I first heard about the World Trade Center attacks when I first turned on the TV in the morning as I typically do every morning as I prepare to go to work. The first thing I saw was the two towers billowing a huge column of smoke in the New York skyline. I have visited New York City and the World Trade Center towers so the picture stuck home to me. One is awed by the hugeness of these towers and their domination of the skyline of New York City. What struck me as even more shocking was when I heard while I was at work that they had collapsed. How could such a huge building collapse with just the collision of an airplane. We are all saddened that such a thing could happen to such a beautiful building and have killed so many people at one time.

I received a call from our fire dispatcher in the evening on October 21st asking me if I wanted to go work on the Federal team assigned to assisting the World Trade Center recovery operation. I was surprised to get the call because it was something I had dreamed of going on but I never thought I would get the chance to go. I weighed my possibilities of going with my supervisor at work and we decided that I could go on the assignment. Wow, I was going to go to New York and Ground Zero! What an opportunity. I was nervous and anxious to go. That is usually the case when you are given a fire assignment to go on a fire, but this was a different assignment altogether. The team was assigned to assist with logistical support of the operations at the site. I was going as a supply cache manager and could be working in a warehouse somewhere in New Jersey, somewhere on a pier at a warehouse in New York or at a supply cache at the corner of the World Trade Center "pile". I had not a clue. I just had to wait and see when I got there. I hurried to get my bags together so I could leave on an early flight the next morning.

Arriving in Newark airport in the evening my driver to the Hilton hotel at Times Square was there with a signboard with my name on it. He had little difficulty finding me because there are very few people wearing Forest Service jackets in New Jersey. We recovered my bags form the baggage claim area and headed into the city. Well I had arrived. 2,500 miles away from my small town of Bend, Oregon (population 50,000) and in the big city. I had been to New York City before as a kid and now I was back. I remembered it as a city of orderly street grids with residential neighborhoods in the heart of the city, people packing the sidewalks and taxis the main vehicle on the streets. Our hotel at Times Square was the perfect location to enjoy the city with the short amount of time that we had after working twelve hours a day. From our location we could get out right after working and find whatever we needed in a short walk.

The next morning a driver was assigned to me to bring me to get my ID badge and bring me to where I was going to work while I was here. I had yet to hear where I was going to work and was interested to hear what my fate would be. A worker in the huge warehouse or a supply cache worker at the heart of it all on the corner of the "pile". The driver drove me to Pier 92 to get my photo ID badge I needed to be admitted to the areas we were going to be working. FEMA had set up offices on Pier 92 to process us as we arrived to work on the project. To get in we had to show picture ID. My driver's licence was scrutinized by the guard at the entrance because when it is renewed they give us a sticker to stick on the back of the license to renew it for another two years. My sticker was worn and not readable. This worried the security guard and she almost didn't let me in. Then it was off to the metal detector where they asked to take a look at my pack to see what the digital camera was. I filled out the paperwork for my FEMA ID, had my picture taken and then we were off to Duane Street fire station to see if we could find out where I would be working. Duane Street Fire Station is the place where the federal team I was assigned to based their operations out of. Being only 5 blocks from the World Trade Center it is a good location for the Incident Command Post. The fire station is known as the "Miracle Station" because it lost no firefighters in the World Trade Center collapse. Even though they were all deployed there that day. We climbed the three flights of stairs up to the command post and called my boss, the Supply Unit leader to ask where I was going to be working. After a short phone call I was informed that I was going to be working the Church Sector supply cache at ground zero. I was going to be working at the heart of it all. This was good news to me it is important to me to be able to help as best I can and being there helping give out supplies to the workers on the "pile" was going to be a great way to do that.

We walked from the fire station down to where I was going to be working. As we got closer we began to pass through security checkpoints manned by police. My new FEMA security pass was working as it was supposed to. When we got to the last checkpoint we were inside the fenced off area at Ground Zero. You could just begin to see some burned out buildings and smell the smoke that was still coming from the wreckage. This weird smelling smoke is like nothing I have ever smelled before and I am sure it will stick in my memory for as long as I live. You just don't know how bad the stuff is for you. It is something that you smell as soon as you got off the subway car at Chambers station. I also caught a whiff of it in Brooklyn when the wind was blowing our way. Getting closer we got to the remains of World Trade Center building 5. The building was a ghost of a building but was still standing and was completely burned out with all the windows missing. Next we saw the hulk of building 4. This building was completely burned out and was nothing but an ugly mass of cables, rebar and beams jutting out. Apparently one of the World trade Center towers had fallen on this building and flattened half of it. Pushing it into the underground mall below. Well I had arrived this was the scene at Church Sector Supply cache. I was introduced to the person I was to be replacing and Ernie (from the Texas Forest Service) who I would be working with for the next two weeks. From the doorway of our supply room we could survey the scene out onto the "pile". Excavator machines were working away on the pile and welders were cutting away at the steel using torches. The scene was loud and busy. I was to see this for the next two weeks.

