In the hours since a pair of hijacked passenger planes destroyed the twin towers of the trade center, St.Vincent’s, the major trauma center closest to lower Manhattan, treated more than 300 people, many of them injured rescue workers. But by evening, the flow of ambulances had slowed to a trickle at St. Vincent’s and other area hospitals.
Hampered by falling debris and smoldering wreckage, rescue workers were impeded from further sifting the trade center’s ruins for survivors Tuesday night. Hundreds, if not thousands of people, are feared still remaining in the rubble. On a typical day, 50,000 people worked in the twin towers.
Of the people St. Vincent’s treated, about 50 were in critical condition and three had died. Two of those succumbed to smoke inhalation; the other was crushed to death, said Dr. Leonard Bakalchuk, speaking for the hospital.
The hospital stopped taking blood donations Tuesday night. Despite the shortage in the city, officials said, long lines of hundreds of eager donors had overcome the hospital’s ability to process the blood.
Bakalchuk said St. Vincent’s prepared to receive victims of the catastrophe essentially by “moving the hospital into the emergency room.” He said he expected to see more patients arrive Wednesday, when rescue workers expected to accelerate their excavation of the site and search for survivors.
Also tending to families
Nearby, the hospital had set up a family information center in a ground-floor space donated by New School University. Counselors and mental health professionals sat at tables that lined the room; none was without clients. Other workers there took names of people’s missing loved ones and tried to match them against a list of people known to have been admitted or treated and released from a hospital. The list was being updated constantly.
Jeff Pesot was among those seeking information. He was concerned about friends and relatives who worked at Eurobrokers, a firm that occupied offices in one of the World Trade Center towers. He had received an e-mail at 3 p.m. EDT from two of his friends at the company confirming they had survived, he said. But he continued to worry about a cousin and several other friends.
Misha Phukhan, 26, came in search of her missing sister, Bella Phukhan, 24. The sisters both worked in the World Trade Center, but for different companies. Misha was on her way to work when the first plane struck. Her sister worked in the 104th-floor offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial firm, in the first building hit. Misha said she had spoken to Bella earlier in the morning but had not heard from her since the disaster occurred.
St. Vincent’s was the third hospital Misha had visited in her so-far futile search for information about Bella. “They just tell me to check back again,” she said, sobbing.
Michelle Brown, 32, came to the hospital looking for the brother-in-law of a worried out-of-town friend. “So, I’m here looking for him. She’s sitting by the phone and she’s hysterical,” she said of her friend.
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`It’s just devastating’
Inside the information center, Brown said, “It’s so horrible. There’s so many people inside. It’s just devastating. I was sitting next to a woman who was looking for her husband.”
The Rev. Roger Fawcett, a Roman Catholic priest at nearby St. Columba’s parish, came immediately to the hospital when he heard of the catastrophe.
“We saw a lot of banged-up people,” he said. “The first reaction is incredulousness and unbelief.”
Fawcett said he saw many firefighters and other rescue workers being brought into the emergency room. He added that a first-aid station had been set up at the base of the twin towers soon after the disaster, and many of the injured aid workers had been caught in the subsequent collapse of the buildings.
Asked what he would tell those who want to seek revenge for the attack, he said, “If we keep hitting each other, it will never stop. But we have to do the first thing first, which is to help people.”
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said, “We have a lot of hospitals and we’re using them,” referring to the city’s 170 hospitals. He said the city also is prepared to use medical facilities in neighboring Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut if necessary.