Echoes of Ground Zero for Lynn’s Legere

LYNN – As they watched first one, then a second skyscraper collapse into a smoking heap on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Jack Decareau turned to fellow fireman Dave Legere and asked, “Who do you think is in those buildings?”Without replying, Legere knew he and Decareau had just witnessed the deaths of hundreds of New York firefighters as well as police officers who had rushed into the World Trade Center towers to rescue trapped office workers. The overwhelming sense of helplessness he felt at that moment prompted Legere to board a train a week later to New York and volunteer to help out on the gigantic rubble pile known the world over as ground zero.”I really felt if I didn’t go down there I’d regret it, but I didn’t feel any different than any other firefighter,” he said.From Sept. 19 to Sept. 25, Legere spent mostly nights working with other firefighters assigned to a search and rescue crew digging through the debris of pulverized building material and steel beams. He helped form a chain of workers who passed along five-gallon buckets of material to searchers who sifted through the material looking for any sign of the 3,000 people killed when the towers collapsed after being struck by hijacked planes.During his week of volunteer work, New Yorkers opened their arms and hearts to Legere, providing him with a place to hang his gear in a fire station blocks from the rubble pit and feeding him aboard a cruise vessel converted into a makeshift residence for rescue workers.A woman who spotted him smoking outside Ladder Eight station bought him five cartons of Newports. Firefighters in the station who lost a lieutenant when the towers collapsed ate breakfast with him every morning while they sifted through a long list of funerals for fallen comrades.”It tore them up. They knew they couldn’t possibly go to all of them so they had to pick and choose which ones to go to,” he said.On the way to and from ground zero, Legere walked past hundreds of people holding up makeshift posters of loved ones and hoping for any information on the fates of missing friends and relatives.”Every building was covered with pictures of someone missing and each had a story with it.”Legere used vacation time to volunteer in New York after learning rescue coordinators were not calling on fire departments across the country to send additional firefighters to the site. He initially could not obtain permission to get onto ground zero but a Ladder Eight firefighter showed him a back way to the site past rows of cars belonging to people killed in the terrorist attack.”The smell was not one I’ve ever smelled at a fire before: It was a combination of rubber and plastic and really acrid.”Even a week after the attack, a fire still roaring eight stories below the ground burned through rescue workers’ boots and forced searchers to cobble makeshift booties for search and rescue dogs. Although a need to help out compelled Legere to go to ground zero, his own brief burial years before the Trade Center attacks, beneath rubble also drove him to volunteer.In 1995, Legere and four other firemen were fighting a fire on the third floor of a Beacon Hill Avenue building when the floor collapsed, dropping them into the cellar. It took rescuers 40 minutes to pull debris off the men, all of whom survived the collapse.Legere thanked Ladder Eight members for their hospitality by returning to New York with fellow Lynn firefighters and containers stuffed with lobsters donated by East Coast Seafood. They fed their New York comrades with a giant pot of pasta packed with lobster meat.He visited the Trade Center site two years ago but the sight of tour directors conducting $75 walks around the site left him with a sour feeling.”I don’t think I’ll go back again.”