Decision to Give Up Hope of Rescue Difficult to Make

Delicately and reluctantly, officials are nudging the grieving families in this city toward what seems an inevitable truth: few, if any, of the 5,422 missing remain alive.

A week after the attack on the twin towers, people cling to the images of miracles past: a newborn baby found eight days after the 1985 Mexico earthquake; a cook rescued 14 days after an earthquake buried him in the rubble of a Manila hotel.

But the grim scientific truth is that such tales are exceedingly rare. In the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, the last survivor of the wreckage--a longshoreman named Buck Helm--was rescued three days later. In the 1999 earthquake in Turkey, five days proved to be the limit of human endurance.

“There is a very delicate public relations issue in moving from rescue to recovery efforts,” said Linda Bourque at UCLA’s Center for Public Health and Disaster Relief. “The issue now is to find as many bodies as possible, as intact as possible, for identification purposes.”

The former site of the World Trade Center may already be only a vast tomb. But accepting that fact is a complex emotional process for the families left behind.

Parents who have spent a lifetime protecting their children do not surrender that responsibility easily. And many sons and daughters may not be willing to relinquish their loyalty to a parent who, after all, might still be alive somewhere, trapped in a dark place, needing their help.

By Monday, after six days of waiting for word of her father, 21-year-old Jacqueline Hernandez was ready to say it would bring a sense of relief to the family to know with certainty that he was dead. But she was not willing to embrace that notion just yet. “They’re saying there’s people stuck underground,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m not going to give up without a fight.”

The family spent the week posting fliers of 42-year-old Norberto Hernandez on lampposts and walls across the city. He was a pastry chef at the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of 1 World Trade Center in the north tower.

Jacqueline told the youngest of her father’s grandchildren that “he’s in Puerto Rico, baking cakes.” To the rest of his family, Norberto remained in a sort of limbo, caught somewhere between the land of the living and the dead.

“I’ll do whatever I can to see my father again,” she said.

On Sunday, Jacqueline had made another attempt to get near the blast site only to be turned away. “I tried to sneak in, but there’s soldiers there.” At home, someone was always ready to answer the phone. “Every time the phone rings, we run,” she said. “Every time there’s a knock on the door, we run.”

Finally, on Tuesday, the Hernandez family got word. Norberto’s body was one of 35 identified during the day by authorities.

Many, many more families are still waiting.

In situations where a person is most likely dead but still missing, the normal process of grieving can take on new dimensions, said Robert J. Kastenbaum, author of “The Psychology of Death” and other books.

It is common for a surviving relative to experience a “visitation” from the missing person, a momentary sensation that he or she is in the room with them.

“The thoughts they have are not weird or pathological,” Kastenbaum said. “It’s the situation they’re in that’s pathological.”

Most cultures place the body at the center of the rituals that follow a death. “They want to see the [deceased] person at rest,” he said. “It’s something deeply rooted in most of us. They want to know that it’s over so they can carry on.”

On Tuesday, Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen toured the ruins and said he was losing hope that there might be a “void” that contains survivors deep in the 1.5 million tons of debris. So far, rescuers have discovered evidence of intense fire and heat when they’ve reached such spaces.

Everyone working on the mound of rubble that was once the World Trade Center knows this simple fact: The last survivor was rescued on the afternoon of Sept. 12.

Since then, during more than 140 hours of continuous digging and lifting and listening, no one has heard a word, or felt a breath from the thousands trapped underneath.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said Tuesday that rescue efforts would continue. But his statements have grown ever more pessimistic over the last few days. “The chances of recovering any live human beings are very, very small now,” he said. “Those chances are not totally over. . . . But we don’t have any substantial amount of hope that we’ll find anyone alive.”

Although such miraculous discoveries may have happened before, pathologist Dr. Charles J. Stahl said a number of factors work against those struggling to live through this disaster.

“This is not quite the same thing as an earthquake,” Stahl said. “In this case you have not only many crushing injuries but also a lot of dust and smoke related to the total collapse.”

His final assessment: “The chances of having survived are very slim.”

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Times staff writers Robert Lee Hotz and Matea Gold in New York contributed to this report.