'You Can Describe The Collapse Of A Building. But That’s Only Half The Story': A First-Person View Of Ground Zero

A word Michael Heller uses frequently to describe what he experienced that day is “reverent.”

Twenty years ago this week, Mr. Heller, a volunteer firefighter and professional photographer whose work regularly appears in The Sag Harbor Express and other Express News Group newspapers, was summoned on September 11, 2001, to document the devastation at what became known as Ground Zero, the site of the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan after teams of terrorists flew two hijacked jets into the buildings.

Mr. Heller watched footage on television that morning that played over and over again of the explosions, the flames and the crumbling facades of the tallest buildings in New York City. He watched video of people running from the site, gray dust covering cars and the people themselves, vehicles crushed by the tumbling debris, and he shuddered at the thought of the human life that was lost, and the terror that he imagined individuals felt who were at work in the towers that morning during the moments before their death.

But it wasn’t until he actually arrived at the scene later that night that the utter enormity revealed itself to him.

It was, he said, like an apocalypse.

Mr. Heller didn’t first learn about the attacks until he answered the phone that morning, shortly after waking up at his home in East Hampton. It was a call from Getty Images, the company that licenses and sells photographs, which knew Mr. Heller had his own company — ironically named 911 Pictures — that specialized in photography for emergency service organizations.

“Do you have anyone there?” an urgent voice called from the other end of the phone.

“Where?” Mr. Heller recalled saying.

“Don’t you know?” came the reply.

Mr. Heller turned on his television to watch what the world had been seeing since 8:45 a.m., when the first of the jets, carrying 20,000 gallons of fuel, struck the 80th floor of the first tower, and the subsequent devastation. And then the second plane, and the collapse of the landmark buildings, and the legions of firefighters and emergency service workers who began showing up to battle the fires and try to save lives.

“As a firefighter, I was thinking to myself, ‘Are they going to be able to do this?’” Mr. Heller wondered. “Is this a bridge too far, you know?”

It was about 8 o’clock that night when he got a second call, from the New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control, asking how soon he could get into Manhattan. The office oversees all fire service in the state and needed someone to document the scene at the World Trade Center.

Acknowledging an unease at not knowing what to expect, he remembers the ride in that night on the Long Island Expressway.

“The overwhelming feeling as I’m driving is that it was surreal. Like something out of ‘The Twilight Zone,’” Mr. Heller recalled. “The LIE was deserted — it’s usually full of traffic. I was literally the only one on the road.”

Passing through a roadblock and checkpoint, he was waved on through the Midtown Tunnel. Emerging on the other side into a deserted Manhattan, he crossed town and then pointed his car down to the financial district, where, at the edge of the scene, he was finally stopped at a checkpoint and, after showing his credentials, was told to continue on foot.

“It’s one thing to see this on TV, on a little screen,” Mr. Heller said, “but you get there, and it’s 360 degrees all around you.

“This was so overwhelmingly large,” he continued, “and I think, ‘How do I show this so it makes any sense? Where the hell do I even begin?’”

In training, you make a 360-degree perimeter of the scene, he said.

Standing on the corner of West and Vescey streets, he looked out at the scene in front of him, and thought to himself: “I guess I’ll start walking.”

“I am barely a quarter of the way down the block when I slowly come to a halt again, once more in awe,” Mr. Heller wrote in a first-person account published two months after the tragedy in National Fire & Rescue Magazine.

“To my right rises a 10-story pile of debris, what used to be No. 7 World Trade Center. I remember from the newscasts that this was the third building to fall, at roughly 5 p.m. [that] evening, after being engulfed by fire after the two towers collapsed. It is still burning in there somewhere; thick clouds of smoke billow out from inside the rubble as two FDNY tower ladders use hose streams to extinguish the fire — an effort that I know will take hours, if not days.

“It is not the building’s ruins that cause me to stop, however. What freezes me is the scene around it. More than any broadcast scene of rescuers sifting through rubble, what I see before me at this moment tells the true story of the World Trade Center disaster.”

When asked what he means and what he saw, Heller struggles briefly and says, “It was the human aspect — people stunned, people rushing to help.”

“When the fire started, they set up a command structure,” Mr. Heller said, “but when the towers collapsed, I think that all went to hell.”

He stopped short of calling the scene chaotic, but he emphasized the desperate efforts that people were making in trying to effect some kind of rescue, even while rescuers were searching for other would-be rescuers.

“A lot of the trucks had already been destroyed,” he said of the fire vehicles that had responded earlier. “I stopped and saw the truck from Ladder 117 was all burned up. Their entire company was lost.”

He added, “There was a lot of disorganization, but one of the first things they did was gather their resources and equipment.”

Farther down West Street, he came upon a collection of supplies: air bottles, hooks, ladders. “There was a huge pile of all this stuff,” he said. “What they had done was, they had gone into all the trucks that had been destroyed and pulled out all the equipment that could be salvaged.”

In his first-person account, Mr. Heller writes: “On this side of the street, away from the commotion of the Command Post, rescuers move silently through a 2-inch-deep layer of dust. Like a winter’s eve snowfall, it coats all the vehicles parked on the street. Coated too are the sides of all the buildings surrounding me, save for hundreds of jagged black holes where windows were blown in from the force of the explosion. There is no more ‘street’ and ‘sidewalk’; there now exists only a field of twisted pieces of sheet metal, paper, plastic and steel, spread around me as far as I can see. Scene lights and red rotating beacons atop apparatus provide the only light, illuminating the dust still blowing through this eerie landscape. It is quiet here — no one is saying much.”

Indeed, Mr. Heller said the scene was so overwhelming and bizarre that it was hard to articulate thoughts, feeling and emotions.

“I can’t emphasize enough, you have in your life your world view, which encompasses how you see the world, it’s of a certain order,” he explained. “And then we were all thrust into something that was completely different, beyond what you could comprehend.

“To try to have a conversation with the firefighters, you can’t ask, ‘Does this make sense to you?’” said Mr. Heller. “The feelings were obvious. What were you going to have a conversation about?”

It wasn’t until months after his visit to the site that he had a conversation with one of the firefighters on the scene whom he became friendly with. In recounting one of his experiences, Mr. Heller said the firefighter told him a story that goes a little way to expressing what it meant to be there.

The firefighter had been with other firefighters and emergency service personnel looking for possible survivors in the basement of one of the buildings when the towers came down.

“When he came up out of the basement, he turned right,” Mr. Heller said.

“Everybody who turned left died.”

“It sounds trite,” said Mr. Heller, “but when you actually experience something like that, you really do feel lucky to be alive.” It’s a way, he said, of understanding the fragility of life, and the fine thread that keeps us tethered to earth.

He said he got a sense from the firefighters that it was humbling. He paused: “‘Humbling’ is the wrong word — ‘spiritual’ is the word I want to use. It was something they understood among each other. You can describe the collapse of a building. But that’s only half the story.”

“I pick my way slowly over to something that has caught my eye, about halfway down the block,” Mr. Heller writes in his published account. “It is a piece of steel girder, perhaps 25 feet long and 3 feet thick. It is hard at first to realize that it is a girder, because it stands as tall as I am, and it has been bent into the shape of a pretzel. My God.”

In 2001, Mr. Heller, like most photographers, was still shooting with film. Digital cameras were available, but most didn’t have the technical abilities of a conventional SLR camera and were very low resolution, or were prohibitively expensive.

Mr. Heller went to the site on September 11 armed with 12 rolls of film, 36 frames each, which enabled him to shoot just 432 photographs — compared to the thousands he might have been able to shoot with his current digital camera. So his choices on what and when to shoot needed to be carefully selected.

His odyssey took him through a world transformed. Metal twisted into pretzel shapes, dystopian streetscapes, and landscapes defined by mountains of crumbled concrete. In the overnight hours, the scene was peopled by figures in shadows, dodging into and out of the bright glare of scene lights that ignited areas where firefighters poured streams of water on stubborn fires, smoke billowed, and cranes stooped to lift layers of debris away to reveal yet more layers of debris.

