The four men sat on a sunny sidewalk in Greenwich Village on a recent workday and ate their lunch staring at the steel skeleton of a building going up on West Third Street.þþOne of them commented on how much easier it was to eat a sandwich in front of steel that was strong and straight and new, not molten and mangled and laden with debris.þþThe men — Larry Keating, Danny Doyle, Mike Emerson and Bobby Graves — are veteran ironworkers in Local 40. They were at ground zero ÿfrom the first day to the last day,ÿ as they proudly describe it, working closely with firefighters, cutting steel and picking through wreckage for human remains. It was devastating work, and the four men say they got through their long, grueling shifts by banding together and talking each other through the horror.þþThe job ended in June, when the last steel beam was lifted from ground zero. But for the ironworkers and other workers who handled body parts and blowtorches, the trauma is not necessarily fading. þþMany workers have turned to a federal screening program run by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine to get help with problems both physical and mental. But for many others, reaching out for help is out of the question. þþÿIt's over, but it's not over,ÿ Mr. Keating said. ÿYou were working in a graveyard and saw a lot of stuff you weren't meant to see, and a lot of it still lingers. We talked each other all the way through the cleanup, and we're still doing it.ÿþþMr. Keating, 50, a 23-year veteran ironworker who served as a foreman at ground zero, explained that the foursome arranged to remain together after the cleanup. They worked briefly at the Williamsburg Bridge and then moved to this job site, which will become New York University's new law school.þþÿThe cleanup was as traumatic as it gets,ÿ Mr. Keating said. ÿBut I don't know one guy who has said anything about seeking therapy.ÿþþOfficials estimate that as many as 30,000 people may have helped in the cleanup of ground zero. The ironworkers, and the roughly 1,500 other union laborers — heavy equipment operators, carpenters and others — who worked full time clearing the pile, as it was called, have returned to job sites that are not graveyards. þþBut many of them grew dependent on the long hours to steer them through the disaster, said Brian Lyons, a site supervisor at ground zero.þþÿNow that the cleanup's over, a lot of guys have gone off the deep end,ÿ Mr. Lyons said. ÿWhen you were working down there, you had responsibility and pride. You could do something about the tragedy. But when the job was over, and we laid the guys off, some took it very hard and couldn't stop coming back to the site. Some had to be escorted off the property. They kept showing up like they were lost. Some of them wanted to work for nothing. You had to snap them into reality and say: `The job's over. Go home.' ÿþþFor the four ironworkers working on West Third Street, it's back to normal life: leaving the house at 6 a.m. to get to the job and walk narrow steel beams high in the air. At this site, the smell is of coffee bars and sandwich shops, not death and burning jet fuel.þþMr. Emerson, 36, and his wife had their first child, a daughter, seven days before the collapse, but because of the long hours on the cleanup, he said, ÿI basically never saw her awake for her first six months.ÿþþÿMy social life and family life came to an end,ÿ recalled Mr. Emerson, of Yorktown, N.Y. ÿYou spent your home life on edge, and we saw each other more than we saw our wives.ÿ þþThe men often worked 20-hour days and would go home to shower, sleep an hour and return to the pile. After about seven months, they all got their first weekend off. Afterward, they compared stories and found that they all had fought with their wives and had felt strange being away from the pile.þþStill, Mr. Graves, 49, a 28-year veteran ironworker from Brooklyn, prefers to speak of ground zero as just another workplace. ÿThe way I see it is: it was a job,ÿ he said. ÿNow the job's done, and I'm on to another job.ÿþþBut Mr. Emerson disagreed. ÿHow can you compare the pile to any other job?ÿ he said. ÿNo job will ever be like it. It was a different sense of purpose, a different feeling, a different motivation.ÿþþ
Source: NY Times
