elite professionals, they know each other pretty well, and all have pals buried in that debris. Each of them has to face the possibility that the body parts they are finding, the tissue sample on a piece of concrete, may be what remains of another firefighter with whom they trained, or worked side-by-side at Oklanhom City or some other disaster. It's unimagineable.
My day today was mostly in the office, chasing down bioterrorism rumors and discovering that NOBODY IS IN CHARGE in Washington. Am I surprised? Well, having written a book on the subject I suppose I should have been prepared. But I'm not. It's amazing to discover that nobody at the federal level is in charge of preventing, or responding to, a bioterrorism event domestically.
So much for shadow government.
Be well. Be safe. Stay defiant.
Laurie Garrett
