This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Firefighter Steve Mossotti deployed to New York City with Missouri Task Force 1 to assist in search and rescue at the World Trade Center.
Even 10 years later, firefighter Steve Mossotti's pictures of ground zero are difficult to look at — and impossible not to.
The images are otherworldly. A juxtaposition of the recognizable and the unimaginable: The still-smoking rubble of 110-story twin towers that stood at this spot until the terror attacks of Sept. 11. A few battered and leaning remnants of building structure that somehow didn't bust apart and would become iconic symbols of the World Trade Center, now missing from the New York skyline. Destruction so massive, so incomprehensible, that the only sense of scale comes from the tiny figures of rescuers working in that horrific scene.
There are pictures of Mossotti's search and rescue team from Missouri in bright yellow jackets and safety helmets working alongside the home team in blue with the telling block letters on their backs: FDNY and NYPD. Earnest rescuers — some wearing masks, many of them not — digging by hand through twisted beams and pulverized concrete, mangled office furnishings and much, much worse, hoping to find someone buried alive.
Even the team's two search dogs seem apprehensive as they sit in the front seat of a bright green jeep waiting to go to work. To the right is a cheerfully upholstered chair — where did it come from? The ground is literally blanketed in paper — business letters and documents that came from someone's desk in an office that once touched the sky.
Mossotti's first glimpse of ground zero came on the evening of Sept. 12 with other members of Missouri Task Force 1, an urban search and rescue team authorized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"It was just surreal,'' he said. "Walking in there and standing up on that rubble pile and looking around. There was still smoke. And the upper floors of the building next door were burning still. It was like, 'All right, I've been to hell. I know what hell looks like now.'''
Within hours of the terror attacks, Mossotti and two other firefighters from Mehlville — Joe Schmidt and Dave Waser — had begun packing their gear, preparing for an expected deployment with the Missouri task force. When the second hijacked plane slammed into the World Trade Center and another hit the Pentagon, it had become clear that the New York disaster was no accident. The 62-member squad flew out of Whiteman Air Force Base near Sedalia early that afternoon and arrived in New Jersey that night. The team was put through heavy security screenings every step of the way — a clue to the extraordinary nature of their mission as the nation withstood terror attacks. Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day by hijackers who crashed passenger-filled U.S. airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a remote field in Pennsylvania.
"We realized early on that this is a big thing that's going to go down in history,'' Mossotti said. "But the magnitude of it really didn't hit home. Going into the site, you realized what really was going on."
They would spend 10 days working on that mountain of grief, an experience that still drives Mossotti's steadfast insistence that the nation must stay prepared.
"It's easy to let things pass and forget the vulnerability of our country,'' he said. "But we always need to keep our guard up and realize that another incident like that can happen at any time. We should never forget the memories of those who sacrificed their lives and the innocent victims killed that day.''
It's not if but when
A decade after the terror attacks, Mossotti, 57, still serves as a plans manager with Missouri Task Force 1. And he continues to echo the refrain of the nation's first responders who urged preparedness in the aftermath of Sept. 11: It's not if. It's when.
"There will be some events,'' he warns. "And when they happen, we will deal with them as a country. We're secure here, but we just need to understand that there is evil out there. There are a lot of people who don't like our way of life, and they're going to keep trying to interrupt it. We need to be a little more tolerant of the security measures and processes that are in place to keep us safe. The threat is real, and life as we know it has changed.''
Mossotti said there was a big push for disaster preparedness after 9/11 that brought an influx of training and equipment for emergency response agencies. But he worries that the nation is becoming complacent because there have been no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 2001.
"We can always train and prepare to go in and do the search and recovery or cleanup,'' he said. "The trick is stopping it. And that's where sometimes I get a little frustrated with people. When they complain about security measures that take place at the airport or at other facilities.''
Mossotti believes that memories have faded of the hijacking attempts thwarted since Sept. 11, including a foiled international plot in 2006 that would have made use of liquid explosives.
"As a result of that plot being uncovered, that started the policy that you can't take liquids on board. Well, that's inconvenient,'' he said. "Do you think the people on the three planes that crashed in the buildings or the one that landed in the field in Pennsylvania — do you think those passengers if given the opportunity would have preferred a full body scan or a better search? And that people weren't allowed to take box cutters on the plane?"
A Scene Like No Other
Working amid the ruins of the skyscrapers was unlike any emergency scene he had ever seen, Mossotti said.
"When you think about a building collapse, you can stand there and walk around it. When we got there, we're talking block after block — a very large area that when you were standing there, everything around you was destruction,'' he said. "That was surreal. To find yourself in the middle of that much destruction, and damage and debris."
Missouri Task Force 1 is a self-sufficient team that travels with its own equipment and is specially trained to locate and rescue victims trapped in collapsed buildings. Members include physicians, paramedics, structural engineers and specialists in planning, rescue, canine search and hazardous material. Team members can breach steel and reinforced concrete and are trained to work in confined spaces.
But the World Trade Center ruins were different, Mossotti said. "We had this heavy mass of steel. There was no concrete to break. It was pulverized.''
Despite their overwhelming task, Mossotti said the rescue workers went to work every shift believing they would find survivors.
"We try not to ever give up the hope that we are going to find someone because in any kind of collapse event you always know there are potentially pockets where people may have been trapped or sought refuge,'' he said. "We see in earthquakes where they're still finding survivors eight to 10 days after the event. We continue to work it as though it is a rescue. Unfortunately, we also know that as time goes on the chances of finding survivors goes down, even among individuals who might have survived the collapse. Their chance of surviving quickly goes down after the second and third days.''
Mossotti said it was difficult when possible rescues turned into false alarms.
"You always have a lot of ups and downs,'' he said. "The word goes out they found somebody, so everybody's hopes shot up that there is a rescue. Then we find out it wasn't.''
Mossotti has suffered no adverse effects from his duty at ground zero, he said. But he and other Missouri rescuers are enrolled in the health registry established by the New York Health Department to track rescue workers exposed to the toxic ruins.
'In between, we live our lives'
After they returned from New York, Mossotti said team members received frequent invitations to discuss their experiences, but interest seems to have faded as the years have passed. He said it's only natural that people who were not directly affected have gotten back to their routines.
"We go back to our politics as usual, and we develop new issues or problems that distract us,'' he said.
He wonders if people truly understand the deep impact of the terror attacks.
"They remember where they were and what they were doing at the time when it happened and they watched it on TV,'' he said. "But unless you actually went and saw the destruction that took place it's hard to visualize.''
Mossotti said that looking through his pictures of ground zero recently has sharpened his own memories of 9/11.
"You don't realize in 10 years how much you've put away. How much I don't think about it — even though I was there. It's hard to believe it's been that long,'' he said. "Time erases things. I guess it's a normal defense survival mechanism we have. I can see for others who weren't as directly involved how easy or quickly they move on.''
That said, Mossotti believes that at times of crisis, Americans will always stand united.
"That's one thing about this country,'' he said. "We may not seem unified — everybody's got their own interests and problems. But if there is an event, people do rally behind it. In between, we live our lives.''
