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Poszywak
didn’t know what to expect when he got there. Like
the rest of the nation, he had watched the catastrophe
unfold on TV, in real time, less than 48 hours before.
Now he and two other firefighters trained in confined-space
rescues were accompanying their colleague Thomas Prin,
an Horry County battalion chief who had served with
the New York Fire Department for 22 years, to Ground
Zero.
Poszywak,
himself a battalion chief for the Horry County Fire/Rescue
Department, will never forget the next three days, much
of which he spent working as part of a support crew
for FDNY Rescue Company 3 of the Bronx. (Rescue 3 is
Prin’s old unit. His son, Thomas Prin Jr., is a
New York firefighter and was near the towers when they
collapsed.)
To
get to Ground Zero, the men had to park five blocks
away and walk. “Except for all the dust and bits
of paper, you couldn’t see the site until you turned
a corner and then you were right on top of it,”
said Poszywak. “It was indescribable, the size
and magnitude of the destruction.”
Pairing
up with firemen from the Bronx unit, Poszywak and the
other Horry County firemen began work at 9 a.m. that
Thursday. They had braced themselves for carnage –
the death toll at the time was estimated at more than
6,000 lives – but the search for survivors and
even for the remains of victims was unsuccessful. They
worked primarily on the great pile of debris which sloped
upward toward the five-story remains of the south tower.
On their hands and knees they searched for crevices
or “voids” where survivors might have been
trapped.
“One
thing I will never forget is looking down into a hole
in the debris and seeing pieces of a fire engine that
had been parked on the street,” said Poszywak.
“That really hit home.”
Sometimes,
when someone thought they heard a survivor in the rubble,
work would stop and everything would get absolutely
quiet, according to Poszywak. “Unfortunately these
would invariably turn out to be false alarms, which
kept the workers’ nerves and emotions on a roller
coaster,” he said. Several times during the day,
he and hundreds of other workers evacuated the site
and ran toward the Hudson River when sounds from a nearby
building suggested it was about to collapse.
The
second day they were there, Friday the 14th, was the
rainy day President Bush stood among the rescue workers
and told them “the world can hear you.” Poszywak
says that Bush, who passed less than 20 feet from him,
filled the workers with a new sense of determination.
“Up until the President got there the sense of
discouragement among everyone seemed to be increasing,”
he said. “But after he left there was a new resolve,
a sense of ‘Whatever happens, we’ll do what’s
got to be done.’”
For
Poszywak, those three days in New York magnified the
pride he feels in his profession and the bond that unites
him to his fellow firefighters. “There was an incredible
sense of brotherhood. When the body of a fireman was
found, the members of his own unit carried him out.
They were looking for survivors, but they were also
looking for their brothers and cousins and buddies.
The unit we worked with from the Bronx had lost eight
people and the FDNY had lost most of its command staff,
including its chief, on Sept. 11. Those of us at Ground
Zero from Horry County would be able to walk away from
it in a few days. But those guys are going to be hurting
for the rest of their lives.”
Now,
back in Conway, Poszywak says that every time his station
gets a call, his response is somewhat different than
it was before he went to New York. “The firefighters
of Sept. 11 thought they were just responding to a routine
call when they first heard the alarm that morning. You
can’t take anything for granted, not anymore.”
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