Searchers enter mall where time stands still

One floor beneath the World Trade Center, in what used to be a shopping concourse, a clock on a jewellery store wall remained frozen at 9.10. A ghostly Bugs Bunny statue stood coated in grey dust outside a Warner Brothers gift shop nearby.

As the stores in the underground mall were checked one-by-one for survivors, rescue workers marked them with an orange X. They made one stroke of the X as they went in, the other as they came out.

Wearing what looked like miner's helmets, search crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) picked through the rubble and the darkness under 5 World Trade Center, burrowing into any space big enough to shield a survivor.

The nine-storey section of the Trade Center was charred but did not collapse when the complex's 110-storey twin towers crumbled early last Wednesday (NZT).

"There are caverns down here," said Don Schroeder, commander of a Fema unit from Sacramento, California.

"The focus is to continue to find and extract victims from a pile of rubble like this."

He said he had no doubt a person could have survived in the spaces the workers found, but nobody has been found alive so far. He said some bodies were recovered as crews tunnelled into the concourse but he could not say how many.

One week after the terrorist attacks, 218 people were confirmed dead at the World Trade Center and 5422 still listed as missing. Only five survivors have been pulled from the rubble.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said yesterday that the chances of finding anyone else alive was "very, very small".

"We don't have any substantial amount of hope we can offer anyone that we will find anyone alive. We have to prepare people for that overwhelming reality."

That won't be easy. Hundreds of families are awaiting word in more than 60 countries about the fate of their loved ones.

Many others have come to New York to pass out flyers bearing photographs of those missing in the slim hope that somehow they will turn up alive in a hospital bed or in an air pocket amid the ruins.

Family members aren't the only ones who suffer when disaster victims can't be recovered, said James Reese, an expert in traumatic stress who has been asked to help New Jersey emergency personnel deal with the frustrations of digging through the rubble.

Many of those firefighters and police officers are suffering what he called "survivor guilt", feeling they should have done more to help those still under the debris.

Mr Reese said his job would be to make them understand that it's not their fault. "The enemy did this, we didn't. We cannot go in and create miracles."

In the mall below the Trade Center, rescuers worked in darkness broken only by their headlamp beams and some daylight that fell through the shaft of a stalled escalator. Broken glass crunched underfoot.

The air was stale and stifling. Workers wore heavy, elaborate filter masks. Canisters of oxygen were on hand if needed.

At the Tourneau jewellery shop, where eight clocks displayed time from around the world, local time had stopped at 9.10 - about 22 minutes after terrorists began the attack by hijacked aeroplanes that brought down the towers.

The store's windows were shattered. Rolex boxes were empty. Pale blue velvet cushioning display counters were caked in dust.

The workers from the Fema urban rescue team based in Sacramento form one of eight 62-member teams on duty from California, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Florida and Pennsylvania.

Cranes lifted large pieces of debris from a great crater yesterday. A large rubbish bin was labelled "AIRCRAFT PARTS" in bright yellow spray paint.

Flyers were posted throughout the area, showing workers what an airliner's black box looks like. The black boxes of the two airliners that brought down the twin towers have not been found.

- REUTERS

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