A steel beam so hot it glowed cherry red in the middle of the day.
A stretcher team solemnly walking through a wasteland, bearing a fallen hero.
A father who knows his missing son is somewhere nearby, buried under rubble.
That’s just some of what Larry Greep saw at Ground Zero.
As our nation marks the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Greep doesn’t need to tune in to a documentary to remember the disaster. He spent a month in the ruins of the World Trade Center.
The Vancouver resident worked for the Army Corps of Engineers back then. The civil engineer and several co-workers from the Portland office were dispatched to New York City to monitor debris removal.
Greep arrived on Sept. 19. The Corps of Engineers team took a tugboat to the site and approached Ground Zero from a riverfront marina.
“It was like science fiction. Dust was everywhere. Trees were covered with paper. We walked past a temporary morgue and into a scene of mass destruction,” he said a few days ago in the Fisher’s Landing home he shares with his wife, Linda.
Greep was assigned to the North Tower sector.
“When I got there, they were ending the search-and-rescue effort for survivors,” Greep, 69, said.
It had become a recovery effort.
“When I was first there, they would bring out three or four stretchers a day. All work stopped. They took it to an ambulance. If there was a flag draped over the body, it was a fire or police responder. A horn would blare when it was all clear” and people in that quadrant would return to work, Greep said.
Greep saw the faces of 9/11 victims all around Ground Zero, after people posted portraits of their missing loved ones.
“There was photo after photo on fence lines all around the site. They were people somebody was looking for,” he said.
Greep happened to encounter an example of that search. He called it the telling moment of his month at Ground Zero. On his last day there, he took his replacement to the site of the North Tower, where the elevator lobby used to be.
“A fireman was looking around. I asked, ‘How’s your day?’ ”
“My son’s a fireman, too,” the man told Greep. “He’s here, about 15 feet down.”
The scale of devastation created by two jetliners hitting two skyscrapers was beyond imagining.
“It’s astounding what gravity will do,” Greep said.
When the upper portion of the South Tower finally started to come down, “It was like dropping a Navy destroyer on the rest of the building.”
Greep worked from 7 a.m. to about 7:30 p.m., overlapping with his night-shift counterpart.
“The fire department was in charge of the site. A fire was burning in the middle. They dumped water on it 24/7, and it burned for 99 days.”
Greep saw an illustration of that heat when he was with an ironworker.
“Machinery pulled out a 40-foot beam that was cherry red at midday,” Greep said. “They took temperatures of material they were putting in trucks and got it down to 300 degrees.”
Some of the demolition equipment resembled a human hand — only measuring 15 feet from tip to tip. The operator would grab a steel beam and put it on a waiting truck. Greep recalled watching as one operator had the beam poised maybe eight inches above the trailer bed when he let it go.
“It hit the trailer and broke the tongue on the trailer. They had to figure out how to get the trailer moved.”
There were other unexpected challenges in removing all that steel. Authorities got word that some truck drivers were selling it, Greep said.
“Steel was $59 a ton, and those were 20-ton beams. Within a few days, the National Guard set up inspection stations where trucks were leaving the site. They ID’d the drivers and vehicles, and tracked them. That was a little unsettling, but it was good to have the National Guard.”
In addition to the National Guard, the Navy hospital ship Comfort was berthed nearby. “I saw .50-caliber machine guns on boats on the Hudson River. I flashed back to Vietnam,” said the Marine veteran, who was an aviation electrician for an A-6 Intruder aircraft.
“You can’t imagine the safety issues, plus the environmental hazards. Guys get scared out of their wits when they walk on the pile and it shifts. It was like standing on a big box spring.”
The environmental hazards included all manner of toxins brewed up by 9/11. While he was on the job, Greep breathed through a respirator.
“Ironworkers and firemen didn’t pay attention to respirators. As a result, a lot of things happened to a lot of folks,” he said.
Even with that respirator, her husband could very well be one of them, Linda Greep said.
He finished his workday covered with all the crud that was floating around Ground Zero, Linda said. And last year, he had a cancer scare.
“I was diagnosed in December with bladder cancer,” he said. “I’ve had three surgeries since, and I’m clean.
“I had some pre-existing conditions,” he continued. He is participating in a screening program administered through a New York hospital. He gets tested each year locally “to see if there is anything new, or if the pre-existing is worse.”
While that yearly screening program provides a reminder of 9/11, there is something else the Greeps could do to mark Larry’s time at Ground Zero. They could go there.
“I have not been back since I left. No opportunity,” Larry said,
“We’ll see a different version,” Linda said. “All completed.”