“I reach the intersection of Church and Dey streets and look southwest, where the South Tower used to be,” Mr. Heller wrote. “Before me is the remains of No. 4 World Trade Center. The right half of the building still stands, its façade shredded and blackened, but the left half has been destroyed by pieces of the South Tower, which now tilt up to the sky at crazy angles. Lit from behind, and seen through a mist of smoke, ash and dust, it is a silhouette of destruction. On three flagpoles in front of the remains, scorched and tattered flags still sway in the soft breeze.”

“Thinking like a photographer,” said Mr. Heller, “everywhere you look there was something to take a picture of.”

He needed to document the scene, but at the same time he wanted to create compelling images. “I think about composition, maybe a nice arc of a hose here, and lights doing something interesting there.”

In one photograph, the stream of water from a fire hose forms an arc across the image, while red lights play in puddles of water in the street that divides the photo. On the right side of the street, a pile of rubble smolders and cars line up, damaged and coated in dust, while a ladder truck with a backlit American flag dominates the other side of the photo.

“I try to create something artistic, rather than just snapping pictures — trying to create beautiful photographs out of something that is horrific.”

In another photo, a pair of firefighters, visibly exhausted, sit in a fire chief’s wrecked Suburban, its doors flung open and covered in gray dust and pieces of concrete, each man with a thousand-yard stare in his eyes.

“As I’m walking around, I don’t know what I’m going to see around the next corner,” said Mr. Heller.

How did he decide what to shoot? “Just gut. I really did just wait until something captured me visually.”

And there are some scenes, filled with emotion, frustration and pathos, that are difficult to capture in an image.

At one point, walking past the remains of a health club where all its equipment had been melted and twisted by the fire’s intense heat, Mr. Heller turned again onto the main debris field. Here, a couple of dozen firefighters from New York and Long Island were working with several steelworkers to try to move a girder, under which is a body they have found.

“I watch them for a period of time, during which they try everything from digging underneath to an all-out tug-of-war, with a human chain of firefighters lashed to the girder,” wrote Mr. Heller. “There is an air of frustration; the beam is so large and so buried that even several attempts at ‘one, two, three, HEAVE!’ it hasn’t moved an inch.

“A rescue foreman climbs over to where they are working. ‘Look, guys, this isn’t working, We gotta move on.’

“‘No, wait!’ they protest. ‘We can get her out! We almost have her!’

“‘Guys, I know how much you want this, but this is taking too much time. We gotta keep looking — the dogs may have found something over by South Tower.’

“‘No, wait, please, we can do this!’

“‘I’m sorry, guys — we can get her as soon as we can get a crane in.’

“The team lingers, and then reluctantly moves away. Those of us remaining stand in silence, rooted by the sight of a single slender female arm emerging from that huge piece of steel.”

There is no romance in the photo Mr. Heller made of this moment. It is clear, but stark. All the details are there. The image is markedly different from many of the others and has the feel of a crime scene photo. A half-dozen or so men stand, heads down, resigned, staring at a giant steel girder pinning a delicate feminine arm into the gray dust.

Asked about that moment, Mr. Heller said it was “almost holy, in a way. A reverence. You just wanted to be quiet.”

“It probably struck a nerve with them,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of cleaning up this mess; there was a person there. Seeing the actual arm was actual proof.”

As the sun came up on the morning of September 12, the vast destruction more fully revealed itself. A massive field of rubble, girders poking up — what Mr. Heller described as “steel pick-up sticks” — and the familiar skeletal walls of the trade center reaching toward the sky. It was, like the day before, a beautiful morning. But seen 24 hours later, one of the great structural achievements of the 20th century, and a symbol of the economic strength of the most powerful country on the planet, laid in ruins on the ground, vanished from the cityscape. The view was stark and unforgiving.

This was “the pile” in daylight.

