Changed at ground zero

[Times photo: Cherie Diez] Gerd Schuch works at St. Petersburg's Fire Station No. 8 near Lake Maggiore. His helmet bears a picture of his wife's missing cousin, New York fire fighter Thomas Casoria.

By BILL DURYEA, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 13, 2001

A St. Petersburg firefighter travels to New York, hoping to rescue a family member and fellow firefighter who disappeared in the rubble. He emerges from the crucible with a new worldview.

ST. PETERSBURG -- Before he set off for New York City determined to dig his cousin from underneath a mountain of rubble, Gerd Schuch neatened up a little around the house.

Tree branches, snapped off by a big storm the night before, littered the yard. Schuch, whose toolbox is so tidy he knows if someone has moved a screwdriver, would never leave his home in such disorder. It was a simple chore to accomplish before tackling something much larger. He stacked the branches in the back yard.

"I'll deal with them when I get back," he told his wife, Maureen.

Schuch hurriedly packed his heavy-gauge firefighter's gear, a respirator, a jar of Vicks VapoRub, extra work boots and a new cell phone. His wife had bought it that day, thinking that if Gerd became trapped in the debris he could call for help.

Schuch (pronounced SHOE), who is stationed with Engine 8 near Lake Maggiore, and his friend Tom Bruno, a maintenance supervisor with Lealman Fire and Rescue, then loaded their bags into the back of a rented light brown Nissan pickup. Their plan was to drive straight through to New York City, meet up with Schuch's cousin-in-law, Anthony Marden, a New York firefighter, and join him in the search for another cousin, also a firefighter, who hadn't been seen since the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

Schuch and Bruno left St. Petersburg on Saturday evening, Sept. 15, about 7 p.m. More than 20 hours would pass before the still-smoking skyline of Manhattan came into view, plenty of time for Schuch to ponder something Marden had told him before he left:

"If you come up here, you will be changed."

The missing cousin

[Photo: New York City Fire Department] Thomas Casoria, 28, was last seen helping to carry a wheelchair user down the stairs of the World Trade Center's south tower.

Just before 9 on the morning of the attacks, Schuch was mopping the slate-gray floor of the station garage, always the first chore of his 24-hour shift. He put down the mop in time to see the second airplane slam into the south tower.

Schuch is a stocky man with neatly trimmed blond hair and a mustache to match. The mustache is the last vestige of a more full-bearded period in his early 20s, when he rode a Harley-Davidson around town. He still owns a Harley, but now he rides it mostly for charity events.

Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Schuch was not familiar with the geography of New York City, but he knew that Maureen had close family members who worked in downtown Manhattan. He called home immediately, but it was hours before Maureen could get a call through the jammed phone lines to her relatives.

By that evening, almost all of Maureen's family had been accounted for, everyone except her second cousin, Thomas Casoria. A firefighter with Engine 22, Casoria, 28, had been seen last around the 26th floor of the south tower, helping to carry someone in a wheelchair down the stairs.

Schuch called Bruno, the godfather of his son, that night.

"We started kicking around the idea of going up there," Bruno said.

"I figured that if (Casoria) was trapped, he had about a week to live," Schuch said.

Wednesday morning, Schuch finished his shift, returned home and drove his three children to school. That much was normal. But the news was full of stories about volunteers swarming to the scene of the disaster. The bucket brigade was in full swing, and Marden, Schuch's cousin-in-law, had already been there a full day.

Schuch wanted to go. He talked to Maureen, who was supportive but nervous.

"She worried that I was going to get hurt up there," Schuch said, "that I wasn't going to come back."

He talked to his chief, who told him to take as much leave time as he needed.

Marden returned from ground zero after three straight days. He told Schuch that he could still be of help.

"I figured we're going to go up there and we're going to dig these people out in no time," Schuch said.

[Photo courtesy of Gerd Schuch] When he saw the devastation at ground zero, Gerd Schuch says, "It looked to me like if the whole Old Northeast section (of St. Petersburg) was gone."

Pieces

In four years as a firefighter, Schuch, 35, has seen a few things. He once helped pull a man safely from the mouth of a 10-foot alligator. He treated a teenager who dove out of a moving car while high on PCP. He was on the scene after a furniture truck plummeted off an overpass on top of a bus. In April, he was named EMT of the Year.

What he saw in New York staggered him.

He was daunted by the scale of the city, which he had never visited in the 15 years he had been married to a native New Yorker. All concrete and brick, towering over him. Was there a single wood frame house anywhere?

When he arrived at ground zero early Monday morning, he struggled for a reference point. Even after five days of nonstop television coverage, he was not prepared for the expanse of the destruction.

"I thought it would be like the Soreno (Hotel demolition)," Schuch said. "It was overwhelming to me. It looked to me like if the whole Old Northeast section (of St. Petersburg) was gone."

Based on the layout of the buildings and witness reports, Marden drew a map of where he believed Casoria might be trapped. But that point was more than 100 feet from where they had to begin digging.

