Friday, September 14, 2001

Glimmers of hope
Small number of
survivors pulled from rubble Thursday
By Larry McShane
Associated Press

NEW YORK — The light of a new day brought small comfort to a city in shock, as rescue crews pulled five firefighters alive from the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center in a hunt Thursday for nearly 5,000 missing people.

President George Bush announced he was coming to New York on Friday in an effort to calm the jittery city.

Bush, in a conference call with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki, said he was heading to Manhattan. “I’ll be there tomorrow,” the president said.

After spending more than 50 hours pinned inside an SUV buried in rubble, the five firefighters were pulled alive from the twisted remains of the World Trade Center, city officials announced.

Three of the five were able to walk away after the improbable rescue early Thursday afternoon, authorities said. There was no immediate word on the condition of the other two men who cheated death in the terrorist attack that left nearly 4,763 people missing.

The missing, if added to the deaths in Washington and Pennsylvania when hijacked airliners crashed into the Pentagon and a grassy field near Pittsburgh, would bring the death total to near 5,000 — higher than the death toll from Pearl Harbor (2,390 Americans) and the Titanic (1,500) combined.

“It could turn out we recover fewer than that, it could be more,” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said at a news conference Thursday morning. “We don't know the answer.”

The mayor said that the parts of 70 bodies were also recovered by workers digging through the rubble left by Tuesday's terrorist attack on that collapsed the World Trade Center.

The total of missing people included all the passengers and crew on the hijacked planes that hit the twin towers. “It’s as inclusive as we can make it,” the mayor said.

Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen said rescue workers, now into a third day of their grim duty, remained optimistic.

“There's a good probability there are people in that building who are alive,” Von Essen said. “This is not (only) a recovery operation.

But earlier, workers at ground zero had warned of the imminent report of unprecedented carnage on U.S. soil.

“Let's just say there was a steady stream of body bags coming out all night,” said Dr. Todd Wider, a surgeon who was working at a triage center. “That and lots and lots of body parts.”

The city had some 30,000 body bags available to hold human remains, Giuliani said.

Still, he said, there were just 94 confirmed dead; less than 30 had been identified.

As authorities hunt for accomplices to the heinous attack, a car that may have been connected to the terrorist attack evaded authorities by slipping into Staten Island, Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said. Officials from the Joint Terrorism Task Force has targeted the suspicious vehicle.

And in Queens, a terminal at LaGuardia was briefly evacuated as police detained a man at an American Airlines security check for allegedly making a remark about a device in bag, which was later declared unfounded.

A vast section of New York City was sealed off Thursday, with the stock markets to remain closed for the longest stretch since World War II. Work was slowed by hellish bursts of flame and the collapse of the last standing section of one of the towers taken out by twin suicide jets.

On Wednesday, five people were pulled alive from the Trade Center rubble — three of them police officers.

The New York Times reported that three financial companies with offices in the complex — Marsh & McLennan, Keefe Bruyette & Woods, and Cantor Fitzgerald, had more than 1,500 workers missing. Hundreds of New York firefighters and police officers were also lost in the destruction, along with more than 150 Port Authority employees.

A thick cloud of acrid, white smoke blew north through Manhattan after the four-story fragment of the south tower fell Wednesday. Gusts of flame occasionally jumped up as debris was lifted from the smoldering wreckage.

The vast search to uncover the terrorist plot stretched from Miami to Boston to Portland, Maine, and on to Canada and Germany. Up to 50 people were involved in the attack, the Justice Department said, with at least four hijackers trained at U.S. flight schools. Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden remained a top suspect.

“We’re pursuing a couple thousand credible leads and I believe we’re making progress on those leads,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

In Washington, President Bush worked with Congress on legislation authorizing military retaliation, and officials revealed that the White House, Air Force One and the president himself were targeted a day earlier.

America's NATO allies bolstered Bush's case for military action, declaring the terrorist attacks an assault on the alliance itself.

Gradually, some sectors returned to normal. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta said commercial and private planes would be allowed to return to the air at 11 a.m. EDT. Schedules were expected to be in disarray, and heavy security was the rule.

In New York, the landscape was a haze of gray dust, splayed girders, paper and boulders of broken concrete. Firefighters armed with cameras and listening devices on long poles searched for survivors. German shepherds and golden retrievers clambered over the debris, sniffing.

A morgue set up in a Brooks Brothers clothing store received remains a limb at a time.

Giuliani was among those who escaped Tuesday's attack uninjured, bolting from a building barely a block from the site when the first of the towers collapsed.

More than 3,000 tons of rubble was taken by boat to a former Staten Island garbage dump, where the FBI and other investigators searched for evidence, hoping to find the planes' black boxes with clues to what happened in the final terrifying minutes before the crashes.

Wall Street and the rest of the nation's financial center remained closed for a third day Thursday, with hopes they may reopen Friday. The shutdown on the New York Stock Exchange was already longer than the two-day closure at the end of World War II; the next longest was for a week after the 1929 market crash.

Insurance industry experts say the attack could become the nation's most expensive manmade disaster, with payouts ranging from $5 billion to $25 billion.

The densely packed bottom tip of the island, an area roughly 5 square miles, remained off-limits to everyone but emergency workers. Volunteers emerged from the search-and-rescue mission with grisly tales as they cleared away the twisted steel and glass wreckage of the twin towers.

One body was carried out wrapped in an American flag. When workers hung another American flag from a piece of a transmission tower that apparently survived the collapse, "everybody stopped and saluted," said Parish Kelley, a firefighter from Ashburnham, Mass.

Kelley spent the day working in a crater left by the towers' collapse. As he picked through the rubble, he watched as a man's body -- a cell phone still clutched in his hand — was carried out.

“We’re looking at a pile of rubble 30 to 40 feet high. Where do you start?” said sheriff's Sgt. Mike Goldberg of Hampden County, Mass., accompanying a search-and-rescue dog.

The discovery of a foot and leg and a cockpit seat led to speculation that one of the pilots had been found, Goldberg said.

Survivors held to their spirit, like Marlene Cruz, who sported a neck brace, a leg cast and an unbroken will.

“I wouldn’t let a terrorist stop me,” she said at Bellevue Hospital. “If the building were still there, I would go back.”

For those looking for missing family members, there were unanswered questions. A family grief center set up in a Manhattan armory drew 2,500 family members on Wednesday, said Gov. George Pataki.

Thousands more were expected as the search mission continued. On Thursday morning, Jeanine Nardone was one of the people arriving at the center.

“I don't think my mom will survive if something’s happened to my brother,” said Nardone, whose brother Mario worked in the 84th floor of the second World Trade Center tower. “We’re not giving up hope. ... He would not give up on us.”