POWERFUL MEMORIES EMT Ralph Bressler reads one of two letters from children he’s kept from his days aiding firefighters at the World Trade Center site following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Len Baldassano photo
Manor EMT recalls 9/11
Ralph Bressler was at Ground Zero
By Len Baldassano | Manor Ink Mentor
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when Ralph Bressler was preparing for his next class in Liberty High School, a phone call from his wife changed the course of the rest of his day and, in many ways, the rest of his life.
“My wife generally doesn’t call me unless something big is going on,” Bressler recalled. “Then she told me a plane just hit the World Trade Center.”
At first Bressler assumed it was a small plane, and was “no big deal.” “So I turned on the news, and no, it was a very large plane ... and then, pretty soon after that, the second plane hit.”
Bressler quickly changed to his role as a Sullivan County EMS volunteer, and would soon enter the chaos in Lower Manhattan.
Volunteering to help
“I went to my principal and told him what had happened,” Bressler said. “He said to me, ‘You can leave whenever you want’.” Bressler volunteered himself, his son Kurt and Ted Hartling to drive one of the town’s ambulances to Ground Zero, and they were put on standby by the county’s EMS coordinator. “He said, ‘I’ll give you a call back.’ And that call came back at the beginning of October.”
Recalling those days in conversation with Manor Ink as the 25th anniversary of the WTC attacks approached, Bressler winced when describing his first impressions upon arriving at Ground Zero. He recalled the smells, sights and sounds with a clarity that suggested those experiences remain vivid for him.
Bressler also shared a dozen photos taken at the site, along with two letters from children that the Red Cross had given him. One, from a boy named Carlos, read “I am sending a happy face to you so you can feel better.” It was dated Sept. 13, 2001.
A pile that never got smaller
THE PILE Excavators remove debris from the World Trade Center site in Oct-ober 2001. Photo courtesy of Ralph Bressler
“We were there to support the FDNY,” Bressler recounted. “To take the load off them, so they could respond to their regular calls. I talked to an FDNY lieutenant there on Thursday morning, and he said that where we were parked there had been eight-to-ten feet of debris that they had already cleared away. I remember the very large dump trucks ... it was a constant stream of them, and yet the pile never got any smaller.
“I also remember that every now and then everything would stop. They would carry out a rescue basket, often with human remains that they had found. If there was a flag on it, it was a firefighter or a police officer, or somebody that they identified as emergency services. And everyone stopped … they just stopped what they’re doing,” he said.
After concluding his work at the WTC site, Bressler and his crew headed back to Livingston Manor. As they left the city, he witnessed another sight that has stayed with him.
“As we turned onto the West Side Highway, there were dozens of people with signs that read, ‘We appreciate you. Thank you for what you do.’ One of the things I remember thinking about was the unity that people had then – in contrast with unity that we don’t have now as a country.”