Rob Sheffield
Contact Rob Sheffield on X View all posts by Rob Sheffield September 11, 2026
Workers at St. Vincent's Hospital wait for injured people from the World Trade Center towers after planes crashed into the buildings, in New York on September 11, 2001. Peter Morgan/REUTERS The following article appeared in the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone.
I spent Tuesday night at Chelsea Piers, the sports-and-leisure complex on the Hudson River at Twenty-third Street, which rescue workers had turned into a makeshift emergency room. There were hundreds of surgeons there ready to start operating on the survivors. There were police and firefighters and EMTs from all over the tristate area, and volunteers — there just weren’t any survivors.
Some of the volunteers, like me, had nowhere else to go: My John Street apartment is only four or five blocks from the World Trade Center, and I had no idea whether there was any home left for me to return to. Others, like my girlfriend, Kat, had been pounding the pavement all day trying to donate blood, waiting in the O-positive line at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village but getting turned away like everybody else. We needed to do something — well, we needed there to be something to do. Kat and I got to Chelsea Piers around five and hit the jackpot; no, they weren’t taking blood donations, but they did pick out a group of twenty volunteers and gave us a job. We were assigned to escort patients into the OR, which Kat recognized as the soundstage where they film Law and Order.
The woman with the megaphone gave us a quick lesson in escorting patients: When they arrived, we would get their personal info, including any allergies or chronic conditions and their religion. We would walk with them from the ambulance to the green room (minor injuries), the yellow room (serious injuries) or the red room (near death). We leaned against the railing as the woman with the megaphone stuck masking tape on our chests and wrote the word VOLLY on the name tag. (Some other volunteers milling about had VOLLY PAD on their masking tape – what did that mean?) We passed the box of blue rubber gloves down the line and figured out how to put them on. We were scared — the patients were due to start arriving any time. Half an hour, someone said. I saw a blue emergency-medical-services van pull in the driveway, covered in soot and ash. Somebody had written “God Bless You” in the dirt on the window.
There were rumors buzzing through the room, and no way to disbelieve any of them. The United States had just bombed Afghanistan, explosives had been found under the George Washington Bridge, the borders of New York State had been blockaded. Some of the rumors were true, most weren’t, but there was no line across which any tale was too tall to make our bodies hurt a little more, to make our hearts move a little more wearily. We were waiting for action. Any minute now, we were told and kept telling ourselves, the survivors would pour in. The woman with the megaphone told us another half-hour.
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Official-looking people milled around: Surgeons and nurses, med students and EMTs, police and rabbis and friars and nuns. A cop came around and gave us a brief lecture on how to read a police officer’s uniform to get his or her name, badge number and precinct number in case he or she was unconscious or wounded and couldn’t tell us. Nobody wanted to go home, really; it was comforting to be around other people, and many of us had no way to get home anyhow. But the longer we waited around, the more obvious it became that maybe there weren’t going to be any survivors here, not tonight, not tomorrow.
