The scene at Ground Zero at 2 a.m., 10 days after the attack, is surreal. One hundred ten stories of two buildings lie crushed by gravity into a pile of metal no more than four stories high. A two-story chunk of one building is still lodged in the side of an adjacent building. Mist from a water cannon perched atop another neighboring building is falling through bright lights onto gas-masked workers. Smoke still rises from countless fires under the rubble. A crane is trying to climb the mountain of wreckage, but keeps slipping back. Small avalanches of debris periodically thunder down.
And a flatbed trailer waits for another crane to deposit a beam from the World Trade Center.
Truckers have been on the front lines since the attacks that shook America Sept. 11. Norman Ortiz, a driver for Document Express of New York, says he came to help because just watching television coverage became frustrating. “I feel helpless at home just watching TV,” he says. “I wanted to get in there and do something.” He volunteered for whatever work was needed. “It’s incredible in there. I saw dead bodies, body parts – total chaos. There’s the smell of dead bodies.”
Despite the horror of the scene, Ortiz is glad he came. “People are working hard. Everybody’s alive – their hearts are into it. I worked on the bucket brigade, cutting metal, doing heavy lifting, giving out food and water, using a pickaxe to break concrete and dirt. I’m going to come back as much as I can to help out.”
Truckers have brought in generators to power the lights that keep workers clearing out debris around the clock. They bring in food and water for the workers, many of whom are volunteers. So many truckers were loading up their trailers with contributions that New York City became inundated with food and supplies.
Truckers also provide the only way to remove the debris from Ground Zero. Drivers of dump trailers and flatbeds cart away tons of wreckage every day, hauling their loads to barges and over bridges on the way to the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island.
Drivers risk their lives making runs into Ground Zero. At least two large buildings were threatening to collapse in the days after the attack. When engineers detected 1/4-inch of movement in a building, they sounded an alarm that told workers to drop everything and run, according to Raymond Acevedo, a structural engineer with Canron Steel.
