He rushed to the scene to organize evacuation efforts with a group of four junior officers. McLoughlin was leading them through the underground plaza between the two towers when the South Tower came down, burying them beneath 30 feet of twisted, burning rubble.
Over the monthslong recuperation that followed, he saved only two items from his Sept. It was pure luck that McLoughlin was on patrol and wearing his Rocky public-service boots that day, rather than ordinary shoes for his shift on the desk.
So when the McLoughlins were cleaning out closets last year as they prepared to sell the family home in Goshen, NY, it was J. In , at the height of the pandemic, he contacted the shuttered museum and offered to donate the boots to its permanent collection , joining at least 20 other pairs of shoes — loafers, slippers, sneakers, stilettos — already in its treasury. We drove through civilian-directed traffic into Manhattan because police officers and firefighters already were running toward danger at the World Trade Center site.
Officers set up perimeters and saved as many dust-covered people as they could around the area that would come to have different names: Epicenter, Ground Zero, The Pile and, eventually, hallowed ground. We choked on thick, black smoke that kept us from being able to see the men we were rescuing, even as we were chest-to-chest with them. Two officers, Port Authority Police Sgt. Will's wife was seven months pregnant. They were injured, stuck and in pain. Our team crawled over and through hot steel beams.
Lim, a canine officer, had locked his yellow Lab in the South Tower, promising to return, and run to the North Tower to help. Now he was racing down the stairs. That was when the wind started, even before the noise. The building was pancaking down from the top and, in the process, blasting air down the stairwell. The wind lifted Komorowski off his feet. Lim landed near Harris. Harris landed on her side, clinging to the boot of Billy Butler.
A firehouse is a physically intimate place. Twenty-five guys take turns cooking together, bunking together, living together for days at a time. Komorowski was recently promoted to lieutenant, and the first floor of his new station in an Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn contains barbells, a pool table, a gas pump, a garbage can of dog food, a soda machine, a tool bench, a pole, and two big red trucks.
Off to one side is a memorial to the firefighters lost in the World Trade Center. A minute after Komorowski, now 40, steps into the communications room, an alarm sounds. He pulls his gear over his pants. Emotional distance is probably protective. Sooner or later, every fireman hauls a burnt child out of a fire. September 11 overran the usual defenses. Jonas and his men, finally freed from their stairwell, looked around at fires and flattened buildings. They thought they were witnessing a nuclear attack.
The department now has 60 full-time counselors instead of the 9 it employed before September Jonas waited to make his therapy appointment, then nearly backed out. He thought he should be doing better by now.
Jonas is six feet, pounds, with a gentle voice and an intense way of tipping his head down while gazing up at a listener. One time, the nightmare was so vivid I said, I got to talk to someone about this. Eventually, his wife went, too. So did his son, after he refused to go to baseball camp even though it was at the field across the street from their house. Lim has spent two years in therapy.
On September 11, Lim had put Sirius in his cage, intending to return. But I had to admit to myself that I really missed him a lot, that I felt guilty about leaving him there. Komorowski, now 40, mostly felt the effects at home. Summers, Komorowski, his wife, and their two daughters spend a lot of their time outside. His 4-year-old stands on her chair at the table with the American-flag tablecloth, and with two hands squeezes ketchup out of a plastic jar.
He sometimes finds that noises spook him, or being in an elevator or on a subway. Once, a few days after September 11, he was jolted awake in the middle of the night; his body shook uncontrollably for twenty minutes.
I think about that a lot. Therapy helps. Still, it can feel like another symptom. Surviving is a freakish experience. These people really should be dead. They lived a miracle. They should walk through life full of joy. And yet these people—and their families sometimes more so—seem afflicted by a persistent guilt, guilt for having lived. Louise Buzzelli is vivacious and tiny, an inch or so over five feet.
On September 11, , she was seven months pregnant. After speaking to her husband that morning and learning that he was about to walk down from the 64th floor, Louise hung up and turned to the TV. Twenty minutes later, she watched as the North Tower collapsed. How am I going to bring up this baby? Louise, blonde and now with a month-old daughter named Hope, sits on the floor of the family room and talks about her complicated state.
The guilt concerned the widows. Some of the other wives are familiar with the feeling. Their inexplicable good fortune seemed a source of embarrassment. There were of them; for a few hours, Louise had been I know what they felt like, and it was only for that one day. Louise felt she had to do something for the mothers. Canavan said he and a still unidentified man were saved because a large cement wall had fallen over them, creating a safe pocket in the pile of twisted steel rebar and debris.
They began the painstaking process of crawling and digging their way upwards through the rubble. After what might have been 20 minutes, they saw a little peephole of light and got their first breath of fresh air.
I was scraped from head to toe. I was hurt and I didn't, I didn't feel a thing.
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