An ambulance call like no one before
What everyone remembers of that Shelter Island ambulance run into the city was the emptiness of the highway and the speed with which they could travel. Traffic heading east was normal but all the entry ramps for traffic heading west were blocked. The highway was for emergency vehicles only and the two ambulances often seemed to have the road to themselves.
The morning of September 11, 2001 dawned across our Island like many another — sunny, warm and a touch humid. Shelter Island Red Cross Ambulance Corps paramedic Ben Jones went out fishing with two paramedic friends; a little later corps members Peter McCracken sat down in Stars to have some coffee; Helen Rosenblum had been in Southold with her significant other, Ed Boyd, and she started the trip back to Shelter Island; Town Police Detective Jack Thilberg sat down at home to breakfast. He turned on his radio and was the first of the group to hear something about what he thought was probably “some freak aviation accident.”
But then Det. Thilberg’s phone rang — and it was Washington calling.
The National Red Cross was on the phone from Washington. “It was very unique,” he remembered recently. “It’s not something that happens and they basically told us ‘to deploy our assets to the city to assist.’
As the person in charge of the Red Cross ambulance squad, he said, “My first instinct was that we have to worry about ourselves here because we weren’t sure what the extent of the problem was going to be,” he said. He was concerned about “releasing our only ambulances to go elsewhere when we might need them ourselves.” He was convinced that the national office in Washington didn’t understand the local system. “The way mutual aid works is there’s a whole system in place. You don’t just pull somebody out. You go to the neighboring communities and it unfolds that way, so that shocked me.”
The ambulance corps was part of the Red Cross but it also was part of Suffolk County Emergency Medical Services.
“The EMS people were telling me that it was not our business to be going, but we had a higher responsibility to the mother organization,” he recalled. This was not a situation that had ever been defined or discussed. “I’d never thought about responding to a national incident,” he said. The Island was their focus, their primary mission. “But because we were attached” to the Red Cross, “we had another responsibility as well.”
So he made the decisions and called out the crews. Two of the three ambulances would go and one would stay behind. Each ambulance would have at least one staff person on board trained in advanced life support. Nine people would go: Helen Rosenblum and Ed Boyd, both trained in advanced life support; Faye Rodriguez, Chris Drake and Ed Kotula in one ambulance and four in the other, Peter McCracken, Bud Fox, Ken Klenawicus and Ben Jones, the ALS aboard.
Ben remembered, “I was out fishing with two paramedic friends of mine and the call came to come in and I thought it was a drill and I called Jack and said ‘I’m not coming in, not for a drill. I’m out fishing and the fish are just starting to bite.’ And he explained to me in real plain English that I would get in there and on the way, listening to the radio, we realized that something bad had happened in the city. But I never connected us to it until I got to the barn and found out that they wanted us to go into the city.”
Helen Rosenblum was driving back to the Island from Southold, where she’d been with Mr. Boyd. She was told to report to the ambulance barn. “There was some discussion and the decision was made that we would take two ambulances,” she recalled. Ben would be the ALS provider on one ambulance and Helen would hold that slot on the other. Jack wanted Ed to go, Helen said. “Jack felt that he was so steady.” Boyd had made over 9,000 calls in his career as a volunteer. Responders on Shelter Island do 300 a year.
“Jack was pivotal,” she continued. “I remember him telling us to be prepared to be there for a long time, so we brought changes of clothes which we didn’t need.”
Jack didn’t know what they would meet when they came into the city but he was determined that they’d be prepared. “We were concerned about our members being safe and self-sufficient. When you go on mutual aid, you usually rely on the structures there to support you but we wanted them to be self-sufficient … We loaded them up with cash so they could buy food, equipment. If they broke down, they had plenty of money for emergency repair, anything — so they didn’t have to rely on anybody else.”
They picked Ed Boyd up in Southold at the fire house. He had gotten a call from Helen, telling him to get ready. “I was preoccupied at the time for my 90-year-old mother. I told Helen I had to get her tomatoes. Helen was pretty persuasive, somehow, and made arrangements for whatever she’d need. Before we left, one of the guys at the fire house came up with a whole sleeve of respirator masks, said ‘Take these, you’ll need them.’”
And so finally, by a little after 10 a.m., they were on their way, a caravan of two, planning to stay together as long as they could.
Ben remembered, “When we got on 495, there wasn’t a single soul heading west except us. We had two ambulances flying into the city. Everything was blocked, no entry to the highway. We went right through the tunnel, unbelievable. Those ambulances had never been driven that fast. You couldn’t go that fast on this Island even if you tried. It was pretty dramatic. You could see a tower of smoke coming up by the time we were passing the Throgs Neck Bridge. It just blew your mind, it covered so much of the area. I can’t describe it, it was so huge.”