When one first arrives at the scene of such a terrorist attack, or even a natural disaster, it is shocking and it is hard to believe how such a thing could have happened here in America.. I am still shocked after seeing this wreckage that anything this big could have happened by the crashing of two planes into the 80th floor of the two buildings. Eight blocks of wreckage is contained on the site of this attack.. My first impressions of the scene were shock as to how large scale the wreckage and debris is. The sheer force of two buildings of such size falling down would understandably cause a lot of damage but to actually see it is beyond belief. There are areas where there are pieces of metal twisted beyond belief and also areas where you can see that tons of debris came down in one collapse of material and humanity. Yes there were people in this building and yes they were still hidden inside that debris. Looking at the pile and knowing that there were people who lost their lives in this attack and were still unrecovered makes one look at the pile in a different light. It is saddening. The people had little chance to escape before they were doomed to death.

Our duties as supply managers included supplying the city, state and federal workers on the site with safety equipment and tools. Supplies included hardhats, gloves, respirators, safety glasses, digging tools, sweatshirts, long underwear and stocking caps. These were supplied to all that needed them. In addition we could check out power tools such as rebar cutters, saws-alls and generators to the workers. This was an entirely different operation than we were used to managing and the accountability of these items seemed to be of little concern. Typically on a fire type assignment we would be able to order supplies from a catalog of items that was standard to all fires managed by a fire management team anywhere in the country. This was not the case here where supplies had been received at the distribution center and stored in the warehouse till we asked for them. Too bad they had not given us a list of all there was at the warehouse. That would have made our ordering easier. As time went by I began to understand what we typically could get in if we needed to bring our stock of supplies back up to a comfortable level. If we needed to get in something in that was not at the warehouse we could give it a try at a local donation center, whose specialty it was to call up people who manufacture and sell items and ask for donations of items that we were not able to get through the normal channels. This was considered "illegal' for us to do because as a federal agency we were not supposed to be taking donations from anybody. We used this source only a few times but when we did it was a big help for getting things done.

The workers working on the pile are a mix of contractors, police officers, firefighters and other federal employees of agencies like OSHA and the Army Corp of Engineers. When a body is believed to have been located the police and firemen are called in to do the search. There also was a group of police assigned to securing the perimeters of the site and fire department EMT's who stand by and will assist in the recovery and transport of a body to the on site morgue when one is found.

Not far from where our supply cache is there is a fire station that borders on the devastation of the pile. The fire station was the home to Engine 10 and Ladder 10 and is known as the Ten House. I heard that the whole day shift of firemen was lost during the collapse. The fire station is an eerie site amongst the wreckage of ground zero. Knowing that they were all there doing what they do best made them susceptible to their loss. On the outside of the station are notes from children and grownups mourning the loss of the firemen. To go inside one feels the emptiness knowing that they are no longer there. Not long after I arrived the fire department decided to distribute the surviving firemen amongst other stations in the city. This was difficult for the firemen as we witnessed when they came into our supply area and they were bitter with their departments decision to disperse the fire station's men.

The sights, sounds and smells at the pile are overwhelming. On the pile there is twisted metal and huge pieces of steel from the outer skin of the World Trade Centers mixed with pulverized concrete. The pile is constantly smoking in spots, especially where excavators are digging. There are six cranes lifting heavy beams and lowering men in baskets with cutting torches. There are fifteen excavators with clawlike grabbers picking up material and dropping it in the twenty waiting dump trucks or setting heavy chunks of steel on the twenty flatbed trailers. There are firemen and police searching around and probing for bodies. The firemen are typically wearing their big bulky structure helmets and black jackets with yellow reflective stripes and tan Carhartt brand pants. The police rescuers are wearing kneepads, blue pants and blue jackets and are carrying around tools to sift through the wreckage. Everyone is (or should be) wearing a respirator on their face to protect themselves from the noxious smoke and dust on the pile. The noise on the pile is intense. The cumulative effect of excavators, dump trucks, back-up alarms and other cutting equipment is hard to imagine. The smell of the pile varies depending on the wind direction and where you are. It is an odor that will stick with me for as long as I live. In the center of the pile the smoke and fumes are horrible. A respirator is needed to defend yourself from whatever is in the acrid smelling smoke and dust. When the wind is blowing the wrong way the streets surrounding the pile can also be terrible and make the police and EMT's working the streets come running to our supply cache for respirators. I was lucky enough to not smell any odors of decomposing bodies, but I heard that when the rescue workers caught the odor of decomposing bodies they intensified their search efforts.

