America Stands Tall Back to home page

By SEAN CORCORAN

Correspondent

SALEM -- Dan Dugery's story begins when he was told to turn on the television set.

Dugery, a Salem resident, is a chief petty officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. He is also a member of the Coast Guard's National Strike Force, a quick-response team that assists the Environmental Protection Agency in handling the nation's oil and hazardous chemical incidents. His work has brought him to disaster sites throughout the country, from Boston to Hawaii, from oceans to cornfields.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Dugery and members of his team were sitting at a conference table in Fort Dix, N.J., when their operations boss came into the room and said to turn on the TV; a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

"We turned it on thinking it was an accident, not even thinking it was terrorism yet," Dugery said. "And shortly after we turned it on, the second plane collided with the tower."

"We all basically, for a minute or two, sat there completely dumbstruck. And then our training kicked in."

Within an hour, the strike force was getting equipment out the door. By the next day, Dugery was standing on the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

"I grabbed my gear, said goodbye to my wife, and said, 'I'll see you when I see you.' And out the door I went," he said. "I went from reality to complete devastation within a few hours."

Dugery, a veteran of dozens of manmade disasters throughout his 26-year Coast Guard career, suddenly found himself in a world of tans and grays. Streets, cars, signposts and people were all covered in layers of dust.

Months of work

For the next few months, he and his co-workers put in 14- to 16-hour days. They checked the air quality of the free-standing buildings, as well as the subbasements of the collapsed Trade Center.

They decontaminated equipment, and did water testing to be certain the East River wasn't leaking into the levels below the collapsed buildings. And they looked out for each other. They made sure everyone stayed busy, trying hard not to think about what had happened.

"There were so many emotions," he said. "It was like having your TV turned on to a station with no signal, just static. It was like that.

"You would walk by people sitting there, and they had that look that they were thinking about it -- that thousand-yard stare. We always kept an eye on each other."

For several days, Dugery and the other members of the team were assigned to check the air quality of the buildings surrounding the World Trade Center complex. The job needed to be done immediately so technicians and financial workers could get back into the buildings and retrieve records necessary to get the stock market back online. The buildings they were entering were dozens of stories high, with no lights or elevators, and no circulating air.

Dugery didn't know it at the time, but the work his team was doing came from a presidential mandate, he said.

"We found out later that the magnitude of what we had done was to help get the stock market back online," Dugery said. "We opened up several vaults and took large boxes out of them. I found out later that some of them were templates for stocks and bonds. So, it was kind of funny -- we were walking down the streets with this rolling trash can full of millions of dollars in potential stocks."

Sifting through rubble

After a few weeks, while other members of the strike force went to Washington, D.C., to help deal with the anthrax scare, Dugery was assigned to work at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island where all the rubble from the collapse was taken. There, the debris was combed through once again for remains and hazardous material before being divided into piles.

It was at Fresh Kills where Dugery had a New York City police officer approach him with a rag in his hand. "I have no idea what to do with this," the officer said, opening the cloth to reveal a perfectly intact Wedgewood tea cup.

"We were both kind of staring at it," Dugery said. "It was like finding a Picasso in the middle of a jungle. We had no idea what to do with it. This thing survived a building collapse, excavation, being dumped in a dump truck, from a dump truck to a barge, from a barge being excavated out to another dump truck, being dumped on a pile and then sifted through. We just kind of stared at it."

In a way, an ending to Dugery's Sept. 11 story can be found 10 years earlier, before 9/11 found its way into infamy.

In 1991, Dugery was in Hawaii for the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing. Curious, he asked one of the servicemen who was there during the attack on Dec. 7, 1941, to tell him what it felt like to be a part of history.

"He said, 'I wasn't a part of history, I was just there.' To me, he said, that wasn't part of history,'" Dugery recalled.

"And it's funny, we are part of something that is going to be in the history books, and it was not what I expected it to feel like. It doesn't feel special. We had a job to do, and we did it."