On 9/11, Not a Single Patient Arrived at the Triage Center

The following article appeared in the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone.

I spent Tuesday night at Chelsea Piers, the sports-and-leisure complex on the Hudson River at Twenty-third Street, which rescue workers had turned into a makeshift emergency room. There were hundreds of surgeons there ready to start operating on the survivors. There were police and firefighters and EMTs from all over the tristate area, and volunteers — there just weren’t any survivors.

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Some of the volunteers, like me, had nowhere else to go: My John Street apartment is only four or five blocks from the World Trade Center, and I had no idea whether there was any home left for me to return to. Others, like my girlfriend, Kat, had been pounding the pavement all day trying to donate blood, waiting in the O-positive line at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village but getting turned away like everybody else. We needed to do something — well, we needed there to be something to do. Kat and I got to Chelsea Piers around five and hit the jackpot; no, they weren’t taking blood donations, but they did pick out a group of twenty volunteers and gave us a job. We were assigned to escort patients into the OR, which Kat recognized as the soundstage where they film Law and Order.

The woman with the megaphone gave us a quick lesson in escorting patients: When they arrived, we would get their personal info, including any allergies or chronic conditions and their religion. We would walk with them from the ambulance to the green room (minor injuries), the yellow room (serious injuries) or the red room (near death). We leaned against the railing as the woman with the megaphone stuck masking tape on our chests and wrote the word VOLLY on the name tag. (Some other volunteers milling about had VOLLY PAD on their masking tape – what did that mean?) We passed the box of blue rubber gloves down the line and figured out how to put them on. We were scared — the patients were due to start arriving any time. Half an hour, someone said. I saw a blue emergency-medical-services van pull in the driveway, covered in soot and ash. Somebody had written “God Bless You” in the dirt on the window.

There were rumors buzzing through the room, and no way to disbelieve any of them. The United States had just bombed Afghanistan, explosives had been found under the George Washington Bridge, the borders of New York State had been blockaded. Some of the rumors were true, most weren’t, but there was no line across which any tale was too tall to make our bodies hurt a little more, to make our hearts move a little more wearily. We were waiting for action. Any minute now, we were told and kept telling ourselves, the survivors would pour in. The woman with the megaphone told us another half-hour.

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Official-looking people milled around: Surgeons and nurses, med students and EMTs, police and rabbis and friars and nuns. A cop came around and gave us a brief lecture on how to read a police officer’s uniform to get his or her name, badge number and precinct number in case he or she was unconscious or wounded and couldn’t tell us. Nobody wanted to go home, really; it was comforting to be around other people, and many of us had no way to get home anyhow. But the longer we waited around, the more obvious it became that maybe there weren’t going to be any survivors here, not tonight, not tomorrow.

Adrenaline secreted into the bloodstream and then not used tends to create nausea and dizziness, so we found ourselves fighting fatigue. There were food tables set up on the basketball court: surprisingly good deli sandwiches, coffee, orange juice, bottled water and chocolate chip cookies. In the gymnastics room, mattresses lay on the floor for medical personnel to sleep on. The grief-counseling table was set up nearby, where the social workers waited like the rest of us for some chance to be useful. We took breaks to go sit on the floor in the main office and watch CNN, but the list of things we didn’t know just kept getting longer and scarier. There was still no death toll, not even a guess. Finally, the police alerted us when an eighteen-wheeler full of medical supplies arrived. We volunteers formed a fire line, one arm’s-length apart on either side, and started unloading the boxes. I bet it didn’t occur to any of us that none of them would get used or that the next day they’d have to get loaded back onto the truck to be driven down to Ground Zero.

After midnight, the cops started telling volunteers to leave our phone numbers and go home. Not a single patient had arrived for surgery. We all knew that the news was getting worse; we also knew that the news would take an incalculable time to reach us. I ducked outside to try my cell phone, but there was no reception. The batteries were almost worn down, and once they were dead they were going to stay dead for a while. Kat and I walked back along the river to her apartment in the West Village, exhausted from not doing anything. The West Side Highway was like a ghost town – no traffic, no pedestrians, only the occasional lone set of flashing red lights. A mile and a half from home, I could see the cloud of smoke lingering over where my neighborhood used to be. The cloud was blank and inarticulate, a monolith with no secrets to reveal to any of its human witnesses. What was it Emerson said: “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing”? I don’t know how long I stared into that cloud of smoke, trying to read some clues or signals or runes there. But it had nothing to tell me. The smoke just hung there in the air, a cloud of death, and the longer I looked at it, the bigger it got, the way death does.

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