Easthampton paramedic Dan Constantine packed his bags and boarded a bus for New York at about 11 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.
He joined a rescue team with doctors, nurses, paramedics and support personnel. They eventually established five medical stations around what responders called “the pile,” with four positioned directly around the ruins.
By the time the team arrived, most survivors had already been pulled from the rubble. Instead, the medical team treated people working at the site — firefighters, police officers, construction workers and other recovery personnel.
“It was this huge pile of rubble, maybe 14 stories high, right in the middle of Manhattan,” he said. “It was very surreal.”
The site was still smoking and burning, he said. