National Observer, Australia, No. 81 (Dec. 2009 - Feb. 2010)

 

Why cops ran in as the Twin Towers crumbled

by Brett Williams

National Observer
Australia's independent current affairs online journal
No. 81 (Dec. 2009 - Feb. 2010).

New York Port Authority Police lieutenant Jeff Baumbach spent hundreds of days — including day one — at Ground Zero after the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York's Twin Towers. Invited to address the annual conference of the Police Association of South Australia in October 2009, as the president of the Port Authority Police Lieutenants Benevolent Association, he gave delegates his graphic personal account of the horror.

 

Between the dead bodies of two Port Authority Police officers, in the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, lay two other bodies. They were those of elderly disabled women, whom Captain Kathy Mazza and Officer Steve Huczko had tried to shield and refused to leave behind.

Jeff Baumbach — then a Port Authority Police sergeant — and some of his colleagues uncovered all four bodies. And, from their dead mates' location and radio transmissions, they were able to work out what had happened.

"They just couldn't get them out of the building," Baumbach explained. "And, when it came time, I'm sure they (the officers) had a few seconds to make a dash for somewhere, but they wouldn't leave (the two women). We found them right there, all together."

Three other Baumbach colleagues, Antonio Rodrigues, Chris Amoroso and Dominick Pezullo, also died in the September 11 terrorist attack on New York's Twin Towers in 2001.

They and rookie Will Jimeno had stepped up to head straight into the disaster zone, with Sergeant John McLoughlin, to get imperilled workers and others out to safety. But, once they were in the thick of the chaos, the South Tower came crashing down on top of all five cops.

Rodrigues and Amoroso died instantly. The other three wound up trapped, but Pezullo managed to dig himself out of the rubble and moved to free his mates. Before he could help them, however, the North Tower collapsed at 10:29am, just as its twin had at 9:59am.

A piece of concrete struck and killed Pezullo. He had fallen not far from McLoughlin, to whom he spoke his dying words.

The two survivors, Jimeno and McLoughlin, remained buried in rubble until a bunch of New York City cops dug them out, after dark, 13 and 22 hours later. Each emerged with badly damaged legs and would undergo many operations.

The world would come to know McLoughlin as the last man pulled alive from the World Trade Center after the September 11 attack. But, today, neither he nor Jimeno is able to walk unassisted.

Another cop lucky to survive was Sergeant Bob Vargas, who ran into the lobby of one of the towers to evacuate people. But when the 110 floors above him came crashing down, the compressed air underneath them forced him off his feet and hurled him face-first to the ground.

"That air," Baumbach explained, "pushed him right along the floor and right through a plate glass window. He ended up some place outside, 30 to 40 feet from where he was actually standing when it happened.

"He lived, and we don't know why. He wasn't even hit by any debris as he came down and outside through the window."

So the terrorists had failed to bring about the deaths of McLoughlin, Jimeno and Vargas, but 37 Port Authority Police officers did die that day. Three or four of them were close mates of Baumbach, and a dozen or so others had worked with or under him.

"It was the worst tragedy ever to befall a law enforcement agency in United States history," he said. "And there was no discrimination: the officers killed were from all ranks, all nationalities, all religions and both sexes.

"Even our highest-ranking official, Superintendent Fred Morrone, was killed. He was leading some guys in the rescue effort when one of the buildings came down."

Baumbach was not on duty when the hijacked airliners struck the towers, at 8:46am (north) and 9:03am (south). He was at home, starting his day with a cup of coffee and the television news, on which he was to see the disaster begin.

And, by the time United Airlines flight 175 hit the South Tower, he realised that New York City was under attack. Indeed Baumbach would later say that he thought he was watching the start of World War III.

After taking some urgent phone calls about the catastrophe, he was quickly on his way from his New Jersey home to a police staging area in Lower Manhattan. A sight along the way struck him as particularly eerie: lines of doctors and nurses with wheelchairs, waiting outside hospitals to receive the wounded.

"No one was showing up," he said. "People, who were hurt a little bit, ran. They weren't going to stay there."

But Baumbach saw and heard of many more horrors that day, and in the days and weeks that followed. He knew that people had jumped to their deaths from the upper storeys of the towers to escape the raging fires.

Their bodies literally burst on impact with the ground; cops racing between the buildings slipped and slid in their entrails.

One of the most eerie sights to Baumbach was the dust-covered survivors whom he described as looking like ghosts as they fled the mayhem. And what remained of the facade of the South Tower, rising up out of the ruins, reminded him of an old science-fiction movie.

"The fires were raging and debris was raining down from all over the place," he remembered. "The streets were covered with it.

"On the ground level were fumes and clouds of dust and acrid smoke. The concrete and everything was pulverised, so it was in the air.

"The fires burned for 99 days. We put a probe down through the rubble sometime before Thanksgiving (late November) and it was still 1,600 degrees (Fahrenheit) down in the middle.

"An aircraft engine was found 78 blocks away. Because of the impact, it came away from the aircraft and just kept going through the air."

For their heroic rescue and recovery efforts, Baumbach continues to pay tribute to "my people", his officers. "They evacuated almost 50,000 people that day," he said proudly.

And Baumbach saw much more of that stoicism and dedication through the following weeks, as he and his officers worked on the recovery of the dead at Ground Zero. Some defied evacuation sirens, which sounded to warn of potentially dangerous movement in the wreckage.

In one case of respectful defiance, an officer told Baumbach: "I can't go. If this thing collapses, we're never going to get back to where we are now. We're never going to get this body out of here."

