Third anniversary of terrorist attacks dredge up memories for Santa Monica’s rescue workers
By GENEVA WHITMARSH Daily Press Staff Writer
When the World Trade Center’s towers toppled, Jim Hone was in Santa Monica. Forty-eight hours later, he was helping lead the biggest rescue operation in national history.
“There was more debris than I’ve ever seen,” said Hone, chief of the Santa Monica Fire Department. “There were fires, dust everywhere — it looked like a nuclear winter with all the pulverized concrete.”
Hone’s perception of that day has been echoed by thousands of people who experienced the trauma of Sept. 11 firsthand. And on the third anniversary of the attacks, the lingering effects have dominated everything from politics to the way many Americans live their lives.
Hone, 50, was a member of the Federal Urban Search and Rescue team when he saw television footage of the plane slam-ming into the second tower. He’d been called to six federal disasters since the early 1990s and knew this time would be no different.
“I basically told my wife, ‘See you later — I don’t know when I’ll be coming back,’” he said.
Two hours later, a state official called Hone and told him to get ready to board a military aircraft en route to New York. He would be a state representative for the 70-member Riverside Task Force, a job that involved making sure California’s resources were effectively maintained during rescue operations.
When he stepped onto Ground Zero, he learned many of the men he’d served alongside during previous rescue operations had died when the towers collapsed. He was asked to take on the additional responsibility of managing task forces from Indiana and Missouri.
“I didn’t see the towers come down because I was driving from Point A to Point B,” he continued. “So, when I got out there, it was pretty surreal. The size of the debris was a full 16 acres, and there was (a ton) of steel that we had to climb over, through and under. I thought (the Oklahoma City bombing) was pretty bad, but it paled in comparison to this.”
Twenty-two hour work days followed as Hone and his team of 300 men worked to remove an estimated 5,000 to 9,000 tons of twisted wreckage from the southeast side of the debris field, where tower two had come down. They also had the daunting task of searching for bodies in seven stories of debris, as well as combing through 22 buildings in the immediate area. The team didn’t recover any survivors. The last person pulled from the wreckage alive — a woman who worked on the 13th floor of one of the towers — was found before Hone’s team arrived on the scene.
“If you look at the fact that each of the building’s box columns weighed 22 tons, you have an idea of what we were working with,” Hone said. “We were pretty much burning the heavy machinery up to try and get it all out of there. We had cranes, excavators, 18-wheelers... And then we were climbing through below-grade tunnels and covering every inch of the high-rises surrounding the perimeter. There were human remains found in those buildings, and we had to search them.”
Hone returned to Santa Monica on Sept. 21 and later gave a speech on his experiences in New York. In the audience was Santa Monica resident Victoria Mendoza, a member of the local chapter of the American Red Cross.
“When I heard Hone talk and saw his pictures, I decided I had to go,” said Mendoza, who put in a month-long stint in January 2002 as a Red Cross case worker in the areas hardest hit by the attacks. She was one of five local Red Cross members who eventually made the trip.
“There were people so traumatized by the incident that they wouldn’t leave their homes,” she said. “So we went to a lot of the apartment buildings in the area, knocked on doors and asked people if they needed anything. We talked to some people who were so close to the airplanes that when they passed their apartments, they could smell the fuel.”
Mendoza estimates that she visited more than 100 people as she distributed everything from money to air purifiers.
She tells the story of a young man who watched smoke pouring out of the Twin Towers from his apartment before deciding to seek help.
“He said he watched from his apartment, but it didn’t register that something so horrible was happening,” she said. “Finally, he decided to get out of there. When he opened his door, the streets were completely black, and people saw his door open and ran into the apartment for shelter.”
When he later emerged from the apartment, he walked slowly and deliberately to the smoldering remains of the trade center.
“He didn’t speak one word from the time he left his apartment from the time he got to the scene,” she said. “But when the first person talked to him, he broke down and cried like a baby.”
Mendoza said it’s stories like those that had the deepest impact on her. She also recalls that when the electricity went out it caused a temporary power loss to a nearby Verizon call center. When the electricity was restored, family and friends of victims received phone calls from loved ones that had been made shortly before or after the planes struck the towers.
“It’s amazing,” she said. “I never had the chance to break down and cry when I was there. I had to hold in a lot of emotions. But stories like that — wow.”
Today, Mendoza is in her 10th year with the Red Cross. Hone is no longer a member of the task force since being chosen late last year to head the city’s fire department. He returned to Ground Zero a year after the attacks to pay his respects.
“Emotionally, over the years, I’ve been able to put a lot of shields to it,” Hone said. “I lost a lot of friends, but I know they were doing what they had to do and doing the best work they could at the time. They saved thousands of people with the work they were doing — there’s no question in my mind.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 11, 2004. Read the original PDF.