To get the full scale of the devastation takes a few days of being there. It is so overwhelming when you first get there that you need a while to take it all in. You can still see the location of where the towers were by the remaining shells of the outer skin of the buildings. Next to these shells is debris that came pummeling down during the collapse rendering it unrecognizable. The surrounding buildings are just shells of buildings after having been ravaged by fire and having huge pieces of the towers fall on top of them. There are surrounding buildings still standing with windows broken out of them and scars left by falling chunks of debris. One building has a huge gash in it where the tip of the south tower came crashing down. Another has a huge metal beam jutting out of it twenty stories up. The neighboring streets surrounding the devastated area are a ghost town. There is a restaurant that borders on ground zero with its refrigerators still running and food and drinks left untouched on the still lit display shelves. Debris and dust litter the floors. There is an eerie feeling in this restaurant. Further back are buildings marked with spray paint indicating that they were used for triage of the injured or set up as temporary morgues for the dead.

The firemen are recovering partial and full bodies of people almost every day. One day they discovered fourteen bodies in a cavity beneath the surface of the pile. There was a rush on rubber gloves and the parade of ambulances past our supply cache was nonstop for a while that afternoon. When they find parts of bodies they place them in red plastic biohazard bags and bring them to the morgue where they are identified by DNA samples. Friends and relatives have been bringing in DNA samples of the deceased so that everybody can be identified. The horrendous force of the collapse of the buildings leaves no doubt that most people will only be identified by nothing more than a small body part. The searchers out at the now closed landfill on Staten Island are also finding small chunks of bone from the victims. Ironically the name of the landfill is Fresh Kills. The searching at the landfill is difficult with dump trucks of debris coming in all the time and very little time to sift through the debris. The workers here are city policemen detailed to help in the search. To be a rescue worker sifting through the remains of the pile must take courage. Not everyone could deal with finding what they find.

Our job as supply workers lets us see all the workers at the site. There are a lot of great people we got to meet in the time we are here. We get to see the firemen and police come in all covered with dust and ash after they have been working on the pile. One day a building caught on fire ten floors up in a building that was being cut apart with cutting torches and we supplied the firemen who put it out with dry clothes after they had gotten soaked by the water they had used to put out the fire. When the weather was cold we were giving out hats, sweatshirt and long underwear to the police working the streets surrounding the pile. There are EMT's who are here to help carry out the bodies from the wreckage and bring them to the morgue. We also meet the people working at the morgue helping to catalog and identify the dead. All of them have gone through a lot this last month of their lives and are very brave to be here doing what they do to help the cause.

They all have interesting stories to tell. The coroner at the morgue tells us of how someone brought in some bones from the pile and thought they were bones from an infant. Little did the rescuer know that one of his fellow workers was eating chicken for lunch and that they were discarding the bones on the pile. An EMT tells us of his runs for blood for survivors on his ATV through Manhattan right after the towers fell. A special forces policeman tells us of his journey underground through subway tunnels and crawlspaces to where he sees where millions of dollars of gold are being recovered by armed guards. Other people tell us that they were watching the north tower burn from their office building when they saw the second plane hit the south tower.

Everyone is talking about the bravery and unfaltering dedication of the New York Firemen and Policemen. I have a new respect for these people after working with them here for as long as I did. They have been here for so long working away tirelessly for the cause of getting the recovery of every last person done. After talking with them and hearing their stories they are truly great people.

Coming to New York in itself was a great experience. Not everyone's job lets you travel out of town on a fire assignment if you want to, and not every fire assignment has you commuting to work on the subway, making deliveries in a gator through traffic in downtown Manhattan or having to decide from hundreds of restaurants to go out to. I will never forget the devastation that I saw at the site of the towers, the sadness that was felt for all of the people that were lost and how lucky I was to be able to participate in this operation. September 11, 2001 will be a part of history for many years to come. I hope that all who lost friends and relatives are able to let go of those they lost without too much grief. Life will go on and our country has been brought together and made stronger because of what happened to so many that day.