In the grief and rubble, echoes of 9/11 collapse

Though tragedies differ, pain and process are similar

Rescue workers navigating the dusty rubble moonscape. News conferences offering little encouragement. Photographs of missing loved ones assembled in a sudden memorial shrine. The anger. The grief. The faint hope ceding to sorrowful acceptance.

The middle-of-thenight collapse of the Champlain Towers South apartment building in Surfside last week was a tragedy apart from any other, with its own distinct circumstances, its own affected community. This was not a terrorist attack in lower Manhattan; this was an apparent structural failure in South Florida.

Still, for anyone who recalls the fresh days following the World Trade Center catastrophe — 20 years ago this September — the reports and images from Surfside are almost too familiar, no matter that the Champlain building was roughly one-tenth the height of the 110-story twin towers. The two events are bound by the human and technical rhythms of disaster.

“Let me frame it this way: We go through a process,” said Joseph Pfeifer, a retired assistant chief for the New York Fire Department and founding director of its Center for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness. He was the first fire chief on the scene when the towers fell and helped to oversee the massive rescue effort.

For example, he said, in the immediate aftermath of both tragedies, people felt the need to come together, to express their grief through the public display of photos and flowers.

“There’s this longing to be connected,” Pfeifer said. “Because we don’t want to be alone. The event is so overwhelming.”

In both cases, families were invited to visit the scene from a safe distance — whether to pay their respects, or to feel close to their loved ones, or to show support for the workers who are doing all that they can.

At the same time, there is the need to gently but clearly explain that rescue efforts after a building’s total collapse are moving more quickly than they might appear, with care being taken to minimize the danger to rescuers and possible survivors.

Mike Corr, a retired detective and rescue specialist for the New York Police Department’s Emergency Services Unit, also responded to the 9/11 aftermath. He vividly recalls the jagged pieces of steel, the unsettled concrete, the jutting rebar, the fires, the noxious smoke and gases — and the fear that the removal of a beam, say, might send debris cascading into a void occupied by someone still alive.

“Every action has a reaction,” Corr said. “You remove the next layer, and then the next layer, and then the next layer.”

As with the Sept. 11th aftermath, Pfeifer said, there will be investigations — a form of reflecting and asking what happened and why. “Then it’s envisioning the future,” he said. “How do we do this better? And that becomes a level of hope.”

First, though, comes the difficult moment when hope meets reality, when the incident commanders finally decide to change the mission plan from rescue to recovery.

The chances for surviving the force of a collapsing stack of concrete floors are nearly nil.

“It’s not to say it’s hopeless,” Corr said. “There are cases where people have survived.”