“I spent a while there and shot a whole roll just there,” said Mr. Heller.

“The sky begins to grow brighter to the east, and a tableau of destruction slowly appears before me,” Mr. Heller writes. “Amid billowing clouds of smoke, huge 100-foot pieces of the towers jut out of the ground at odd angles, where they were embedded after smashing down with forces that I cannot even begin to comprehend. I feel like I have traveled back in time to World War II, to Dresden, Germany, after the massive firebombing that took place there. Then I realize that it is more like the movie ‘The Day After,’ which imagined America after a thermonuclear war. This is the Day After, and I must document it. I begin to make my way back around the perimeter, back toward the way I came.

“I trudge south along West Drive, past overturned vehicles and firefighters who are sleeping the best they can amid piles of equipment and debris. Then past 210 Engine, to an area just beyond where National Guard troops have located what appears to be part of another body. I watch as they use some bits of found debris to very carefully brush away surrounding dust and papers, while another guardsman lays out a body bag next to it. In the background, smoke rises from something burning in the rubble.”

Along West Drive, Mr. Heller paused at a scene to capture an image that presented itself. There is a field of rubble, steaming and breathing smoke into the air. Blocks of gray concrete, twisted lengths of steel, a fire truck in the middle distance crumpled and stove in.

But it isn’t until your vision adjusts, and in the sea of gray the eye goes to a flash of neon yellow, tiny, just off-center in the foreground: the highlights on the coat of FDNY Battalion Chief Gerard Koziak, who sits alone, facing southeast into the morning sun which lights his face, the only living thing in acres of waste. It was as if the weight of what has occurred is resting on the firefighter’s shoulders.

“When I came upon this, I grew excited, because I knew immediately that this shot would be the best of them all, and as a result I took the time to shoot several exposures and variations of it,” Mr. Heller said, reflecting on the photograph, which won the Premio Internacional Bombero de Oro de Fotografia (International Gold Firefighter Photography Award), at a ceremony hosted in Spain in 2004.

The photo was technically difficult to achieve. Getting the right color balance was a challenge, since the rising sun produced colors that were in direct opposition to the lights that were still on, shining on the scene, said Mr. Heller. They produced an effect called color crossover — competing colors, in this case too much of both red and cyan — which makes color correction “a nightmare.”

But that is a technical discussion. What the viewer sees, and what struck Mr. Heller about the moment, was the composition and the information it imparts about what the photographer was experiencing.

“First off, it is the sense of scale,” said Mr. Heller. “One cannot fully grasp how large the pieces of the tower were that were jutting up out of the ground without seeing a person in the photo for scale. In addition, the pieces of steel jutting up at all odd angles forces your eye to zig-zag up, down and back and forth all over the image, echoing the chaos of the scene overall. Add to that the smoke, which adds an additional layer of surrealness to the image.”

By the time morning had slid into early afternoon, Mr. Heller was exhausted. He had been awake for more than 24 hours and had been carrying a load of gear, cameras and lenses for 16 hours on site.

On his way back to his car, he was confronted with a phalanx of reporters and cameramen who tossed questions out to him about what was going on behind the security line.

“What’s it like in there?” “Have they found anyone alive?” “Did you see any bodies?”

The questions continue until the journalists become distracted by a National Guard Hummer approaching with a guardsman manning a machine gun on the roof, and Mr. Heller retreats to his car for the ride home to East Hampton.

That December, Mr. Heller wanted to get back to Ground Zero, so he pitched a story to the magazine that had published his first-person account. He thought the time was right to do an update on the search-and-recovery mission, and learned that the searchers were using GPS to map where they were finding bodies to more fully understand what had occurred as the buildings collapsed. It was a relatively new use of the technology, said Mr. Heller, who felt it was something worth documenting.

He had developed a network of friends in different companies in the FDNY, and had occasionally embedded himself with them when they turned out for fires. Coincidentally, when he was at the scene originally, he had come across one of the trucks he had ridden on years before, Ladder 3. It was one of the first things he spotted when he arrived that first night. It sat, destroyed, when an entire walkway collapsed on it, caving in the front half of the truck.

