Ten Days at Ground Zero

Lawrence Township Police Sgt. Mike Yeh can still see the Air Force fighters rocketing overhead. East Windsor Fire Co. #1 Chief Kevin Brink can remember trudging through the ash that in places was as deep as snow drifts. Both men can still recall the horror and disbelief they felt when they first set eyes on the mountain of twisted steel and shattered concrete.

Ten years have passed since the two first responders raced up to Lower Manhattan in the hours immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. As members of New Jersey Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 1, the Garden State’s elite corps of rescue personnel, the pair spent 10 days at Ground Zero digging through the rubble in search of survivors.

“On the way up they told us, ‘The towers are completely down.’ In my mind at the time I was just thinking the top sections had fallen over and collapsed into the lower sections. I couldn’t fathom that both towers were entirely down. It’s still kind of unbelievable,” Yeh, 46, said.

“I couldn’t believe how big it was. It was a mountain of debris,” Brink, 45, agreed. “It was like a war zone. Just driving in, before you even saw Ground Zero, you had to drive through all this debris and rubble. It was weird because as you were walking through the streets it was like snow, but it was all ash and soot. It was that thick – 6 to 8 inches of soot. It reminded me of walking through a snow storm. And debris was still falling.”

Getting The Call

Yeh, then still a police officer who was assigned as the school resource officer at Lawrence High School, recounted how he happened to walk into the school office minutes after the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the Trade Center.

“They had it on the TV. One of the staff told me, ‘A plane just hit the tower. We don’t know what’s going on.’ I knew then that there was a problem because a friend of mine was a pilot. You could fly up the Hudson River in an airplane like a highway. It was a clear day. I knew you couldn’t hit that tower by mistake,” Yeh said. “And I knew it was something that was probably going to involve us. The FDNY’s [Fire Department of New York City’s] special operations people trained our task force. They had a big hand in a lot of our training. So I called down to the task force and asked them, ‘Are you guys watching what’s going on because this is not a mistake, this is not an accident?’”

He said USAR personnel, stationed in an old blimp hangar at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, had not yet heard but rushed to find a TV at the military base’s fire station.

“We carried alpha pagers at the time. Right after the second tower got hit, we got the page,” Yeh said.

His supervisors in the police department arranged for other officers to keep watch on the school, freeing up Yeh to respond to New York. “I felt bad that I was leaving the school but they understood.” He said school staff immediately went to work readying counselors and trying to figure out if any students had family members who worked at the World Trade Center.

On the opposite side of Mercer County, meanwhile, Brink, then a career firefighter in Washington Township (now known as Robbinsville Township), was on duty at the firehouse.

“I was in the weight room and I saw the very first news break come on the TV. This was before they even realized it was a terrorist attack,” Brink said. “My first thought was, ‘How does someone run into the building?’ And then they started talking about terrorists. The next thing you know the pager is going off saying report to Lakehurst to go to New York.”

Brink, who was working as the shift commander at the firehouse that day, called in a supervisor to relieve him and headed home to retrieve all the specialized gear issued to each USAR member.

Reporting To Lakehurst

Brink was married at the time, but he and his wife Jill did not yet have children. Today, they have three boys – twins aged 8 and a 5-year-old. He’s a second generation firefighter in East Windsor.

Yeh and his wife, Kerry, have two daughters, ages 11 and 6. The oldest was just a year old at the time.

“I always wanted to be a fireman, a policeman, ever since I was a little kid. It’s funny – my brothers and sisters will tell you it’s something I always wanted to do,” Yeh said.

In 1981, as a teenager, he joined the Princeton Junction Volunteer Fire Co. in his hometown of West Windsor and later volunteered as an emergency medical technician with Twin W First Aid Squad. After moving to Lawrence Township, he joined Lawrenceville Volunteer Fire Co. in 1992, and became a police officer in Lawrence in 1993. “I’ve always had an interest in more specialized rescue, so I applied to be on the USAR task force and was able to get on in 2000.”  

“I went home to get my gear. My wife happened to be home from work that day. I told her we were getting deployed to New York City,” he said. “She’s dealt with my responses forever. She was good about it. Obviously, she was concerned for my safety but she didn’t express it. I told her I would call her when I could, keep her updated on things.”

After collecting their gear, Yeh and Brink each headed to Lakehurst. During their individual drives, they each tried to keep up with the situation by listening to their car radios.

“Just as I got to Lakehurst, a friend called and told me one of the towers had come down. He said, ‘You guys have to be careful. Firemen are dying,’” Brink recalled.

The scene at the military base was chaotic, as task force members scrambled to load equipment and gear on trucks.

“By the time I got there, they had three transit buses waiting for us and our trucks were lined up and ready to go,” Yeh said.

‘Dead Silence’

“It was kind of eerie at Lakehurst when we were leaving,” Yeh said. “The base doesn’t have any trees, so you could actually see the smoke from the towers in the distance out toward the shore because the smoke was running south. We drove up the Parkway and onto the Turnpike. And by then they had the Turnpike northbound shutdown, so it was just us and emergency vehicles headed north.”

Brink shared a similar memory. “I remember driving up the Turnpike in a convoy with a state police escort. It was eerie. There were no cars on the Turnpike. Just us. It was weird to see the Turnpike shut down. We got up around Newark airport and there was this dead silence. We saw the column of smoke the whole way.”

During the bus ride, Brink said, task force members tried to figure out “how we were going to help these people.”

