America's bloodiest day
Hope for survivors dwindles among the rubble

By Larry McShane
Associated Press

NEW YORK — Rescue crews dug through rubble and body parts in the stark glare of spotlights for a second night, desperately hunting for signs of life amid the smoking remains of the World Trade Center.

Aldolfo Roriguez holds a photo of his father, Alexis Ludoc, 45, who was working on the 96th floor of World Trade Center Tower 2. Rodrigues was one of many who brought photos to hospitals in hopes of learning the whereabouts of a loved one. Associated Press

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani hinted at dwindling hopes: the city requested 6,000 body bags from federal officials.

On Wednesday, five people were pulled alive from the rubble — three of them police officers. But the dead far outweighed the living: a total of 82 bodies had been recovered so far.

In all, more than 700 people were confirmed missing or dead in the attacks in New York; at the Pentagon, which was damaged by a third jet; and in western Pennsylvania, where the fourth hijacked plane crashed. The toll is sure to rise.

A thick cloud of acrid, white smoke blew through the streets Wednesday after the four-story fragment of the south tower fell. Gusts of flame occasionally jumped up as debris was removed from the smoldering wreckage.

"The volunteers are literally putting their lives at risk," Giuliani said.

The massive search to uncover the terrorist plot stretched from Miami to Boston to Portland, Maine, and on to Canada and Germany. Up to 50 people were involved in the attack, the Justice Department said, with at least four hijackers trained at U.S. flight schools.

In Washington, President Bush worked with Congress on legislation authorizing military retaliation, and officials revealed that the White House, Air Force One and the president himself were targeted a day earlier.

Friends and family of missing World Trade Center victims awaited news at a missing-persons station in New York yesterday. Associated Press

In New York, the landscape was a haze of gray dust, splayed girders, paper and boulders of broken concrete. Firefighters armed with cameras and listening devices on long poles searched for survivors. German shepherds and golden retrievers clambered over the debris, sniffing.

A morgue set up in a Brooks Brothers clothing store received remains a limb at a time.

Giuliani was among those who escaped Tuesday's attack uninjured, bolting from a building barely a block from the site when the first of the towers collapsed.

More than 3,000 tons of rubble were taken by boat to a former Staten Island garbage dump, where the FBI and other investigators searched for evidence, hoping to find the planes' black boxes with clues to what happened in the final terrifying minutes before the crashes.

Wall Street and the rest of the nation's financial center remained closed for a third day Thursday, with hopes they may reopen Friday. The shutdown on the New York Stock Exchange was already longer than the two-day closure at the end of World War II; the next longest was for a week after the 1929 market crash.

Insurance industry experts say the attack could become the nation's most expensive man-made disaster ever, with payouts ranging from $5 billion to $25 billion.

The densely packed bottom tip of the island, an area roughly five square miles, remained off-limits to everyone but emergency workers. Volunteers emerged from the search-and-rescue mission with grisly tales as they cleared away the twisted steel and glass wreckage of the twin towers.

One body was carried out wrapped in an American flag. When workers hung another American flag from a piece of a transmission tower that apparently survived the collapse, "everybody stopped and saluted," said Parish Kelley, a firefighter from Ashburnham, Mass.

Kelley spent the day working in a crater left by the towers' collapse. As he picked through the rubble, he watched as a man's body — a cell phone still clutched in his hand — was carried out.

"We're looking at a pile of rubble 30 to 40 feet high. Where do you start?" said sheriff's Sgt. Mike Goldberg of Hampden County, Mass., accompanying a search-and-rescue dog.

The discovery of a foot and leg and a cockpit seat led to speculation that one of the pilots had been found, Goldberg said.

Arthur Schell was among hundreds of people who gathered last night at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas for a candlelight vigil for victims of the recent terrorist attacks. It was one of many such vigils around the country. Associated Press

"I wouldn't let a terrorist stop me," she said at Bellevue Hospital. "If the building were still there, I would go back."

For those looking for missing family members, there were unanswered questions. A family grief center set up in a Manhattan armory drew 2,500 family members on Wednesday, said Gov. George Pataki.

Thousands more were expected as the search mission continued.

At St. Vincent's Hospital, where hundreds of victims were treated, a sobbing Annelise Peterson walked in a daze, clutching pictures of her boyfriend and brother.

Peterson asked if anyone had seen either. No one could tell her yes.

Among the missing: 202 firefighters, 154 workers from the Port Authority, 57 NYPD and Port Authority police officers, 38 members of a Manhattan management company.

Also lost was John P. O'Neill, head of security for the World Trade Center and a former FBI expert on terrorism. O'Neill headed the investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole, along with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Back at Bellevue, a firefighter almost had to have his leg amputated so he could be freed from the rubble, said Pataki, who visited the hospital to thank medical workers and speak with patients.

The governor asked him why he would risk his life. The unidentified firefighter told him: '"What do you expect? I'm a New Yorker."'