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CHAPTER 1
In 2002 NYPD Detective Candiace Baker, who worked at Internal Affairs, was suffering from a persistent cough. Otherwise she felt fine. She had no other symptoms: no fever or sore throat, no irritated eyes. But Baker kept coughing and coughing. She was trying to treat it with basic over-the-counter cough medicine and by drinking hot tea. A lot of people noticed that she couldn't talk without coughing, but it now seemed normal to her. Since nothing else hurt, it didn't seem important.
Still, when her ears started hurting, she decided to see a doctor. She told him, "I think I have an ear infection. I just need ear drops." While he checked her ears he asked her how long she'd had her cough. Baker wasn't sure but said it had been a while. She just wanted the ear drops. The doctor instead ran a series of tests to see what was going on. Afterward he wanted to know how long she'd had a respiratory condition.
"I don't have any respiratory condition," Baker said.
"Yes, we believe that you do," the doctor replied.
The doctor then administered a cardiogram. Looking at the results prompted him to ask how long she had had a heart condition.
"I don't have a heart condition," Baker said.
The doctor replied, "We believe that you do."
"I can't. I don't have the time. I'm a single mother." Baker was insistent: all she wanted was ear drops. She had to get back to work.
The doctor explained that symptoms she had ignored for months, such as a burning in her stomach, throat, and chest (which she thought was heartburn from something she ate), as well as her unrelenting cough, were potentially serious. He sent her to a series of experts, including a cardiologist and a pulmonologist.
Dr. Sherma Winchester-Penny, the cardiologist, had an office some sixty miles north of New York City. She specialized in treating women with heart disease in a holistic manner and with the care she learned working as a nurse before she went to medical school. After a series of examinations, she sat Baker down to try to figure out why she had become so sick so suddenly.
She began by asking Baker about her job and what exactly she did. "It's just work — office work" was Baker's response. Winchester-Penny asked Baker to walk her through her work history. Baker answered that she worked for the Police Department, for the Internal Affairs Division. She wasn't in the field, and her duties were, for the most part, administrative and deskbound.
Her police career had begun in her mid-twenties, when she went to work for the New York City Transit Police. She started out on patrol. During one incident, she was injured while subduing an assailant. Her back was sprained, and she had ongoing back pain. As a result, she was put on restricted duty, mostly assigned to work a desk job while she healed. She was also assigned as a driver for the chief of her department, Raul Martinez.
After the New York Police Department merged with the Transit Police, Baker made a lateral transfer to the NYPD. She worked various assignments, including in the chief's office, and then was transferred to work in Internal Affairs, where she was again working for Martinez. She started out in the command center, the main hub where people call in to make complaints against officers or to complain about what occurred during the time of the incident or arrest. On the personal front, her son had been born in 1989, and they had moved to Staten Island.
Winchester-Penny explained that it didn't make sense that Baker had had a clean health record at her last full physical, had never suffered more than a cold, and then, all of sudden, was diagnosed with multiple conditions. "It has to be something you were exposed to," the doctor suggested. It was then that Winchester-Penny asked a simple question: "What about when you worked on the Ground Zero cleanup?"
"Honest to God, I had never thought about that," Baker said later. The doctor wanted to know everything that had happened to her on 9/11 and on the days that followed.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Baker was sitting at her desk at One Police Plaza when she heard a boom. She chalked it up to somebody moving something or something falling. It was just a noise in New York City. When she learned that a plane had flown into the North Tower, Baker joined her fellow detectives in their gym room, which had a panoramic view of the WTC. There she watched as the second plane flew into the South Tower. She didn't understand what was happening, but tears flooded her eyes. Other detectives were crying as well.
Baker was dispatched to several different hospitals to determine the number of injured. When so few showed up, she realized most of the victims were fatalities.
Baker was soon assigned to the missing persons' hotline. She took hundreds of phone calls. To this day, she remembers them vividly: voices full of fear and the desperation of those who didn't know what had become of their loved ones. Baker and her fellow officers sat in a small room answering all those phone calls, taking down names, addresses, phone numbers, and other information. After each call, she would stand, walk to the water cooler, have a drink of water, and wipe away tears. Then she would go back and sit down, waiting for the next phone call to come in.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani arrived in Downtown just after the second plane hit. He went first to Seven World Trade Center, whose 23rd floor housed the Office of Emergency Management command center that he had built at great expense after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The $13 million facility opened in 1999. It was a fifty-thousand-square-foot armored bunker with its own power and advanced communications capabilities, designed to be hurricane- and blast-proof. Those who wondered at the wisdom of housing the command center so close to the site of the 1993 attack may have had a point. On the morning of 9/11, debris from the plane crashes had started fires in Seven World Trade Center, so the building was evacuated. No one, not even the mayor, was allowed in and, as a consequence, the command center was unusable.
The mayor then led a group of city officials, including Deputy Mayor Anthony Coles, along with reporters, through the blizzard of smoke and ash to several locations near where the Twin Towers had stood, looking to set up a makeshift headquarters. (In pictures taken that day Deputy Mayor Anthony Coles, the son of a pulmonologist, was one of the few officials wearing a face mask for protection.) Giuliani told the reporters to tell people, "Keep walking north. Keep walking." He and his entourage went to 75 Barclay Street, where there were working landlines. When the second tower fell, Giuliani and his group evacuated Barclay Street and headed to a vacant fire station on W. Houston Street and Sixth Avenue. From there they decided to head to the Police Academy on 20th Street and use that as their command post.
John Miller, reporting live from the studios of ABC TV, was explaining why New York was one of the best-prepared cities to mount an emergency response. The station's cameras were trained on the fires raging at the top of the South Tower, when, at 9:59 a.m., the building began to implode. Before their eyes and those of viewers all over the world, a giant cloud engulfed the top of the tower, for a few seconds giving the impression that only part of the building had fallen. Miller and the in-studio news people were incredulous as a reporter standing in the street told them that the building was no more.
It was hard to grasp that there was only a void next to the remaining Twin Tower, which was itself on fire. The news reporters on every channel — local, network, and cable — were covering the response and attempted rescue of those remaining in the North Tower. At 10:28 a.m., twenty-nine minutes after the collapse of the South Tower, millions watched, live on TV, as dark smoke poured out of the top of the North Tower.
Suddenly the second tower collapsed in on itself. The giant antenna atop the building tipped back as if it were going to fall off, but then sank straight down as the building disintegrated and even larger clouds metastasized over Lower Manhattan.
"Oh my God. Oh my God," was all the reporter at NBC 4 could say. The collapse of the North Tower shook the ground hard enough to register 2.3 on the Richter scale.
Cameras positioned just north of the World Trade Center complex on West Street showed people rushing north, fleeing the Towers as the giant dust cloud rolled behind and finally overtook them. The speed of the dust storm was so great it could not be outrun. News helicopters flying above the Hudson River captured the cloud on film as it began to engulf all of Lower Manhattan.
The terrorists had treated the airplanes as suicide bombs, turning them against the Twin Towers and making sacrificial victims of all the passengers. The subsequent collapse of the Towers and the attendant loss of life, whether planned or foreseen as a consequence of the attack, added to the enormity of the crime. And although it was right there before everyone's eyes, no one saw the other attacker: the silent killer hidden in the dust cloud.
As the Towers collapsed and dust and debris mushroomed, police, firefighters, and emergency medical services (EMS) volunteers were arriving from all over the city. They would continue to show up throughout the day from the greater metropolitan area, and eventually from all over the country and even Canada. Some were on duty, some were off duty, some had even retired. But they were impelled to be there to do what they could in what everyone understood to be a national emergency.
John Walcott, an NYPD detective with the Narcotics unit, was at home in Rockland County, trying to rest up before that night's midnight shift. As he later recounted to reporters, a friend called to ask what the hell was happening in the city. Walcott had no idea. He turned on the TVand, seeing the Towers burning, jumped into his minivan and started driving toward New York.
Chief Martinez, who was training Internal Affairs investigators, was holding a class at 315 Hudson when the call came in. He was dispatched to the Police Academy on 20th Street, which was becoming emergency headquarters.
Mindy Hersh, an NYPD officer who worked in the District Attorney's Office, was at the dentist's, having snuck away from her office a block away. When she rushed to a window and saw the disaster occurring at the World Trade Center, Hersh's emergency training kicked in, and she ordered everyone in the dentist's office to evacuate the building. Thomas Ryan, a detective in the 106th Precinct in Ozone Park, Queens, had worked the night of September 10, 2001. He was at his home on Long Island, sleeping, on the morning of September 11, when he awoke to learn about the attacks. As he drove to his NYPD station house, he could see the dust cloud over New York City. Once at work he got on a city bus that had been commandeered to take volunteer workers to Lower Manhattan.
Lyndon Harris, an Episcopal priest at St. Paul's Chapel of Trinity Church, had been about to join Rowan Williams (the future archbishop of Canterbury) for a spiritual summit that Trinity was hosting. He rushed out of the chapel to see if he could help.
Suzanne Mattei had recently taken the job as executive of the New York City branch of the Sierra Club. Their offices were at 120 Broadway, facing the World Trade Center. She stood in shock as she looked out her window and saw the fire raging on the upper floors of one of the Towers.
Thousands of people were staggering, running, and walking north, moving as best they could, away from Downtown, away from Ground Zero. They looked like zombies caked with white ash, some with their clothes torn, some bleeding from having been struck by falling debris or showered by human body parts or knocked down or blown through store windows or lobby doors by the sheer force of the impact and its resulting tidal wave of debris.