Baumbach responded: "This guy's dead. He's been dead for three weeks." But, still, his officer insisted: "I'm not leaving."

So Baumbach joined him, saying: "Okay, then I'm not leaving." Other officers then stood up to announce their refusal to leave, and none of them evacuated.

They then tried to remove the body but, pinned under a massive girder, it was immovable. One officer, desperate to retrieve at least some part of the dead man, took hold of a shovel.

"He got as far down the torso as he could, where the girder was, and away he hacked," Baumbach recalls. "He separated the guy from the part of him that was under the girder, then everybody grabbed an arm and we took the man with us.

"If the rubble had caved in, not only would nobody have found the man, but nobody would have found us either. But the guys felt so strongly about the family of that person having something with which to get real closure.

"That happened a lot. If we found a finger, anything, it was important that the family was notified so that they had something to bury, a ceremony, and a place to visit later."

After these dedicated cops heard talk of assignments to other duties, some vowed: "If we get moved, if we get transferred, we'll come here in our own time." But, for them, the recovery work continued anyway.

"More than 2,800 people were killed that day," Baumbach said. "In the recovery effort, only 289 bodies were actually found intact. Our people, and recovery teams, picked up 20,000 body parts in that rubble."

Some officers even worked with sifters in the hope of unearthing a wallet, a piece of jewellery or paperwork, anything to identify a victim.

"Our guys had to set up morgues, too," Baumbach explained. "The guys assigned to the morgues didn't fare too well. I don't think you can stare at that every day, hour upon hour, and not be affected. They didn't last too long. We had to get other people in there."

The work went on in 12-hour shifts, six days a week, for the next 12 months.

In reality, most officers came to suffer some kind of emotional impact from the trauma their work inflicted on them. Some became drug- and alcohol-abusers; six male officers and one female sergeant ended up so traumatised that they took their own lives.

"That sergeant was the last person any of our people ever expected that from," Baumbach exclaimed. "She went to work one morning, just like every other morning. She stood at roll call and addressed 50 officers.

"She turned to a lieutenant and said: ‘Lieu, I just have to step into the ladies' room for a minute.' She went in there and shot herself — just like that.

"The sergeants and officers who worked with her every day for nine months said: ‘She was the same every day. I didn't see anything wrong.' "

In all, 60 officers have had to retire from their police careers owing to psychological problems. They have blamed those problems on the stress of the disaster, the 12-hour shifts they worked at Ground Zero, and the seemingly endless funerals they attended.

"We did that (attended funerals) 37 times in 12 months," Baumbach remembers. "It was getting to the point where guys said: ‘We can't do this anymore.' Two times a month in that period, sometimes three, was just incredible.

"Hundreds of our officers have now attended counselling sessions. And a lot of them, eight years later, are still suffering."

Some officers are destined to become physically ill, too, and even die after the next 10 years. Their deaths will come about, according to medical advice, as a result of inhaling asbestos dust which filled the air after the attack.

But seven years ago, many cops encountered another struggle: their return to regular patrol work after months spent working in the pit of Ground Zero.

"Guys couldn't go from complete mayhem to walking a beat, checking doorknobs and doing traffic stops," Baumbach said. "They couldn't get back into the cycle of regular police work.

"And many had trouble with what had changed: going from fighting criminals to now, all of a sudden, being in the anti-terrorist business."

On Baumbach, too, September 11 took an emotional toll. He managed never to shed a tear in front of other cops, or around his two children. One place he did allow his emotions to flow, at times, was in his car on the way home from work.

The other was at home, in quiet moments with his wife, Kathleen. She, too, had known several of her husband's colleagues killed in the line duty.

With such a heavy workload through the 12 months after the attack, Baumbach saw little of his children, then aged six and seven.

"I really only showed up one day a week," he said, "and most of the time they were asleep. I still have some of the crayon drawings they would leave on the table for me to see when I came home each night.

"I take my hat off to my wife because she raised them for that year. And she did one hell of a job keeping things together at home while I was working those insane 12-hour shifts."

More emotionally challenging than anything to Baumbach was listening to recordings of his fellow officers' radio transmissions before their deaths.

"You could hear those guys screaming for help," he remembers. "That was the worst. I couldn't take that."

Although Baumbach thinks he has mellowed with the passage of time, all his memories of September 11 remain vivid. And, as for the terrorists, he hopes they had "the express elevator to Hell".

Throughout the days that Baumbach spent amid the death and destruction of September 11, he thought about his oath of office, his duty to protect his community. It was important to him to serve, as always, with honour and integrity.

When the curious asked him why he was a cop, and put his life on the line for strangers, he told them. "For the majority of people who take this job, it's in their blood," he said. "You want to do the right thing.

"That is why, when everyone else is running away, we're running in. And that's what separates us: the bell rings, and we go. We stick our necks out for people who we don't even know."

Baumbach ended his address to the Police Association conference with a plea for his Australian counterparts to stay committed to their safety. "Please, please be careful," he insisted.

"Protect yourselves, protect your partners, and keep vigilant at all times. These are strange, strange times. To the people we're dealing with now, life means nothing. Your safety is absolutely none of their concern."

 

The author Brett Williams, a former South Australian police officer, is associate editor of the SA Police Journal. This article, from the December 2009 issue of the Police Journal, is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Police Association of South Australia.

National Observer, Australia, No. 81 (Dec. 2009 - Feb. 2010)