/ 12 October 2001

Dignity in the rubble

comment

Henry Porter in New York

The cops have been down here nearly a month and have become used to it, but when people see the ruins of the World Trade Centre for the first time they are shaken. As the van carrying me and six other volunteers approached the ruins, everyone fell silent. You see the forces that were involved and you understand the impossibility of escape. There is also a terrible smell.

Soon we are at the back of the Green Tarp, the makeshift canteen that feeds the firefighters, police officers, FBI agents, labourers and priests who work round the clock. We carry huge containers of food – pasta, salmon steaks and chicken breast – through an ill-lit corridor. I carry ice to a large wheelbarrow used to keep drinks cool.

By mid-afternoon we have a lot of customers. I meet men from Florida, Ohio and Arkansas. Some eat alone, exhausted and grim. Not everyone has got used to the reality. Near the Green Tarp five huge diggers grapple sections of steel with lobster claws, almost grazing over the ruins. In the distance men scramble across the rubble with cutting equipment.

I talk to a man in his 60s who is the boss of one of the four sectors of the World Trade Centre. He takes 200 truck-loads of rubble from the site every day, and his payroll is $2,4-million a week. He holds my eyes and says: “We haven’t been in the elevator shafts yet. We don’t know what we’re going to find down there.” A monk, wearing a hard hat, passes and they nod to each other.

Night falls, and the floodlit ruins seem larger and more frightening. There are puffs of white smoke from the cutting equipment and cascades of orange sparks. At eight we are relieved by another shift. I tramp back uptown. After a shower and some wine I go to see a new movie, Dinner Rush. It is set in a restaurant, and throughout the film the World Trade Centre makes fleeting, ghostly appearances.

But what causes a sudden intake of breath is a remark in the last 20 minutes. One of the characters looks round a packed restaurant in what was the shadow of the twin towers, and says: “Lewis, have you heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? It was destroyed by fire because of the sinfulness of the people.”

New York is no Sodom and Gomorrah. During the three weeks I spent there I felt that the people had achieved astonishing levels of dignity and resolution. Nowhere is this better seen than at the crime scene that was known as the World Trade Centre. I have returned to Britain certain that this act should not go unpunished, for the good reason that it was a strike against civilisation, not sin.