A wallet found amid the rubble: Central Florida first responder remembers 9/11
It was the dust he remembers — dust lighter than snowflakes, dust that mixed with ash and smoke to blot out sunlight, dust that settled into every crevice and pore. It was dust that invaded your nostrils, coated your mouth, burned your eyes and did God-only-knowswhat to your lungs.
It was dust that, just an hour before, had been skyscrapers and airplanes and people.
Wayne Struble waded through it, sinking up to his knees. Twenty years after the worst terrorist attack on American soil, he can still close his eyes and see it.
“As you walked, it would just fluff up and bounce around,” he says. “And somewhere in the dust, you could hear all these alarms going off from the firefighters who were trapped.”
Struble is 54 now, the disaster/ emergency preparedness manager for the Brevard County hospital group Health First. His job is to ensure four local hospitals can respond to hurricanes, floods, fires, pandemics, bombings — anything, in fact, that comes with chaos and mass casualties.
But early on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was a 34-year-old married father of four, a firefighter in north New Jersey and a founding member of that state’s urban search and rescue team. His youngest child had just turned 3 the day before. He was about to pop in a Barney the dinosaur video — her birthday present — when the first news flashed across the TV screen.
He immediately turned on his two-way radio. Seconds later, his phone rang and his pager went off. Get your gear and go. Now.
Struble raced to his station and sped toward the city. As he crested a hill, he could see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burning. The south tower, struck by a second hijacked airliner, collapsed at 9:59 a.m., just minutes before his arrival.
Many of the firefighters who’d come before him were now victims too. From the New York City Fire Department alone, 412 workers died that day.
“It was random,” Struble says. “Fifty people went this way, and 50 people went that way. And the first 50 died, because stuff fell on top of them, and the other 50 lived.”
By nature, training and necessity, Struble is matter of fact. He is accustomed to carnage — the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the collapse of a casino’s 10-story parking garage, the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy — that must be processed with detachment and practicality. He lost a friend that day at ground zero, a former colleague who’d become a Port Authority police officer, killed in the collapse.
Struble worked 12-hour shifts for weeks, at first never sleeping more than three hours a day, hoping beyond reason that he would help find someone alive amid the debris.
He never did.
But in that dust and ash and rubble, he discovered a wallet, tucked into a pair of torn pants, its owner no longer recognizable. He hoped to help notify the next of kin.
Struble opened the wallet to see the man’s driver’s license, and, opposite that, a photo of the victim’s family.
“He had kids the same age as my own,” Struble says. “I thought, ‘I wish I hadn’t seen that.’ ”
Finding a way to talk
Struble always wanted to be a fireman. As a kid, he’d perch on his bunk bed, steering a big, red, make-believe truck. The sound of an engine’s siren would send him racing to a window, just
to see it pass by. He felt it was a calling.
In those moments when
he sped toward a scene that others were trying to flee, life seemed most immediate. Time no longer existed. Seven days in at ground zero, Struble realized he hadn’t called his own family yet to tell them he was alive.
But intense exposure to trauma takes a toll.
“It was hard to talk about it for a long time,” he
says. “Every year, as 9/11 approached, I would start getting irritable. I spent the month leading up to it just looking at all the pictures over and over. I would go through the [TV] channel guide to record every 9/11 program — and then watch them all and be super stressed about it.”
Only after the 9/11 Tribute Museum opened in 2006 did things begin to shift. Struble volunteered as a docent, leading tours, talking publicly for the first time about what happened. It was therapeutic. “When I went for the training, every one of us was someone who had been there that day,” he says. “I was nervous at first. But the more I did it, the better I felt. It was like an elephant getting off my chest.”
The need to remember
By 2014, Struble knew he needed a change of scenery. He had more than 25 years on the job, enough to collect a pension he could live on, and his wife loved the beach and all things Disney.
They moved to Merritt Island in February that year. For more than six months Struble mostly fished and played golf, until they started to feel less like fun and more like work. The job with Health First seemed to be an ideal fit.
But there isn’t a day that passes without thoughts of 9/11. Sometimes they last only seconds. Sometimes hours.
“I’m actually going through some health issues right now. There’s a possibility it’s related to 9/11, but we don’t know yet,” he says. He doesn’t want to elaborate.
As of June, more than 81,000 first responders had enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program established by Congress, citing conditions from asthma to cancer to major depression.
Struble tries to be an optimist. He talks about the way the nation once seemed to come together, supporting victims, their families, their political leaders. He talks about the lack of partisan divide and a sense of selflessness that now seems foreign.
“I think we need to remember,” he says. “We need to remember how strong we were united.”
“I think we need to remember. We need to remember how strong we were united.” Wayne Struble