Edition: U.S. / Global

Ironworkers' Job of Clearing Ground Zero Is Over, but the Trauma Lingers

Published: November 11, 2002

The four men sat on a sunny sidewalk in Greenwich Village on a recent workday and ate their lunch staring at the steel skeleton of a building going up on West Third Street.

One of them commented on how much easier it was to eat a sandwich in front of steel that was strong and straight and new, not molten and mangled and laden with debris.

The men -- Larry Keating, Danny Doyle, Mike Emerson and Bobby Graves -- are veteran ironworkers in Local 40. They were at ground zero ''from the first day to the last day,'' as they proudly describe it, working closely with firefighters, cutting steel and picking through wreckage for human remains. It was devastating work, and the four men say they got through their long, grueling shifts by banding together and talking each other through the horror.

The job ended in June, when the last steel beam was lifted from ground zero. But for the ironworkers and other workers who handled body parts and blowtorches, the trauma is not necessarily fading.

Many workers have turned to a federal screening program run by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine to get help with problems both physical and mental. But for many others, reaching out for help is out of the question.

''It's over, but it's not over,'' Mr. Keating said. ''You were working in a graveyard and saw a lot of stuff you weren't meant to see, and a lot of it still lingers. We talked each other all the way through the cleanup, and we're still doing it.''

Mr. Keating, 50, a 23-year veteran ironworker who served as a foreman at ground zero, explained that the foursome arranged to remain together after the cleanup. They worked briefly at the Williamsburg Bridge and then moved to this job site, which will become New York University's new law school.

''The cleanup was as traumatic as it gets,'' Mr. Keating said. ''But I don't know one guy who has said anything about seeking therapy.''

Officials estimate that as many as 30,000 people may have helped in the cleanup of ground zero. The ironworkers, and the roughly 1,500 other union laborers -- heavy equipment operators, carpenters and others -- who worked full time clearing the pile, as it was called, have returned to job sites that are not graveyards.

But many of them grew dependent on the long hours to steer them through the disaster, said Brian Lyons, a site supervisor at ground zero.

''Now that the cleanup's over, a lot of guys have gone off the deep end,'' Mr. Lyons said. ''When you were working down there, you had responsibility and pride. You could do something about the tragedy. But when the job was over, and we laid the guys off, some took it very hard and couldn't stop coming back to the site. Some had to be escorted off the property. They kept showing up like they were lost. Some of them wanted to work for nothing. You had to snap them into reality and say: 'The job's over. Go home.' ''

For the four ironworkers working on West Third Street, it's back to normal life: leaving the house at 6 a.m. to get to the job and walk narrow steel beams high in the air. At this site, the smell is of coffee bars and sandwich shops, not death and burning jet fuel.

Mr. Emerson, 36, and his wife had their first child, a daughter, seven days before the collapse, but because of the long hours on the cleanup, he said, ''I basically never saw her awake for her first six months.''

''My social life and family life came to an end,'' recalled Mr. Emerson, of Yorktown, N.Y. ''You spent your home life on edge, and we saw each other more than we saw our wives.''

The men often worked 20-hour days and would go home to shower, sleep an hour and return to the pile. After about seven months, they all got their first weekend off. Afterward, they compared stories and found that they all had fought with their wives and had felt strange being away from the pile.

Still, Mr. Graves, 49, a 28-year veteran ironworker from Brooklyn, prefers to speak of ground zero as just another workplace. ''The way I see it is: it was a job,'' he said. ''Now the job's done, and I'm on to another job.''

But Mr. Emerson disagreed. ''How can you compare the pile to any other job?'' he said. ''No job will ever be like it. It was a different sense of purpose, a different feeling, a different motivation.''

Mr. Doyle joked about the exotic colors of the vapors they inhaled during the cleanup and rattled off the names of what they heard the contaminants were: silica, gypsum, fiberglass, polyvinyl chlorides, benzene, asbestos.

''They still don't know what the hell we were breathing in down there,'' said Mr. Doyle, 44, of Brooklyn, an ironworker for 24 years.

It is difficult to say whether ground zero workers will suffer long-term health problems from the cleanup, said Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program.

The federally financed program was set up in July by the Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, part of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, to give free screenings to ground zero workers and monitor them for long-term medical problems. The screening center is in a luxury apartment building on Fifth Avenue near 101st Street. All day long, strapping construction workers saunter through the marble lobby in their dusty work clothes. Appointments are booked solid for months.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped get the initial financing approved by Congress for the center. In June, Congress approved $90 million for screenings and long-term health monitoring of thousands of ground zero workers, but President Bush rejected the plan, citing budget constraints. Mrs. Clinton's office is in discussions with the Federal Emergency Management Agency about more money for health screenings.

Dr. Herbert said that many workers suffer from respiratory problems and psychological difficulties, including post-traumatic stress disorder. She calls the workers ''the invisible walking wounded'' from 9/11.

''It's sad to see people who worked so hard with cleanup and their lives are shattered,'' she said. ''They have flashbacks, nightmares, depression and some patients who will never be able to return to their trade, because of chronic asthma from ground zero.''

One patient, John P. Graham, 40, a union carpenter, went to ground zero on Sept. 11 and tried rescuing victims, while dodging debris and falling bodies. Mr. Graham, a health and safety instructor for the New York District Council of Carpenters, takes medication, including steroids for his chronic cough, and goes to therapy because he still dodges falling bodies in his nightmares.

Then, around the one-year anniversary, a co-worker from ground zero attempted suicide, he said. ''This was a big, strong guy,'' Mr. Graham said. ''You start thinking, 'If he's capable of that, when am I going to start seeing the boogeyman?' ''

Photo: From left, Danny Doyle, Mike Emerson, Larry Keating and Bobby Graves, ironworkers and ground zero veterans, are working together at a new job on West Third Street. ''A lot of it still lingers,'' Mr. Keating said. ''We talked each other all the way through the cleanup, and we're still doing it.'' (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times)