When the crews arrived at the New York City offices of the Red Cross, they discovered it was one of those left-hand not knowing-right-hand situations — they were told ambulances weren’t needed but trucks were.
But they were dispatched to the Chelsea Piers on the Hudson River at 23rd Street. There they took their place in lines of ambulances being dispatched to ordinary 911 calls, presumably taking the place of New York City responders who were down at the Trade Center. But by the time they reached the head of the line, they were each dispatched to assist in the disaster site. One group, with Ben and Peter McCracken aboard, went to a “decontamination center” under the Brooklyn Bridge. The other, with Helen and Ed in the crew, were sent to the World Financial Center, a building several streets away from the fallen towers, to treat “anyone needing medical assistance,” Ed remembered.
As Ben recalled, “It was a parking lot underneath the bridge, a staging area for the police and all the police were coming there. When we got there, we were told to help this big, 250-pound cop who was having chest pains, to take him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t go.
“‘I’m not leaving my buddies, I’m not going and I don’t have any pains any more.’ I told the highest ranking cop I could find and he told me to never mind, ‘We need you here.’ Basically there was a fire hose and guys in white. As the cops came off the line, they’d just squirt them, hose them down.” Their eyes were in especially bad shape, “full of soot and junk.” The crew had eye cups and showed the men how to use them, one after another. “A couple of them were so bad we actually had to set up an IV with a stream of water and wash them out that way.”
As time went on, the crews had little good information — they weren’t watching television as the rest of the world was. “The biggest fear,” Ben said, “ was that this was the beginning of something very, very big. When the second plane came in, then we realized it was a huge, huge deal. I think the whole world almost stood still while they were sorting out in their minds, ‘What does this really mean, what’s going to happen to us?’ The rumors were flying and I don’t remember when we heard about the Pentagon but no one really knew anything.”
At one point a helicopter flew over “and everyone just went flat on the ground, they were diving under trucks.”
Several blocks from the Trade Center, at the World Financial Center, Helen remembered: “We just waited with our stretchers, all lined up with other ambulances and their stretchers. It was really just hurry up and wait. We were lined up and we just waited. There was nobody alive, there was nobody injured. There was nobody who needed us. We all had a tremendous desire to help and there was nobody to help.”
She went on, “There was a bridge where we were, like a walkway bridge, and all of these trucks and chief cars were piled up underneath the bridge, covered with rubble, and you just kept wondering where were the people who had been inside those cars and what had happened to them and we just kept waiting for someone to come down and need us and there was nobody.”
She went into the building, looking for a ladies room. The restaurants inside were covered with rubble. She found a large make-shift morgue. “There were hundreds of folded body bags — and bodies and body parts lined up on the floor. You couldn’t tell male from female; they were covered with dust; they were unrecognizable except for clothing they were still wearing. The workers there were trying to put the bodies together with the different parts, trying to figure it out by the clothing.”
Ed Boyd, with Helen’s crew, remembered the dust. “When we were six or seven blocks away, we started to see this white ash on the ground, a very fine dust, like something we had never seen before. It got thicker and thicker, and eventually it was two inches deep, covering everything. We went into the lobby of the building and set up there to treat anyone needing medical assistance. By that time, it was 5 or 6, maybe even 7 in the evening. We didn’t treat any civilians, only one or two first responders with chest pains or blisters. I tried to look around a little, establish the safety of the area we were in. The windows were just gone and there was always the fear that further glass would be falling from higher up.” They remained there until 2 or 3 in the morning, when they were relieved. They linked up then with the other ambulance and started home as dawn was breaking.
Looking back, Ben remembered, “The outpouring of people there to help was mind boggling.” He went on, “We knew nothing really, until we got back here. We had every piece of equipment. We were ready to treat anything and everything and we never opened the drug box.”
He never did find out what happened to “my cop.”
Helen’s reactions? “I guess I was in a state of shock. I was not unprepared in that we knew what we were going to be facing, we knew that we had a job to do and we were going to do that job and we were not going to let any of this really affect us at the stage when we were in New York City.”
The “aftershocks” came later.
Despite Jack Thilberg’s thoughtful preparations, no one remembers buying any food or being brought any, nor could anyone remember catching any sleep at any point along the way. The crews had been in continual contact with the Island. Jack, who still has a feeling of awe when he thinks about it, still finding it “surreal,” remembered: “I was very concerned with them. I was on the phone almost continually, reassessing what we were doing, making sure they were safe. If there had come a time when it seemed [otherwise], we would have pulled them out. That was my job … There was so much to be accomplished and so much unknown.”
