Islander remembers his role at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center on 9-11
Islander Joe Hernandez of Urban Search and Rescue is among an elite few who fought through the rubble at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center just after the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001.
“It was a morning that was just like any other day,” said Hernandez, who moved to the islands in 2011. “I was with my wife. We were going to the post office. I was off that day from a rescue job down in Miami. My neighbor came outside and said, ‘did you hear what happened? A plane flew into one of the towers.’ About a minute after he said that, my pager went off…and I knew it was going to go off. Shortly after the page came in, the second plane impacted and I knew it was going to be a long day.”
Hernandez said he immediately slipped into his uniform and packed a bag as the allotted response time was two hours for his team to be at the station, and four hours until the team is ready for something he refers to as “wheels up,” ready to fly to any location. Not knowing how long he would be gone, Hernandez stopped to say goodbye to his three high school-aged children before heading out on a mission he would never forget.
“President Bush was in Tampa at the time,” said Hernandez. “They had suspended all air traffic, including military, air transports and FEMA. Out of 28 federal teams, 11 went to the World Trade Center and the rest went to the Pentagon.”
The team, he said, started off searching the buildings that surrounded the World Trade Center, where the FDNY (Fire Department of the City of New York) was working hard on the rubble pile.
“They lost, literally, brothers,” said Hernandez, “and, of course, they lost friends that were like brothers — another one willing to lay down his life…that’s a brother. They were in a psychological state and you didn’t want them to have the feeling that we were there to replace them, or to take over. It was absolutely the opposite — we’re here to do whatever you need us to do. It was more of a brotherhood. You laid down that federal title and put your union sticker back on your helmet. It was a great mutual work.”
Hernandez admits having been in the south for his whole life left him unfamiliar with the impact of unions until that point.
“Seeing the strength of the steelworkers, and the crane-operators involved in the rescue operations, which were very well needed, was phenomenal,” said Hernandez.
The beams from the buildings, he said, weighed eight tons, emphasizing the need for the steelworkers to cut and remove them. The team saw things like menus from the Windows of the World restaurant, to bank statements, Hernandez said, explaining that the team made it down to the bottom of the basement under the WTC where they could smell the saltwater surrounding Manhattan Island.
“We made it past the subway, past the mall and it looked apocalyptic,” Hernandez recalls, “in that, on one table you would see a set of keys, a pair of shoes on the ground and a half-eaten donut. Once that occurred it didn’t matter what they were doing or what they’d left behind.”
It was those kind of human impacts that he said gave them true understanding of what they were dealing with. Even the conspiracy theory of what had happened to the country’s gold and silver kept safely beneath the WTC made its way to Hernandez and his team, who learned more than they bargained for when they ran into U.S. Special Forces.
“A fellow in front of me, who is smaller than me, shined his flashlight at a particular big vaulted structure,” said Hernandez, “and he’s yelled at to turn off his light. Our response was, ‘Oh my God, there are people alive down there.’ So we shined our flashlights and then we heard a round of clicks — a usual sound if you’re a hunter. Well, it was being protected.”
According to Hernandez, part of American history is that when early aristocrats traveled to New York City, they often came via subway. He said when they began building Manhattan, they vaulted old subway systems where the country’s precious metals are kept safe.
“So we were there…but we weren’t allowed to be there so we were escorted out,” said Hernandez.
Among the most emotionally moving parts of working through the tragedy of the WTC, he says, was the hospitality of the people in New York, who offered the response team everything from cake to coffee, in an effort to help them gain some sense of normalcy among the ruins. Although he was fortunate enough to work the day shift, he said the men would often fall asleep from pure exhaustion wherever they were, even leaning against a building.
“When we walked up to the rubble pile first hand, it looked like ‘War of the Worlds,'” said Hernandez. “Every day the Army Corps of Engineers would place an X or a cross on a building and if that mark moved it was because the weight had shifted and continued to drop. When we were going underneath that rubble to search, we were praying that wasn’t the day that it decided to move more than just a few inches. Because there was such a small amount of survivors, that we experienced, it caused some of the folks that were underground with us to take out a marker and write their last name on the bottom of their boot, or pant leg and then again on their shirt sleeve…because sometimes the findings weren’t intact.”
Whenever an FDNY or NYPD (New York Police Department) officer was found, Hernandez said they were, of course, in full uniform, which made them more easily identifiable. His team would contact the man in front of the rubble pile to let him know they found another fallen brother. That information would go back to the precinct or station so that his particular crew could come to remove him personally.
Hernandez said the team always asked whether they should leave the area or assist with the removal. Normally, he said, they were asked to stay and assist.
Hernandez described the likely scenario for some of the first responders in building two.
“If you get on a stepping machine, you’ve got on your sneakers and shorts and you do 15 or 20 minutes, you get about 50 or 60 stories. These guys had to get up to story 70 and above and they’re not dressed in sneakers and shorts,” said Hernandez. “They had bunker gear on and air tanks-his own equipment weighs between 35 and 45 pounds. He’s taking everything that he can because he doesn’t know what he’s going to need, so there’s another 40, 50, or 60 pounds and climbing 70 stories. There was no elevator service to get upstairs with about 80 to 100 pounds of gear. The building came down within an hour so they didn’t have time to come downstairs. The responders that were in building two were entombed or encased within the stairwells of the tower. Those were areas that were identifiable by larger pieces of concrete. Each building had over 100 elevators, so finding an elevator didn’t mean you were near a stairwell.”
Although a sense of community from neighbors, friends and family met him when he finally got back home, Hernandez admits coming out of that tragedy changed him for life. Lingering memories of the personal alarms of unconscious first responders chirping beneath the ground with no resolution still haunt him, but the bonds he made with brothers working in the pile of rubble beside him are irreplaceable.
“When viewed from any vantage point, our task appeared to be overwhelming,” said Hernandez. “But the enormity of the search and rescue mission was amplified a thousand-fold when viewed from the middle of the debris pile. Nevertheless, you had to persevere for the sake of those missing and their families, and to satisfy our unfaltering hope and belief that someone, somehow, had managed to survive this horror and were waiting anxiously, desperately, to be rescued!
“In the end we did not find any survivors from this disaster. Our only comfort was in the knowledge that we gave it our best effort. To some degree, our search and discovery of the many unfortunate souls who perished in this assault, though sad and tragic, was able to deliver a small measure of closure for a few grieving families.”