“All food and clothing donations, down this path,” she boomed. “Medical volunteers that way. But this is not a blood donation center, I’m sorry if someone told you it was.” A line stretched from the sidewalk in front of Pier 61 right down 23rd Street, blocks and blocks of people carrying stethoscopes and hard hats and sandwiches and dry clothing for the rescue workers. Surgeons and social workers, priests and electricians, architects and specialists in trauma psychology-it has been a nonstop pilgrimage since the moment of the first blast. There was almost a jubilation among them: Whistles of appreciation for soldiers in uniform, applause for the tiny Tibetan monk carrying a stack of pizza boxes.
But inside is a different story, inside is a scene of abject despair. A MASH surgery unit had been set up on the soundstage where “Law and Order” is filmed, 60 operating tables with four doctors each. In a separate room, several hundred physicians mustered as backup. “Fully-equipped: Neurologists, anesthesiologists, surgeons of all sorts, use your imagination,” says Dr. Neal Richmond, a young New Yorker who oversees the center. “Tremendous resources. Ready for a huge influx.” They thought they might treat perhaps 10,000, Dr. Richmond says. But 18 hours after the blast, not a single operation had been performed here. There simply has been no need.
Inescapable is the foreboding sense of doom. In the waiting area, scores of unutilized people are glued to a single 13-inch television with fuzzy reception, hoping for progress. Most have tags on their chests assigning them to various crews: “Anthony, Labor.” “Damian, Architect.” “Baltasar, Search&Rescue.” “Angie, ER Medicine.” Their forearms are Magic-Markered with blood types and crew numbers, which are logged into a central registry, just in case they get deployed and the worst comes of it. A 42-year-old flight attendant from Los Angeles, Per Hampton, also scrawled the phone number of someone to call, a loved one. He is on standby to help comb the wreckage, something he has experience in-he survived the San Francisco quake in 1989. But like everybody else here, he is being held in reserve. “You just feel you want to do something,” he says. “We know there are people down there stuck in the ruble. And there’s limited time.”
A caravan of perhaps 200 EMS trucks stands still outside the building, embossed with flags from Atlantic City, Highbridge, Clinton, Absecon, Hampton, Flemington-as far away as Pike County, Ohio. In the line, only one crew had been called to the scene, and stayed there briefly before being dispatched back here. A small crowd gathered around Mike Chiaramonte, 57, from the volunteer fire department in Lynbrook, Long Island, as he quietly described what he’d seen. “They got trucks that are bulldozed and smashed. There’s fire trucks just flattened. Flattened and on fire. There’s cops carrying body bags. There’s guys carrying bags full of parts, hands and arms. There’s nothing left of the freakin’ area. What got me the most was watching a team of police officers carrying a body knowing it was one of theirs. The tears in their eyes. It’s so somber over there you wouldn’t believe it. They got a job to do, and they’re doing it well. But they’re torn apart.”
There are no survivors, not being brought here. The televisions report the number of rescues has held to just nine through most of the day. The weight of the hopelessness inside Chelsea Piers is tremendous. “Give me survivors,” one volunteer spoke back to the screen. “Bring us patients.” Desolation broke briefly when a man swung himself from a basketball net to hang an American flag; from throughout the room came a muttered but resolute national anthem.
Beginning at 3 p.m., crews began to dismantle parts of the surgery room and transfer medical equipment elsewhere. “Until this morning, we had reassurances that 500 police officers would be shipped to us. But I might have seen at the most 10 people treated for nonacute cases. Scratches,” says John Chen, the physician coordinator, who first arrived here yesterday morning. “Now we have 10 tables. We are now shipping medical supplies down to Ground Zero.” By 6:30, the site was demobilized altogether.
But what if survivors are ultimately found? “The feeling is,” says Chen, “that there will not be so many as to overwhelm the hospitals.”
Hearing this, a woman approached insistently. “I just heard someone talking over his cell phone to a search-and-rescue crew down there,” she said. “And he says they located three people alive beneath a slab of concrete at the PATH station.”
Chen shrugged. “We’ve been hearing about the cell phone calls and all the rest. But they’re not bringing us anybody,” he said. “Basically from a doctor’s standpoint, we’re just staying available. And trying to take care of one another.”