Schuch could hear pieces of metal falling. He smeared Vicks on his mustache, but even that intense menthol smell could not block the odor of decaying bodies. Fires would erupt suddenly when oxygen reached the smoldering material underneath.

He looked at the 10-foot-tall pile of debris in front of him and realized that "everything was turned to dust."

"That first day I just kept looking around, staring at everything," Schuch said. "It didn't look real."

Schuch saw his first body about three hours into the first day. A crane lifted a piece of steel about the size of a double door. He saw a piece of bone sticking up through the dust.

"It was like finding a fossil."

Using garden spades and small shovels, he and six others dug carefully around the body until it was uncovered.

"It was flat. I couldn't even recognize it as a person. I don't know if it was a man or a woman."

A chaplain from the Fire Department was summoned. The workers took their helmets off as he said a prayer over the body. Then the remains were zippered into a red plastic bag and taken to the morgue.

The next body was found 20 minutes later.

That night he and Bruno returned to Marden's house in Bayside, a leafy and tranquil neighborhood in eastern Queens popular with New York firefighters.

"We didn't even eat. I had a hard time sleeping," Schuch said. "The next day I refocused on trying to find Thomas.

"They say people can live up to 2 to 3 weeks as long as they have water," he said. "I still thought there was a good chance we'd find him."

But Tuesday, a week after the attacks, was more of the same. They would occasionally find bodies, but most often it was only pieces. Very small pieces. Sometimes they would find personal items: name tags a bellhop might wear, or a wallet.

"FBI agents were over our shoulders while we were digging," he said. "If we found something, they were right there to take it."

He was buoyed by the camaraderie of the other men in the bucket line. "All these strangers, and everyone's blending as a team," he said. He showed other volunteers the poem his 14-year-old daughter wrote him before he left, the one that explained why going to New York made her dad so heroic in her eyes.

And he could detect their progress as the pile slowly diminished, making room for the large cranes necessary to remove the massive pieces of steel. But Wednesday and Thursday passed with little to cheer about.

"My expectations started to change toward the end of the week. The heavy equipment started coming in," Schuch said. "It started becoming a recovery operation."

Friday it rained. With the heavy cranes working, Schuch and Bruno realized there was nothing more for them to do.

"I felt bad that we hadn't found Thomas while we were there," Schuch said.

He consoled himself that he had helped find 10 bodies. That was 10 families, he figured, that would get an answer to 10 missing person fliers.

On the drive home to Florida, he and Bruno listened to the celebrity telethon. Occasionally they would interject a memory from the week past. After they reached North Carolina, they didn't feel like talking anymore and they rode the rest of the way in silence.

[Photo courtesy of Gerd Schuch] Gerd Schuch, left, and his cousin-in-law, Anthony Marden, pose in a damaged building at the World Trade Center. Marden, a New York firefighter, joined Schuch and another St. Petersburg firefighter in the search for Thomas Casoria.

New priorities

"Gerd was really quiet when he came back," Maureen Schuch said. "That bothered me. I thought, "Oh, maybe he shouldn't have gone.' "

His normally scheduled shift was on Sunday, but he was spent and he stayed home.

"Everything started catching up with me," he said. "I felt tired. Real tired."

But even after he got some sleep, he woke up feeling out of sorts.

"I didn't feel like going out. I didn't feel like buying anything. I just didn't feel like doing much."

After a week of neglect, his lawn looked pretty shaggy, but Schuch couldn't summon the energy to mow it.

"I'm a keep-busy type person," he said, "but it just didn't seem that important worrying about what things look like."

He went back to work on Sept. 26. Diane Berkheimer, the paramedic on his shift, noticed he was even quieter than usual. "We had to ask for the pictures," she said.

Gradually, he began to open up about what he had seen in New York.

But mixed in with the stories from New York are snippets of a new, emerging philosophy.

"I look at life differently now," Schuch says. "I don't let the little things bother me."

He finally got around to mowing the lawn, although to his wife's amazement he hasn't touched the pile of branches in the back yard.

He didn't get too bothered that the annuals in the flower bed had turned into weeklies while he was away.

"That's all right," he told Maureen, surveying the dead impatiens. "We'll get some more at Home Depot next week."

Before his trip to ground zero, Schuch said, he worried constantly about whether he was saving enough money for his retirement. Family trips were few, local and inexpensive.

"He's one of those people who have to have so much in the bank for an emergency," Maureen said. "He'd say that we might use it for a trip, but we never did."

"I was going to put everything off," Schuch said. "But I'm not going to wait anymore. I'm going to do it now."

Schuch has not cast aside his responsibilities for the sake of instant gratification, but he has come to understand that fretting about the future does not protect it. It only cheats the present.

He is already planning a trip back to New York City next summer.

"And he's telling me we've got to stay more than a week," Maureen said. "But we're going to drive, he says. He's through with planes."

[Photo courtesy of Gerd Schuch] Anthony Marden, left, and Gerd Schuch pose in front of a radically changed New York backdrop, minus the city's famous twin towers.

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