By:Lisa Kovacik and JOSEPH KELLARD
Twelve hours. Twelve firefighters. Each man tested both his physical and emotional limits as Island Park joined thousands of firefighters in cleaning up the wreckage at the World Trade Center. These men arrived at the scene at midnight on the Thursday following the atrocities and worked, with only one or two 15-minute breaks, until 1 p.m. the following day.
After assisting an emergency situation of such incredible magnitude, Island Park Fire Chief Ron Nurnberger took the time to return our call the same day he arrived back in Island Park.
Inconceivable, he said. There were firefighters from Newark, Boston, as far as Los Angeles. The guys from Los Angeles were doing some dangerous high-angle rescue with their bodies roped to go underneath the wreckage.
The IPFD assisted in the removal of rubbish and the search for personal effects along with forensics. Imagine firefighters going at tons of wreckage with five-gallon buckets being handed down along a human brigade.
We got in line with hundreds of fireman and on hands and knees just dug out by hand this concrete dust, working around the twisted steel girders that made up the buildings, said IPFD firefighter Joseph Annarella. The only thing significant that we came across was a shoe, human hair, a fireman's personal crow bar, and every time you came across something significant it was put in a certain area.
Trucks were lined up ready to remove huge hunks of metal and debris and they were taken to a facility at Stuyvesant [High]School, Nurnberger said.
What struck Nurnberger most about entering Ground Zero was how the closer he got, the smaller everything was. The debris field was nothing, he said. Dust and small rocks.
It was just a very eerie, horrible, desolate site, Annarella said. From eight blocks away from Ground Zero, you start to see the destruction. It's blocks and blocks of windows blown out and rubble along the sidewalk and firetrucks flattened or caved in.
Order prevailed in the darkness, in the smoke and dust-laden air, but a major concern was the rainfall of that Thursday night.
It did help keep the dust down and aided in the fires that were still active and difficult to get to, but the five-gallon buckets became 3-gallon buckets due to the mud that was forming, Nurnberger said.
Keeping the focus on shifting through such a catastrophic amount of damage was emotionally exhausting as well.
Ambulances and whole fire trucks were just flattened, Nurnberger said. I've never seen anything like it. You wouldn't see something like this in a movie.
Despite the astonishing visual, media was kept to a minimum. There were no TV stations, helicopters, and very few photographers directly on site, Nurnberger said.
Assisting the firefighters with food and rest was the comforting presence of The Salvation Army and McDonalds.
The Salvation Army was just always there, Nurnberger said. They immediately knew when a firefighter was in need. And McDonalds was tremendous.
On that Saturday, the IPFD sent six firefighters into the city with flood lights and a generator, which illuminated a police command center at the South Street Seaport. On that day, the department was also involved with delivering food donations from the Island Park PTA to the Bellmore Armory. The American Legion had a food drive and the fire department also ran those donations off to Shea Stadium, where members of the New York Mets helped them unload the truck.
The IPFD is currently working on contingency plans for the funerals and memorials for the city firefighters.
Because there are so many city fire department members working on the scene in the city, they've asked the volunteers to help them in the funerals and memorials in the county here, Nurnberger said.
Like other departments, IPFD is on standby in case the city needs any additional help. Nurnberger doesn't expect to be called, but if he is he said his department is ready.
The firemen and police and EMS workers deserve all the credit, said Joyce Walp, a nurse from South Nassau Communities Hospital who volunteers as an AMT for the IPFD. They're all heroes.
Last week, an anonymous letter was taped on a door at IPFD headquarters. In part, the letter read: Please, in your sadness and in the loss of your brothers, try also to look at this as