Mr. Heller reached out to his network of contacts and received authorization from the FDNY to visit the site. He arrived at the site with his fire gear, but was told he wouldn’t need it, and to leave it at the staging area.

Armed with his credentials — a thin green tag that he wore around his neck — Mr. Heller was escorted into the pit on a Gator, a small utility vehicle used for navigating the terrain of the site. In two months’ time, the scene had changed dramatically. Instead of a mountain of crushed concrete and twisting steel, there was now a deep depression into the foundation of where the twin towers once stood. A long ramp now delivered workers several stories down to where cranes and other machinery worked to pick through the rubble in search of victims and to clear the site. Spotters worked alongside the cranes as pieces of the towers were moved aside, peering into the dust to see if there was any evidence of remains.

There was a sense of organized purpose, and the atmosphere was charged.

“There was a lot on the line,” said Mr. Heller, noting that by this time the site had become the center of an international investigation.

“It was much quieter when I was first there,” he said. “There was activity here and there, but it was not centralized; not the bustle of a coordinated effort. It was still too fresh.”

This time around, there was great organization, including a temporary morgue, the installation of a coffer dam, and “everything you needed for excavation.”

The site had not only physically changed, but it had changed in attitude as well. On the night of September 11, Mr. Heller was allowed to freely roam through the site, recording a shared experience with his fellow firefighters. In December, it was being processed as a crime scene, with officials doing forensic work, and an entire alphabet of agencies — FBI, NYPD, FDNY, CIA — performing investigations.

“It was very, very tense,” said Mr. Heller, and the presence of someone new with a camera raised suspicions. “I can feel immediately people looking at me, and I’m sure they’re wondering what I’m doing there — ‘Who is this guy? What’s this camera doing here?’”

As he was stepping out of the Gator, Mr. Heller looked over at where a crane was moving debris. A spotter had found something and signaled, and everything came to a stop.

Mr. Heller watched as workers moved in to mark the body with GPS coordinates, and he saw an opportunity to take a photograph. The crews carried a supply of American flags, and as the body was released from the rubble, it was draped in a flag for the journey up to the temporary morgue.

Mr. Heller stepped forward to take a few shots — and was immediately confronted by an official. Mr. Heller was unclear about which agency the man represented, but was sure it wasn’t the FDNY.

“You’re not supposed to be here, you’ll have to leave,” Mr. Heller remembers the man telling him.

Mr. Heller argued, saying he had permission from the FDNY, but the official was not impressed and told him he would have to leave the scene immediately. “I don’t care,” said the man. “You need to leave now.”

He took a ride back up the ramp in the Gator, with the official not far behind, and at the top of the ramp got out to walk back over to the staging area to retrieve his gear, when he noticed activity at the bottom of the ramp.

He reached for his camera and stepped toward the head of the ramp to shoot down, when he heard the official’s voice.

“That’s it — you’re under arrest!” he remembers the man calling out.

Again, Mr. Heller pleaded his case, as the movements down at the bottom of the ramp continued. But the official stopped him from taking the photo and offered him two options: leave now, or be arrested.

There is no photograph of this moment in Mr. Heller’s collection, only the photographer’s description.

As he looked down the ramp, he saw a crowd of people, who moments ago were digging through rubble, break into two lines along the edges of the ramp leading up from the pit. There was no talking, just a localized silence.

Up from the pit came the flag-draped body, and as it passed the line of firefighters, police officers, steel workers, construction workers and crane operators, each of them either stood with their head bowed, or saluted. A moment of respect for a life that had perished in the first attack by a foreign entity on American soil in two centuries.

“I’ll say this, the magnitude of the moment is not lost on me,” said Mr. Heller. “You, in your life, you can look at something and know that it is important, without having to be told. I had that same feeling, being witness to something that was very significant.”

It was, said Mr. Heller, “reverent.”