As so many fled Lower Manhattan, dedicated public servants who would come to be known as Ground Zero responders headed toward the danger to search for survivors. They worked throughout the day, into the night, and on to the next day.
Smoke could be seen rising above the WTC site from all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and even from the rooftops in White Plains some thirty miles away. No one knew if it was from the exploded fuel tanks of the airliners that had crashed in the suicide attacks or combustibles located in the buildings. But the smoke continued to rise — a potent sign of the damage done and the danger still present.
The disaster site covered some sixteen acres, almost 700,000 square feet, about the size of twelve football fields. The tangle of twisted iron and steel wreckage from the collapsed buildings reached seven stories high (and in some places as high as twelve stories). It was soon referred to as "the Pile." It was dangerous even to walk on the Pile. The uneven wreckage was unstable, filled with pockets several stories deep that acted like sinkholes, constituting a danger for workers. And debris was continuing to fall or implode in life-threatening ways.
On September 12 police officers, firefighters, and volunteers from city, state, and federal agencies searched urgently for survivors and began the awful task of confronting what was an active crime scene that — in a matter of minutes — had become New York City's latest mass grave.
The ground at the WTC site still smoldered and fires still burned, and the air in Lower Manhattan was thick with a foul smell. Feathery white-gray dust covered everything and lingered on everyone near Ground Zero. The dust was made up of the jetliners, their tanks of benzene jet fuel, and the entire contents of the buildings: the outside structure, the windows, the interior walls, the ceilings, the insulation, each painted surface, every piece of treated carpet, all the air-conditioning and heating equipment, and all of the office equipment, including monitors, computers, and copy machines. All of these were incinerated by the heat of the explosion, fused by the extreme heat of the subsequent fires, or pulverized by the building's collapse into minuscule particles containing dangerous chemicals and metals, among them cadmium, silica, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, a known pollutant), and dozens of other elements in toxic combinations never seen before. The dust containing these particles was carried by the wind and displaced by the Ground Zero responders who were sorting through and removing all the dust-laden material on the Pile, searching for evidence and human remains.
The Ground Zero responders who rushed into Lower Manhattan — Baker, Martinez, Hersh, Ryan, Walcott, Harris, and others — were prepared to rescue the injured and to recover the dead who'd perished in the collapse. They found almost no survivors and very few corpses — only 291 bodies would be recovered from among the 2,753 persons who died that day.
Detective John Walcott knew the attacks on the Twin Towers were the work of terrorists, having actually been in the Towers in 1993 for the first terrorist act. He had joined the NYPD in 1992 and was now a detective assigned to Manhattan North Narcotics. What he saw when he arrived at Ground Zero, he later told reporters, was "chaotic, people running, screaming, debris everywhere. It was total destruction, debris as high as my knee, to my thigh. Cars blown away to nothing, mass destruction." A doctor was handing out paper masks of the type you would get at a home improvement center. Walcott wore one briefly, until it became too clogged to breathe through. On that first day, although he had moments of difficulty breathing and was coughing and gagging, he did not stop working.
Walcott went down to the site every day for the rest of September, often working twelve-hour shifts. He worked on the Pile digging with his hands, filling buckets, and doing security. There were searches of buildings, sometimes with more than fifty floors. After almost three weeks, he and his coworkers were ordered to go to the American Express building, where the commanding officer announced that respirators would be available. But the devices they received were fitted with the wrong filters. Walcott had to remove his respirator whenever he ate, coughed, or could not breathe.
In all his time with the NYPD, Walcott had never taken a sick day. He exercised regularly and coached the ice hockey team at the Fox Lane High School in Westchester, not far from his home in Rockland County. He'd been married for several years and had a baby girl.
Six months before the World Trade Center disaster, in April 2001, Walcott had seen his doctor. A chest exam taken at that time read "normal with an impression of no acute cardiopulmonary disease." Yet as 2002 passed into 2003, Walcott found himself increasingly out of breath and sapped of strength. As he would later tell reporters, this had never happened to him before.
Mindy Hersh was a paramedic with the New York City EMS when she took the police test in 1984. She was called to police service in 1986 as a subway transit cop, working undercover in every part of Manhattan, from Harlem to Greenwich Village. Eventually Hersh was assigned to the District Attorney's Office at 100 Center Street, where she worked in EAP (Expedited Arrest Processing), preparing legal documents for low-level crimes like shoplifting so police officers wouldn't be taken off the streets to do paperwork; the officers just faxed their arrest information to Hersh and her colleagues, and they presented it to the court.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "9/12"
by .
Copyright © 2019 William H. Groner and Tom Teicholz.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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