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American Morning

Firefighters Ass'n VP Discusses Ground Zero Recovery End

Aired May 17, 2002 - 08:18   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: And joining us right now is a man who was very involved in the process down at ground zero. We mentioned that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that come May 30, which will, we actually will see the end of the recovery work and there will be an actual ceremony that takes place at 10:30 that day.

And joining us right now is Mike Carter, who is the vice president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association.

Good to see you. Welcome back.

MIKE CARTER, VICE PRESIDENT, UFA: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

ZAHN: Let me ask you this. For people who aren't familiar with your story, you almost lost your life on September 11. Take us back to that day.

CARTER: As I arrived on the scene the south tower had just collapsed. I had jumped on the back of an engine company -- it was 35 Engine -- and rode into the scene on West Street. I was carrying tools and equipment. We were very close to the Marriott and I was looking up and I saw the north tower start to crumble.

We dropped our tools. We ran. I dove behind a car. I survived.

ZAHN: And then you went on to join in the rescue and recovery efforts. You worked 10 days straight going through that painstaking process of digging with your hands and your fingers and small buckets. And you almost, well, you actually were arrested at one point, right?

CARTER: Yes.

ZAHN: Why?

CARTER: Unfortunately, as the recovery operation started to progress, a decision was made by the administration to pull our firefighters out, to drop our force down to 25 firefighters at the periphery. That was unacceptable. We let the mayor know that. We got no response. We had a demonstration. It was lawful, it was orderly and I was arrested because I was a union official and I spent 15 hours in a jail cell.

But for me, every time I see an honor guard take a body or remains out of the site, for me it's a validation that what we did was right.

ZAHN: Because what you say you were doing was just respecting the dignity of some of the individuals who had been murdered there?

CARTER: We weren't going to let this turn into a scoop and dump operation, not for our firefighters, not for the police officers and not for all the civilians that were, that lost their lives and were buried there.

ZAHN: I know it's hard for you to speak for every individual within the fire department, but how will May 30 be viewed when the digging stops?

CARTER: I think it's going to be bittersweet. I think in one respect it's going to be a very tough day for the families of their loved ones who are missing because when that last bucketful comes out, I think there's going to be a realization that we can't make more dirt and maybe my husband or my father's not coming home and we're never going to find him.

So that's going to be tough. I think for the firefighters it's going to be an opportunity to close a chapter in this book and let us try to move on. We have a tough road to hoe. We have firefighters who are retiring at four times the normal rate. We have some very sick firefighters with respiratory problems.

I think we're going to have tremendous fallout in terms of mental health. It's hard to believe we're facing budget cuts. They want to cut manpower and engine companies. They're threatening to close engine companies. They want to do away with some of our fire marshals. The list goes on and on.

So we have a whole series of issues that we're going to have to deal with in the coming months and years.

ZAHN: Will you ever be able to view ground zero, even once it's built on, as anything else but the site of a murder rampage?

CARTER: Well, any time I get close to the site I well up with a certain level of anxiety. I see airplanes, low flying airplanes, I get anxiety. Did my life change? Absolutely. I've been able to cope with it, maybe in part because we've been so busy. You know, most of us have been, we've buried several hundred firefighters. Just the constant day in and day out of always having two or three things that you have to, I think is what's helped gotten me to this point. So I'll never look at the site again, you know, looking over from New Jersey, the skyline was such a beautiful, beautiful thing, and there's a scare there. There's a hole there.

I don't think, in my lifetime, it's never going away.

ZAHN: Even those of us who are just New Yorkers and certainly weren't down at ground zero through those very, very, very harsh weeks, I think we feel the same way. You feel like there's a little hole in your heart every time you look south. CARTER: Yes. I think, I think, I mean we were clearly the most affected, but I think everybody in the city was affected to a very large degree and only the next months and years, you know, will tell exactly how we're going to deal with that.

ZAHN: Well, we wish you luck, Mike Carter.

CARTER: Well, I thank you very much.

ZAHN: Thank you very much for coming in to spend some time with us here this morning on AMERICAN MORNING.

We're going to leave you with this live picture of the recovery work wrapping up at ground zero.

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