9/11: 20 YEARS LATER
KEEPING NYC MOVING
Remembering the rescue efforts of the city’s transit workers
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
fi refi ghters, 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
am, 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 Mc-
Cawley, 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 subways down,
MTA rerouted its buses to pick
people up and shuttle them to
safety.
One of those drivers was
Ron Gibson, who remembers
throngs of dust-covered New
Yorkers streaming toward him
on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg
COURIER LIFE, S A12 EPTEMBER 10-16, 2021
Bridge.
“They were coming, like
thousands,” he said. “I tried to
carry as much as I can, I didn’t
care if they were on the roof.”
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.
“They asked me where I was
going and they told me what bus
to get on. I ended up getting on
a bus and getting a ride home,
somebody handed me a bottle
of water,” he said. “It was a very
disturbing time but having the
transportation systems being
there for you was a comforting
thing.”
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.
“Transit were the fi rst people
on the scene with their
structural equipment,” said former
bus driver Gibson, who volunteered
to bring cops and fi refi
ghters to Ground Zero for a
year afterward. “They were the
ones that had the equipment to
move steel beams.”
Some workers joined the socalled
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.
“We would shoot up to his
place in the Bronx and sleep, put
on the same clothes, and head
back down,” McCawley said.
“We didn’t change our clothes.
If you were down there within
a half an hour, you’d be covered
with grey dust anyway.”
Back on track
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.”
Workers in MTA safety gear at the rubble at Ground Zero. New York Transit Museum Collection