“There are police officers, firefighters, paramedics, doctors, HazMat folks and others from throughout the state on the task force. A lot of people were very familiar with the towers. On the ride up, they were sharing intelligence about the layout of the towers, how there were seven levels below ground level. They said there could be 20,000 people in each tower,” Yeh said. “And we listened to the state police radios. And that was freaky because at that point they were talking that 12 airliners were missing, they were posting up fighter planes over nuclear power plants in New Jersey, they were posting up fighters over New York City… So it started giving you a very unsettled feeling.”

When they got within sight of Lower Manhattan and saw for themselves that the Twin Towers were no longer part of the city skyline, “everyone on the bus was in shock,” Yeh said. “But even though we knew thousands were probably dead, we knew we had a job to do.”

On the Pile

Pausing briefly to meet up with other emergency responders, including several with search dogs, they then proceeded through the Holland Tunnel and to Ground Zero. Task force members immediately went to work, some helping search the pile for possible survivors, others unloading a variety of the specialized equipment.

“I remember, when we got there, there were civilians, men in three-piece suits and women in their business attire and skirts, on top of fire trucks and up ladders, pulling debris away and trying to clear the fire trucks,” Yeh said. “I also remember being on the West Side Highway, trying to get my head wrapped around what we were looking at, and talking to a New York City firefighter, asking him, ‘Can you describe what we’re looking at here?’ I had never been there before. I never realized what a massive site it was.”

“We were literally crawling over the rubble,” Yeh said. “It was treacherous, lugging equipment and climbing over steel beams, trying to locate victims. Building Seven was still on fire, so there were times where everybody would have to evacuate off the site until the all-clear was given to go back to work.”

“I don’t have any memories of ever going to the World Trade Center on a class trip or something like that. The towers were always there; you always saw them. Living in this area, I guess I just dismissed them as a tourist site not worth seeing,” Brink said. “But when they were on the ground, the pile of debris was enormous. I remember grabbing buckets and whatever we could get our hands on and being on these big chain gangs getting debris out of the way, digging for survivors.”

Brink added, “There was just so much turmoil. It was so sad every time we’d walk in or out of the pile. There were people there with pictures, begging you to find their loved one. They’d give you photocopies of the pictures. It was disheartening knowing the devastation these people felt, and knowing it wasn’t likely you were going to find anyone alive four or five days in. But people were holding out hope.”

As part of the equipment issued to them, each USAR member had several forms of respiratory protection, from simple dust masks to full-face respirators. “The powdered concrete and debris was everywhere. We were probably less than 1 percent of all the responders who had the appropriate breathing protection,” Yeh said, noting how so many 9/11 responders in the decade since then have died from cancers linked to breathing the dust and smoke at Ground Zero.

“In retrospect we were lucky to have the equipment available to us and we used it,” Yeh said. “But the New York City firefighters … They were trying to dig down to their fire trucks to find firefighters and civilians they thought might have dove under the trucks for cover. The trucks were on fire, so there was thick black smoke. We would go down different holes trying to get to the trucks. I remember many firefighters going into holes with this black, choking smoke coming out. We would try to follow them in there. And after only a couple minutes we couldn’t breathe. The holes weren’t big enough to wear an air pack; dust masks and even the full-face respirators were not filtering everything out. We had to turn around and come out, and yet these guys would disappear in there for 10 to15 minutes and then come out. They were unbelievable. We tried our best, but they were looking for their brothers. Unfortunately, they’re paying for it now.”

USAR team members worked in 12-hour shifts. At the end of each shift, they returned to a makeshift base that had been set up for first responders at the Javits Center to shower, eat and sleep. During their 10 days at Ground Zero, members of the New Jersey task force did not locate any survivors. They did, however, recover many remains and plane parts.

“It was disheartening [not to find survivors] but our job was still to recover people,” Yeh said.

Aftermath

Task force members were grateful to be reunited with their families at the conclusion of their tour of duty at Ground Zero. Brink said his wife, mother, father, brother, sister-in-law and mother-in-law were all waiting for him when the team arrived back at Lakehurst.

“It really made you slow down and enjoy your family, which I always did, but it really enforced for me appreciating the people who are important to me. It really made you think about those things,” Yeh said.

Neither Yeh nor Brink considers himself to be a hero for responding to Ground Zero.

“The people of New York who were there when things went down, from the emergency services workers to the civilians, they’re the true heroes,” Yeh said.

Out of the tragedy of 9/11, Yeh said, the American spirit soared. “You saw the worst of what people could do, followed immediately by the best that people could do. I remember all these cars lined up in front of the Javits Center, with people sleeping in them. The cars were from different states with notes on them, ‘Please don’t tow us. We’re just here to help.’”

“My heartfelt sympathies go out to all the people who lost someone that day,” Brink said. “For me time passes, but these people who lost loved ones have to relive that every year. It’s got to be tough.”

“As time heals wounds you want to make sure the 3,000 civilians and emergency responders who died that day are never forgotten. These were innocent people who all they did that day was go to work or visit the Trade Center,” Yeh said.

Patrick Murphy, a childhood friend of Yeh’s from West Windsor, was among those who perished in the Twin Towers.

“Ten years later I think emergency services are better prepared, training wise and equipment wise. While we don’t want to live in a society where we’re always worrying about a terrorist attack, we have to be a society that is prepared for a terrorist attack. We can’t think ‘It’s not going to happen.’ They attacked the Trade Center in ‘93 and, eight years later, they learned from their mistakes. Even before 9/11, you could see the extremists attacking U.S. interests and we just never connected the dots. And what people have to realize is the extremists are never going to stop,” Yeh concluded.