In the Aftermath
By Jon Melegrito & Roger M. Williams
New York City
For hundreds of AFSCME members here, Sept. 11 was far from a one-day event. It touched off a seemingly endless period of grueling work, difficult adjustments and searing memories. From Ground Zero, where the recovery effort grinds on, to emergency-relief centers around the city, our members have persevered under the most trying circumstances — determined to get the job done and done well.
Few if any could have grasped the enormity of the devastation and tragedy until they were drawn into it, personally and directly, day after day, often volunteering for the grimmest jobs and the longest hours. Whether providing face masks to rescue workers or handing out Food Stamps to disaster victims, counseling the bereaved or bearing corpses to morgues, our people were there. And there they will remain, helping not only to restore New York City but also the American spirit and the national sense of unity and security.
Seven weeks after the terrorist attacks, Public Employee visited Ground Zero to talk with a wide variety of members of DC 37, Council 1707 and the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA)/AFSCME Local 1000 about their experiences and feelings. Here is a kaleidescope picture of their feelings, actions and words:
"Working at a gravesite" is how Ron Vega, a construction design manager, describes his 10-hour shift at Lower Manhattan’s Ground Zero. Vega, a member of DC 37’s Local 375, compares finding a dead body beneath the rubble to seeing a newborn baby for the first time. "We treat the bodies with tenderness. We want families to know how much respect we have for their loved ones. We cover them with such care and remove them with such reverence."
So Vega works to make sure the rescue and recovery effort is done right. He recalls how, in the days since the collapse of the towers, "a piece of debris all of a sudden becomes a life. We know we’re going to find them that way, and we’re very careful when we dig a hole because you don’t know what the next removal is going to bring."
Detailed at Ground Zero since Sept. 11, Vega works closely with firefighters and other rescue workers. As part of a 60-person operations staff deployed at the site by the city’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC), Vega primarily monitors and oversees the construction crews contracted to remove the rubble during his night shift. But more importantly, "I’m here to remind everyone involved in this effort that this is a mass grave where a massacre took place. We want to make sure we stay focused on recovering bodies."
Working around the clock in three 10-hour shifts, Vega and his teammates — all members of Local 375 — have the enormous job of coordinating several agencies and their key personnel, from structural engineers to surveyors. DDC’s team functions in three ways: as a clearinghouse, providing anything that’s needed on site, from boots to buckets, flashlights to face masks; as a conduit, cutting through red tape to get the sanitation department to bring in water tankers or get the police to set up street barricades; and as a team of experts, eyeballing every piece of steel to make sure it’s not moving while men are working on or under it, checking wind speeds to ensure that loads being hauled will not topple over, monitoring the water seepage from the Hudson River, building a foundation on spongy surfaces that must support 800-ton cranes.
"If it were not for the fact that so many people lost their lives here," Vega says on reflection, "it would be almost fun to watch this process — because there’s tremendous mobilization and team work."
The conditions that workers face at Ground Zero, however, have stirred concern. They worry about the long-term health effects of exposure to toxins and other pollutants. People with a history of asthma and respiratory ailments are particularly vulnerable. "Civil service workers put their lives on hold just to save the city," Vega says.
Still, he vows, "We’re staying to the end. You can’t find that kind of commitment just anywhere. It’s from the heart."
— J.M.
* * *
EMT Sasha Gomez sits in his idling ambulance outside the makeshift morgue at Ground Zero, awaiting delivery of more grisly cargo from the ruins of the trade center. Gomez (Local 2507 of DC 37) looks almost too young to be driving an ambulance, let alone transporting such a load. But he’s been doing both — in frequent 12-to-16-hour shifts and as a volunteer on days off — since the day after the terrorist attack.
— R.M.W.
* * *
Keyboard Specialist Antonio Rodriguez, a member of CSEA, fled his trade-center tower amid widespread panic. He soon learned that five of his fellow members in the state Tax and Finance (T&F) Department had not survived. "I used to talk with all of those people on a daily basis," he says, sadness seeping into his voice. Given a month of optional emergency leave, he reported for work at a temporary office in Brooklyn. "Soon after I got there, they told me to go home: All I was doing was staring at the wall."
As he speaks, T&F’s Terrell Silver looks into the distance and offers no smiles. Silver walked down 87 flights of a shaking staircase to escape, only to encounter "mass mayhem" on the street. Did he then talk about what happened? "Oh, my God, did I! I was calling people back and forth." Like Rodriguez, he could not stand to work during the first few weeks after the attack: "I went in [to the temporary office] for a half day, and the other days I just stayed home."
