Sharing the Burden

   The first thing a visitor notices outside the Shanksville, PA, Volunteer Fire Department is the 12-foot-high steel cross adorning the front lawn. How odd that a religious icon would abut a municipal agency in this age of acute political correctness. A Star of Life on a church steeple would be just as peculiar.

   The giant cross is a gift from New York City's Fire Family Transport Foundation. The vertical and horizontal beams are worn and warped, just as they were when they were pulled from a five-story, 16-acre pile that had been the World Trade Center. Delivered by that city's fire department (FDNY) in 2008, then mounted on a pentangular base, the structure is a reminder that there were not one, nor two, but three Grounds Zero on 9/11. Shanksville Chief Terry Shaffer inherited the third.

   Shaffer was one of millions of Americans that morning watching miscreants use commandeered jetliners to slaughter thousands in massive structures thought to be impregnable. Like most of us, Terry's reaction was buffered by distance and disbelief. Until his wife called him at work.

   "Are you aware of what's going on?" she asked. Shaffer assumed she meant the carnage in New York and Washington, and assured her he was following the news.

   "Well, you have a plane down in your district, and you need to come home right now."

   Terry thought she was joking, or he'd misunderstood her, because there were no other conceivable scenarios. He called a dispatcher for confirmation, then raced from Johnstown to the crash site, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Forty minutes after United Airlines Flight 93, inverted and ballistic, struck an abandoned strip mine two miles from the Shanksville-Stonycreek School, Chief Shaffer stood at a 50-foot crater made by the fuel-laden Boeing 757 traveling at Mach .74.

   "There was debris everywhere," Shaffer recalls. "Lots of wiring and thousands of pieces no bigger than my fist. The only things that looked like airplane parts were a turbine and some tires. You could smell jet fuel and burnt flesh."

   It was evident to all who responded--fire, EMS, police--that their mission would be recovery, not rescue. Somerset County Coroner Wally Miller spotted just one body part--a spinal cord with five vertebrae--during his initial walk-through. Miller subsequently identified all 37 passengers, seven crew members and four hijackers from 1,500 discrete human remains weighing approximately 600 pounds--only 8% of the theoretical total. The rest had likely vaporized on impact.

   Shanksville's firefighters, 10 of whom are EMTs, extinguished brush fires and helped the State Police clear bystanders from what would be Pennsylvania's longest active crime scene, then spent three weeks with FEMA and the FBI salvaging fragments of the plane and its passengers. Terry had concerns about the emotional toll on his people. "I tried to restrict access to those who had been on-site since the beginning," he says, "but that was pretty naïve on my part." Counseling, offered early and often, has helped Shanksville retain 75% of its members from nine years ago.

   The most prominent reminder of the disaster in this tiny borough of 245 residents is the Flight 93 National Memorial, adjacent to the field where the airliner disintegrated. An unobstructed view from the gallery reveals no evidence of the catastrophe--no scorched earth, no severed trees, no scattered debris. The only landmark, barely visible hundreds of yards away, is an American flag draped over a fence post. That is where all but the most forward segments of the 155-foot-long jet burrowed into the ground. That is also where 44 passengers and crew members, responding to the ultimate airborne emergency, suffered the consequences of their selflessness.

   It's as hard to imagine wreckage smoldering in the pristine pastures of Shanksville as in the urban fortresses of New York City and Washington, DC. Processing the horrific, even when buttressed by bravado, is universally traumatic. There's only one level of unimaginable. "I don't think anyone could train for an event of this magnitude," Shaffer says, "but I think we stepped up to the plate, had help from lots of other departments, and displayed the kind of professionalism you would want from both paid and volunteer services." He credits his ongoing relationships with New York and DC rescuers for a healthy post-9/11 perspective: "I feel really close to those people. It may be a cliché, but we're all brothers."

   The Shanksville cross symbolizes that fellowship. It reminds us disaster is an uncompromising equalizer. When mortals and metal fall from the sky, distinctions between fire and EMS, big and small, urban and rural, BLS and ALS, and paid and volunteer matter little. Those of us who respond and survive are tormented by what we tried to do, had to do, couldn't do.

   We share that burden as brethren.

   Mike Rubin, BS, NREMT-P, is a paramedic in Nashville, TN, and a member of EMS Magazine's editorial advisory board. Contact him at mgr22@prodigy.net.