9/11: 20 Years Later
The heroic rescue efforts of transit workers on 9/11
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Retired subway signal maintainer
Frank Tarulli is still processing
his traumatic experiences of 9/11,
when he rushed to the World Trade Center
site after the Twin Towers collapsed and
found the hellish scene covered in dark ash
and a burnt smell.
“It looked like nighttime, it was so
clouded and just looked so dismal down
there,” said Tarulli. “It was almost like
breathing in something solid, that’s how
bad it was.”
The retiree was part of a convoy of hundreds
of transit workers delivering safety
equipment and heavy machinery to Ground
Zero after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Along with police and firefighters,
employees from across the mass transit
system were at the forefront of the 9/11
rescue efforts, transporting New Yorkers
fl eeing from Lower Manhattan to their
homes and repurposing their heavy equipment
and detailed knowledge of the city’s
infrastructure to recover survivors from
the rubble.
“Every time there’s a disaster, all city
workers become emergency workers, and
that’s what we were,” said Tarulli. “The
cops and the fi remen were the frontline,
we understand that, but we were right there
with them.”
System shutdown
Metropolitan Transportation Authority
managers at the Subway Command Center
(the subway’s nerve center in Midtown now
called the Rail Control Center) decided to
shut down subway service at 10:20 a.m.,
after the collapse of the South Tower and
eight minutes before the fall of the North
Tower.
The collapse crushed the Cortlandt
Street station underneath the World Trade
Center on the 1 line, with steel beams
piercing through 7 feet of earth, through
the brick and concrete ceiling, and onto
the track bed.
“There were beams that pierced the
tunnel like a needle through cloth,” said
Kevin McCawley, a former transit communications
technician who worked to set
up communications in the days following
the attacks.
“It was kind of creepy as you’re going
along the subway tunnel, everything looked
normal and then the wall looked a little
caved in at the top and — boom — you just
hit a wall of debris,” he said.
As people fl ed Manhattan and with the
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT MUSEUM
Workers in MTA safety gear at the rubble at Ground Zero.
Beams from the collapsing Twin Towers shot through the Cortlandt Street
station “like a needle through cloth.
subways down, MTA rerouted its buses to
pick people up and shuttle them to safety.
Confusion and comfort
For the MTA, it was much harder to
communicate to riders quickly, unlike now
when anyone can just look up train service
immediately on their phones, said Rob Del
Bagno, manager of exhibitions at the New
York Transit Museum.
“It was terrifying to not know what was
going on and to not know what you were
supposed to do,” said Del Bagno. “You’re
changing things minute-by-minute and yet
you’ve got to be able to communicate that.”
The transit historian curated an extensive
exhibit in 2015 at the Downtown
Brooklyn museum about the transit
agency’s response and recovery from crises
including 9/11, the 2003 Blackout, extreme
weather events, and Superstorm Sandy,
called Bring Back The City, which is still
available to view online.
He was one of thousands who walked
from Manhattan over the Williamsburg
Bridge and he remembered how, despite the
chaos and uncertainty, the steady presence
of public transit was a welcome relief to him
and fellow New Yorkers when he got on a
bus in the north Brooklyn neighborhood.
In addition to the buses, ferries and
other boats and ships set sail en masse to
collect people from Manhattan’s piers and
seawalls, as has been detailed in the 2011
short documentary “Boatlift.”
Within hours of the attacks, the fi rst
trains were back up, but bypassing Lower
Manhattan. By the end of the day, almost
two-thirds of the system was operating
and, miraculously, no lives were lost on the
subways that day, according to the Transit
Museum exhibit.
Clearing the debris
In the days and weeks that followed,
MTA transported fi rst responders to and
from Ground Zero and provided their
heavy machinery previously used for moving
subway tracks to help clear steel beams
and other large debris.
Some workers joined the so-called
Bucket Brigades, lifting smaller objects out
by bucket and by hand to make way for
emergency personnel looking for survivors.
“It was eerily quiet, except for the heavy
machinery,” recalled Ray Miranda a retired
lights maintainer. “I noticed there were no
pigeons, no birds. It looked like a ghost
town, like a nuclear bomb had gone off.”
The transit electrician helped install
emergency generators to power the area’s
traffi c signals, lighting and computers,
since much of the power and cell connectivity
had gone down.
McCawley, the former communications
technician, would put in 16-hour shifts
clearing detritus until his arms tired out,
joined by his late friend and co-worker Pete
Foley, who passed away from a 9/11-related
illness in 2012.
Transit employees worked around the
clock in the coming months to bring back
service to the downtown 1 line, which resumed
operations there by mid-September
2002.
The Cortlandt Street Station didn’t
open until 17 years later, in 2018, rechristened
WTC Cortlandt with an entrance to
the Oculus Transportation Hub as part
of the reconstructed World Trade Center
campus.
As the 20th anniversary of that awful
day approaches — and many fi rst responders
still suffer, or have died from, illnesses
relating to the toxic ash-fi lled air at the
World Trade Center — transit heroes like
Miranda can’t help but relive the tragedy in
their minds around September, while at the
same time fi nding hope in the camaraderie
of everyday New Yorkers they were a part
of.
“I still pray for my co-workers and I hope
their health continues to get better, I hope
they fi nd some solace and gratitude in the
work that we did down there,” Miranda
said. “The impact of 9/11 where everybody
was just pulling for one another. It made
me feel like the city was moving back, the
service that we did.”
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