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Noah Sudarsky at Ground Zero

Few front lines can be as hazardous as Ground Zero, the abyss in Manhattan left by the destruction of the World Trade Centre.

Thousands of tons of steel and pulverized concrete could shift and collapse at any time.

Floods threatened the rescue and recovery effort, while still-live electric cabling made work more perilous still. Worst of all, hope had all but disappeared for anyone who might still be trapped in the ruins: hundreds of the dead were beyond identification, thousands more were to be discovered in horrifying condition.

Despite the danger, police officers and fire crews had to turn away hundreds of volunteers for the rescue effort. Teams arrived from New Jersey and upstate New York to contribute: many were turned away as so many were already at work. New Yorkers wanted to help in any way they could: circumstances were too dangerous for civilians.

EPN journalist Noah Sudarsky did make it through as a rescue volunteer. An experienced construction worker, a climber and a spelunker, he had exactly the skills rescue teams required.

He spent ten hours digging and sifting through wreckage for personal effects that might be used to identify victims before the zone was declared unsafe. Walking to the ruins of the World Trade Centre’s North Tower, he saw “A burning mountain of wreckage, a doomsday vision of destruction”.

“I had experienced civil war in Africa, mindless violence, bloody massacres” he wrote afterwards, “but this was on another scale entirely.”

He described a vision of Armageddon: hundreds of rescue workers scrambling in the smoking ruins, hundred-man lines carrying wreckage. The remains of walls shifting, threatening to crash down on the rescuers. Body parts found and bagged – little survived intact. Miracles, however, do occur: five firefighters rescued the day before, two more pulled unhurt from the rubble that morning.

Returning to Ground Zero a day later, few felt they could still describe themselves as rescue workers. Sudarsky was plagued by his greatest terror – someone trapped under all that rubble – but driven by his hope of finding someone still alive. Each day he worked at Ground Zero, he descended into the “void”: what used to car parking space, maintenance areas and foundations, still precariously existing, still potentially harbouring survivors, but now as he discovered, a mass grave.

Each day, he was called out of the void when fire chiefs judged conditions had become too dangerous. Each time he was called out, he and his colleagues regrouped and found another way in. Despite the stench of death, the fumes, the heat – Sudarsky’s watch measured the temperature at 132 degrees Fahrenheit at one point – people were still determined to find survivors.

Sudarsky joined the effort as a rescuer, a digger, a climber. Only afterwards did he reflect on his actions as a journalist. He had worked in extremely dangerous conditions, with brave men, some of whom had lost family members in the terrorist attacks. He had watched bodies pulled from the ruins and limbs bundled into body bags. He felt that only a line of force, linking the rescue workers, allowed him to continue without losing touch with reality.

“In a sudden epiphany”, he wrote, “I know what it means to feel like a firefighter, to be ready to die for others and to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that others are ready to die for you. Nothing in the world comes close.”