14 SEPTEMBER 9, 2021 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
The heroic rescue eff orts of transit workers on 9/11
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
EDITORIAL@QNS.COM
@QNS
Retired subway signal maintainer
Frank Tarulli is still processing
his traumatic experiences
of 9/11, when he rushed to the World
Trade Center site aft er 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 aft er 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 eff orts, 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
front line, 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., aft er 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 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 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. The
exhibit, called “Bring Back The City,”
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 .”
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
firefighters to Ground Zero for a
year aft erward. “They were the ones
that had the equipment to move steel
beams.”
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 shift s 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.”
Read more on QNS.com.
Workers in MTA safety gear at the rubble at Ground Zero.
Photo courtesy of New York Transit Museum Collection
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