Like virtually every other AFSCME member interviewed, Silver has not sought psychological therapy. "I feel that the only person who can help me through this is God, and I believe He’s been doing that."
T&F’s Beth Eppsteiner suffered a double jolt: "I lost my boss, Charles Mills, and I knew Harry Goody [a supply assistant and CSEA member] very well." Her Buddhist faith has "absolutely" proved a comfort, and so has returning to work at T&F’s pleasant new digs in midtown Manhattan. "Thank God that we have our jobs and that people kept getting paid."
— R.M.W.
* * *
"The more I talk with them, the more they realize that what happened at the World Trade Center has brought back old traumas — especially unexpected deaths, like you had down there."
Sabina Galli is discussing her experience as a clinical social worker in the headquarters of FEGS, the Federation of Employment and Guidance Services. Galli (Local 215 of Council 1707) has been staffing a walk-in crisis-intervention center. Among her clients was a 10-year-old girl who lives near the trade center and whose life was disrupted in ways that seldom cross adult radar. "She was relocated to a school in another area, and she doesn’t like it," Galli says. "Same with her ballet school. And now she’s afraid somebody’s inside the apartment, and she thinks about wanting to ‘get Bin Laden.’"
Kelly Greenier, a FEGS counselor, was assigned to a community board meeting at Battery Park, near the trade center. But people who attended that meeting, Greenier found, "had basic, everyday concerns, not emotional ones: They’d lost their jobs, their apartments had been damaged or even destroyed." At another location, she, too, encountered a troubled child. "The girl’s father, an employee of Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the attack. Her birthday happened to be the next day — the 12th — and now she doesn’t want to celebrate her birthday any more."
From her regular office in the Bronx, rehabilitation counselor Delia Calixtro has been sent to sites around the city. At Pier 94, a busy social services center that has helped many Hispanics, she turned out to be the only Spanish-speaking counselor. At an Internal Revenue Service office downtown, she dealt one on one with employees who had escaped the trade center and surrounding devastation.
— R.M.W.
* * *
Diane Silver, Robert Benitez and Prince B. Oke, members of DC 37’s Local 371 and employees of the city’s Department of Homeless Services, have been collecting thousands of handwritten "thank you" cards and delivering them to a respite center at Ground Zero. "We’re all trying to grasp the enormity of the devastation," says Silver. "This is our way of supporting the courageous rescue workers who are doing their best under the most difficult circumstances." She and her co-workers have made two trips to the site since Sept. 11, and plan to go again during the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays.
— J.M.
* * *
Helen Wilson of Local 371 (DC 37) became an unofficial grief counselor. Associate administrator of the welfare fund, Wilson is also a social worker; so when a 371 member called to inquire about union-sponsored counseling, she brought that skill to bear. "I called a couple of my social worker friends, and 11 days after the attacks, we held a sort of support group right in this building. Although we didn’t get a big turnout, the people who came said they were glad they did, so we held another session.
"One lady [who participated] said that, when a tower fell, she got down on her knees because she thought the world was coming to an end. Another said to herself, ‘Oh, they’re making a movie.’"
— R.M.W.
* * *
At the NYPD’s First Precinct, Glenda Phillips (Local 1549 of DC 37) is still processing thousands of police reports. Each day, she enters on a computer the names of those injured, missing or dead. "It allows me to relate to people I don’t even know," she says, tears welling in her eyes. "It feels like it’s a member of my family, or a close friend."
A police administrative aide for eight years, Phillips doesn’t mind changing her normal hours or shifting to another office in order to accommodate the heavy volume assigned to the 120 officers and civilian staff. "If I can help to brighten their day and lighten their load, I will have done my part."
The officers with whom she works were among the first to respond when the trade center was attacked. She is grateful that all of them survived.
— J.M.
* * *
EMT Andrea Deily works in the Ground Zero morgue as a volunteer. "They bring in remains, and I log them in a ledger. We try to look for identification, a tattoo, a piece of jewelry, a name tag inside a jacket — anything.
"After we do the recording, we have a regular conversation. Then we do it all over again. Nobody sits and dwells on it. The whole thing is just too depressing. We just want to get the job done."
After working for seven years as a stone carver at St. John the Divine Church, Deily will be marking her 10th year as an EMT in April. Despite the obvious pressures, she likes her job, calling it "a good trail to blaze for as long as I can put one foot in front of the other." Then she jokes that she just might go back to Wisconsin "and do something really relaxing — like sell Slurpees."
During the first couple of days at Ground Zero, Deily recalls, she was really angry. "A big chunk of our innocence was gone. I’m an old hippie, and I never want to go bomb a country. But I don’t fault myself for feeling hatred and wanting revenge.
