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Posted on 11/17/2001 8:52:32 PM PST by all4one

The workday for the heavy machine operators at ground zero begins as it ends. In darkness.

It is bad for those who work the early shift, because the only sunshine they see these days is framed by the crater that still hisses and spits like a snake. It is bad, too, for those who work the late shift, operating in the mud and the slop under the lights and with suspect footing.

The World Trade Center job is a bad one, a torturous and consuming business. It goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The smell has crept into the workers' clothes, and the place has invaded their dreams.

The work of the firefighters and the police officers and the National Guardsmen has been documented. But the job now largely belongs to the operating engineers — those 300 or so men and women from the International Operating Engineers, Locals 14 and 15, who pilot and maintain the heavy machines like cranes and excavators, frontloaders and the wrecking ball. Their job is to crush, rip, tear, scoop and load the wreckage.

That is not to slight the ironworkers and carpenters and other trades personnel who do important and necessary work, but it is the demolition and excavation engineers who are the dwellers of the pit.

"My survival mechanism is to not look at it," said Jaime L. Valladares Jr., who has operated an excavator on the rubble since Sept. 12. "You take all of that emotion and you bury it deep down inside you, and you try never to let it come out."

Others deal differently.

"We've got a Vietnam vet on the job," said Bob Gray, a master mechanic who belongs to Local 14 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, but who looks more like a professor than a proletarian. "After a month on the job he was back in the jungle. It was the smell, the smell of bodies. He left for a few weeks and got himself together. He's back now."

A few men have asked off the job, but only a few, Mr. Gray said. Others refuse to go, and others still stand around the hiring hall on Northern Boulevard pleading for the work, or they come down to the job site and plead their case. Ground zero has become a sought-after duty. Ten weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, it is hard to find an operating engineer who has taken more than a few days off. Eighty-five hours of their weeks are spent on the pile, and now they have taken to calling regular society the "outside world."

"Home is the odd thing," said Gregg Nolan, a bald and bearded barrel of a man with a wife and four children who is a foreman of the excavators. "Home is not normal."

People like Mr. Gray and Mr. Nolan talk about going to the local bar and approaching the entrance and looking in at the people laughing and drinking and leading very normal lives. They look at that and then turn around and leave.

"It's like I don't belong there," Mr. Gray said.

According to the union, work is going well and ahead of schedule. With 25 excavators and 12 cranes, officials estimate that 40 percent of the debris has been removed. The two towers are below ground level now. The demolition of another building began on Thursday with the aid of a wrecking ball, a device that had been outlawed in Manhattan for 20 years.

The operating engineers say that they have been put between a rock and a hard place. They have to make progress, their supervisors tell them, and they are no longer allowed to stop the excavation unless they are specifically told by a man in a white hard hat.

"It's becoming a site where they're trying to get something done," said one crane operator, who asked that his sentiments not be attached to his name. "It tears you up."

But the operators and the firefighters have worked shoulder to shoulder since the beginning. They bailed buckets together the first week. And under the supervision of the firefighters, the operators picked columns and girders gingerly until a few weeks ago, when a door to millions in dollars of gold bullion was revealed.

After that, City Hall decreed that the number of firefighters on the site would be limited to 25, citing safety reasons. After protests by the firefighters and complaints from their widows, that number has been brought up to 75. But union officials say the firefighters have no power to stop the demolition.

The machine operators say they will not turn their backs on the firefighters, though. And so, in an unspoken pact, the excavators will dig, and if anything looks out of place, they will take the load and spread it to the side so that the firefighters may scour it for bodies. In the meantime, they will turn to another patch and remove that.

It is now classified as a construction site, but it is a strange stage with the flowers and memorials and the iron-beam cross salvaged from the carnage. Weary workers sneak catnaps in the trailers and sheds. Because of their prolonged proximity to the wreckage, every machine operator has what is being called the cough, brought on by the diesel and dust and smoke and water and asbestos and ground porcelain and glass. And the dozens of machines work around each other in a sort of terrestrial ballet.

The operators talk of the small moments when they stop and look to the heavens and see the stars. This makes them feel human again, only to turn around and see the smoke and destitution.

Thanksgiving is this week, and the crew would like to have off. Danny Nolan, a hard-charging man on the wrecking ball, has had few personal days since Sept. 11. There will be a skeleton crew working out of respect for the families, and people like Mr. Nolan, no relation to Gregg Nolan, said it was the right thing to do.

"If I had people in here, I'd want to know someone was looking too," Danny Nolan said.

Danny Nolan has nightmares now, waking up screaming about the job sometimes. Friends from the past who have died visit him, like the old friend whose name he will not speak because of a belief that the name now belongs only to the soul. In the dream, the friend takes him into a strange room and shows him actual items that Mr. Nolan has seen recovered from the World Trade Center, things like African artifacts.

"The place is playing tricks on me, I guess," he said.

Never forget!

Keep this picture in your mind forever and the attack on the World Trade Towers, the death of those men, women and children will stay personal forever! When you get a peacelover whining in your ear, this is the cure. Six posts from the left, in the middle of the picture you see someone holding an infant out of the building trying to give it fresh air. These folks are all dead now. Keep this atrocity personal forever! Do not listen to the whiners and weepers about the civilian casulties that our pilots accidentally cause. Remember foremost the six thousand plus civilians who died in the attack on the World Trade Center Towers. This terrorist attack was an intentional mass murder of innocent civilians. So tell Reuters or CNN can go somewhere else with their 'sad stories'!"

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