Back From N.Y. With a Lesson

On a long plywood table in the Modjeska Canyon fire station, Bob Sheibel unrolled giant “before” and “after” aerial photos of the World Trade Center he had brought back to share with his fellow firefighters in the Orange County mountain community.

Sheibel, 49, spent two weeks toiling in the ruins of the towers as a volunteer structural engineer, dispatched by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to try to ensure that no additional rescue workers were killed or injured after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

On the “before” photo, the undamaged twin towers stood among hotels, churches and other office buildings like a game-board version of Manhattan.

On the “after” photo, they were replaced by a general area marked “Hazards,” with descriptive names such as “the Crown,” “the Punch” and “the Widow Maker.”

“The Crown” was a 90-foot-high hill of choking debris. “The Punch” was a hole smashed six stories deep in the earth.

“The Widow Maker” was a giant piece of metal from the south tower “that basically dragged like a bear claw . . . down the front of an adjacent office building, and hooked on the edge of the building, hanging over workers in the rubble below,” Sheibel said.

Sheibel told his colleagues that the lesson reinforced for him through two nearly sleepless weeks of work was that rescuers need to be protected as much as possible.

He said the 300-plus New York firefighters who died after responding to the scene had done nothing wrong.

“A firefighter’s first instinct is to run into the burning building that everyone else is running out of,” he said. “That’s how we save lives.”

But the buildings’ collapse proved that maintaining safety under stress is crucial and that disaster scene hazards need to be constantly reassessed.

Orange County Fire Authority Battalion Chief Don Forsyth agreed. He was a member of an urban search and rescue team that responded to the Oklahoma City bombing and the Northridge earthquake.

“It’s like a giant game of pick-up-sticks,” Forsyth said. “You have to make sure that every time you move a piece of debris, you’re not going to cause more harm.”

Sheibel, who trained for 10 years to be certified to respond to such disasters, was on vacation in Mexico when he heard about the attacks. He and his wife, Vickie, a firefighter herself, headed immediately for the border. He called FEMA and soon was aboard one of a handful of planes to cross the nation that night.

Part of Sheibel’s job, along with other structural engineers, was to closely monitor structural hazards, especially involving adjacent buildings.

At the Modjeska station, his colleagues peppered him with questions. Uppermost on their minds was whether there had been any “voids” or open air spaces that rescuers could locate to reach living victims.

No, the buildings were steel tube construction that flattened after they were hit, Sheibel told them. “Once the [towers] pancaked and collapsed, it was an inferno. The reasonable chances for viability were little, because of the tremendous weight and mass.”

Sheibel looked near tears when about 75 of his canyon neighbors gathered at Fire Station 16 Wednesday night to sing “God Bless America” to him and Vickie.

“Thanks . . . gosh . . . thank you,” said Sheibel haltingly, a smile filling his exhausted face as he looked at the familiar faces, the neighborhood dogs battling on the ground, the toddlers in pajamas racing around the grown-ups’ legs.

“I didn’t do anything different than all the firefighters here,” he said. “That’s what the fire service is about, and that’s what this canyon is about--helping out our neighbors in time of need.”

Sheibel was one of more than 1,600 members of urban search and rescue teams called to help. His extra training qualifies him to be part of the elite Incident Support Teams that coordinate rescuers. Others in the crowd would have gone too, if they could have.

“The fact that Bob went was like having a part of all of us go to help,” said firefighter Marc Grossman.