"I am much calmer now. Once the rubble is cleared and rebuilding begins, people’s spirits will get lifted, people’s hopes will be lifted up."
— J.M.
* * *
A six-story fall in one of the trade-center towers, temporary burial in wreckage and resulting knee, back, and arm injuries have not kept Patrick Richiusa, also an EMT, from repeatedly returning to work at the site. Before the tower collapsed, taking him with it, Richiusa helped two people escape: one a huge fireman with two broken legs, the second "my partner, Laura Siebuhr."
"He basically saved my life that day," Siebuhr recalls. "We were ‘triaging’ all the people coming out of the first tower. When we went back in, the building came down. I thought I had lost Patrick. He found me two hours later, with 13 stitches on his back and arm. I’m just thankful I got home alive."
Why didn’t Richiusa stay home and tend to his injuries? "They were going to give me a bunch of time off, but I didn’t want it. I care about this place and these people."
— J.M. & R.M.W.
* * *
As an acting supervisor in the city’s Department of Environmental Protection,Yolanda Vasquez had to run for her life to escape a collapsing trade center tower. Her lungs were infected by the debris, and she has recurring nightmares ("people jumping, everybody running"). What brings tears to her eyes, however, is none of that but the jolt her experience has given her family: "My youngest sister still brings her son with her to stay with me at my house. She feels better just being around me."
Vasquez’ colleague, Rich Bivona, who helped save a female police officer on the day, has been working at Ground Zero ever since, checking water pressure, turning off mains and so forth. The attack "bothered me for two weeks," he says. "I got very quiet, which is not me, and I stopped going to the gym. But I got a grip after talking to a lot of people, telling them how I felt."
— R.M.W.
* * *
The last time Edith Cruz had a conversation with her youngest daughter was shortly before 7:30 a.m. on the 11th, as she was leaving for work. "She asked who I think she should vote for in the [mayoral] primaries," recalls Cruz, a member of Local 1549 (DC 37). "Then she said we should go cast our votes together. She always wanted to do things with me — shopping, cooking dinner, painting our toenails. That’s what I miss most about her."
Angela Rosario, an assistant broker, was going to turn 28 in November. But she perished that Tuesday, along with nearly all of the New York employees of Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices were on floors 101-105 of One World Trade Center. When Cruz heard about the terrorist attack, she was on her way to Bellevue Hospital, where she has worked as a clerical employee for 37 years. She called her daughter repeatedly, but to no avail.
With no word from Angela, Cruz waited in Bellevue’s emergency room, hoping that paramedics would bring her daughter in. She remembered that Angela was born in this same hospital, and dreaded the thought that she might now return as a corpse. After long, agonizing hours of waiting, Cruz started checking other hospitals and the city morgue. She walked the streets carrying a photocopies of Angela’s picture, posting it in several places. She gave newspaper and television interviews. By the fourth day, however, she realized that her daughter was gone.
On Nov. 11, Cruz held a memorial service for Angela at Hunter College, where she was taking night courses in psychology. Even without the young woman’s body, the service provided the closure Cruz needed.
A single mother, Cruz is proud to say that she "raised two beautiful daughters by myself." She’s also proud of the thousands of public employees who risked their lives trying to save others. Her hospital co-workers, knowing of one mother’s grief, put in lots of overtime on the frontlines that day, waiting for patients who never arrived.
— J.M.
* * *
Astonishingly, the exemplary effort put forth by those and many other public employees has been partly overshadowed by the twin specters of layoffs and privatization — involving the very people who made the effort. Although job cuts may be inevitable in New York’s shaken economy, it seems cruel indeed that they would fall on such people as Bellevue Hospital’s Edith Cruz. Yet the ranks of her local have already been trimmed by 15 percent. And while Local 375’s Ron Vega and his Design and Construction co-workers were still removing debris, Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared his desire to privatize the department’s operations at Ground Zero.
The bald unfairness of all that rankles Local 375’s John Forster, who declares, "When the city called on us, the union stepped in and brought it back from the brink. We turned a site of despair into a site of hope." Cuts and threats notwithstanding, they will continue to do just that.
Death Comes to AFSCME — Again
New York City
Still reeling from its losses in the Sept. 11 disaster, DC 37 and Civil Service Employees Association/AFSCME Local 1000 members were burdened with more in mid-November: Three DC 37 co-workers perished in an American Airlines crash in the borough of Queens. Three members of Local 420 were among the 265 passengers on Flight 587 to the Dominican Republic. None of the passengers survived, nor did the relatives of three other DC 37 members.
AFSCME extends its deepest condolences to the families of these members who lost their lives or their loved ones. The DC 37 dead:
The CSEA dead:
