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Rescuers
pull third person from rubble; another sought By
LARRY McSHANE
NEW YORK - After a surreal day where the world watched as the World Trade Center crumbled, rescue workers burrowed through a smoking mix of soot and rubble Wednesday in a hunt for thousands of bodies from the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The grim task in the lower Manhattan neighborhood where the twin 110-story towers once rose was interrupted by brief epiphanies of life, when a fortunate victim was pulled alive from the wreckage of the steel and glass buildings. But workers braced for more recoveries than rescues. "The best estimate we can make is that there will be a few thousand (victims) left in each building," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said at a morning news conference. Port Authority Police Sgt. Jay McLaughlin, who was buried between the two collapsed towers, was pulled free at 7:35 a.m. - nearly 24 hours after the first of two planes hijacked by terrorists slammed into the Trade Center. McLaughlin, the third police officer rescued from the rubble so far, was rushed by ambulance to a Manhattan hospital. Bulldozers and other heavy machinery were on site, as were workers lugging shovels and picks. Giuliani said rescuers were digging for a fourth person whose voice was heard from beneath what's left of the 1,350-foot towers. "We're in voice contact with him," the mayor said. "We're trying to get him out." There was a report that a woman had been pulled out of the rubble alive sometime during the day, Giuliani said, but he had no immediate details. The mayor said 202 firefighters and another 57 NYPD and Port Authority police officers were missing. Also among the missing was John P. O'Neill, head of security for the World Trade Center and a former FBI expert on terrorism. O'Neill headed the investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole, along with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. There were 41 confirmed fatalities - a number that will multiply and exceed the 168 killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Another 1,700 injuries were reported. Rescue workers reported bodies buried beneath the soot on the streets of lower Manhattan, along with body parts scattered in the rubble. The four hijacked planes that crashed on Monday carried 266 people. "You don't know what to say to the families," Giuliani said. "You don't know whether to give them hope or not." Giuliani was among those who escaped the tragedy uninjured, bolting from a building barely a block from the site when the first of the twin towers collapsed. The ordinarily busy area around the Trade Center remained like a war zone, the streets littered with burned-out cars and firetrucks, along with half-melted police cars. Smoke continued to pour upward from the site where the towers once stood, their absence a jagged scar in the city skyline. Smaller fires still burned. Twisted metal piled 50 feet high filled Vesey Street. "It's like Beirut," said Wilson Franco, a Civil Air Patrol member working in the area near ground zero. "It's horrifying." On the street, scattered madly, were reminders of the mundane tasks interrupted by the terrorist attack: a sheet of public relations phone numbers. An insurance invoice. A list of state regulations for security trading. Trees and bushes wore a thick coat of the inescapable gray soot. Robots and bulldozers plow through the haze as workers lugged body parts to a Brooks Brothers store-turned-morgue. A message, scrawled with a finger on a sooty window, offered a prayer: "God Bless the Dead." Despite the non-stop television coverage, people still viewed the attack with disbelief. "I never thought I'd see the World Trade Center pass me by in a dump truck," said Craig Chester, 29, a volunteer in the search and rescue mission. By Tuesday morning, 120 dump trucks filled with rubble were taken from lower Manhattan as workers - battling fatigue and smoke inhalation continued digging. Chairman Lewis Eisenberg said it was too early to say. The World Trade Center was targeted by terrorists twice in the last eight years. People still clung desperately to the hope that their missing friends and family members were somehow alive. At St. Vincent's Hospital, where hundreds of victims were treated, a sobbing Annelise Peterson walked in a daze, clutching pictures of her boyfriend and brother. Peterson asked if anyone had seen either. No one could tell her yes. All of Manhattan below 14th Street was still shut down, and incoming traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge was banned throughout the morning rush hour. A national ban on air travel kept Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports closed. Wall Street was shuttered for a second day. The New York Yankees canceled their Wednesday night game, and students in the city were given the day off from school.
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