PHOTO COURTESY OF WAYNE HENRY AND KEN PEIFFER JR.
Food and refreshments intended for rescue personnel lined the steps and street a year ago near the World Trade Center.
Volunteers answered For most, Sept. 11, 2001, was a day of terror.
call to perform
Ground Zero cleanup
Editor's note: Pennsylvania resident Wayne Henry was a Salvation Army volunteer at Ground Zero. He recently told his story to his nephew, Star-Bulletin copy editor Ben Henry.By Ben Henry
bhenry@starbulletin.com
For Wayne Henry, it was a call to duty.
Henry, who is semi-retired and teaches part-time at Penn State University, is a Salvation Army volunteer in Chambersberg, Pa., which is four hours away from New York City.
Called into action a day after the attack, Henry went from heaven to hell in a matter of hours.
"It's one of those days that you never thought that you'd live to see," said Henry, a high school teacher for 35 years.
There was the physical aspect -- soot and ash covering everything that hadn't already been destroyed. And there was the emotional aspect -- exhausted workers somehow finding it within themselves to keep going, despite being weighed down by heavy hearts.
"There was one occasion when all the work stopped and firemen formed a perimeter in silence as a fire truck was pulled from the wreckage, with bodies still present," Henry said. "When a body was located, everything came to a standstill out of respect."
He and fellow Salvation Army volunteer Ken Peiffer Jr. have allowed the Star-Bulletin to print exclusive photos taken from Ground Zero. Because the media weren't allowed into the area, photographs like these have rarely been seen by the general public.
"Those pictures were taken when we could find a minute," Henry said. "The time we were there, we worked around the clock. Your adrenaline kept you going. We couldn't think about sleep.
"We don't mind sharing these (photographs) if it helps keep alive the memory and helps people deal with the tragedy."
Henry said the workers were up against unbearable conditions; acrid smoke in the air, soot and dust everywhere and the fact that surrounding buildings left standing were highly unstable.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WAYNE HENRY AND KEN PEIFFER JR.
An exhausted recovery worker catnaps in a minibull dozer near the site of the World Trade Center.
"Three blasts on a horn meant, literally, run as fast as you could away from the site," Henry said. "This happened once while we were there. The emergency workers on the rubble didn't leave; they stayed at their task."
Henry's unit was responsible for providing food and supplies to the rescue workers. As supplies poured in, Henry's station at St. Peter's Catholic Church became a storage facility.
"There were even bag lunches from schools from other states, and the students would write notes of thanks," he said. "In most cases the transportation time was too great for us to be able to use them. But their hearts were in the bag more than the lunch, if you know what I mean."
[ WE REMEMBER ]
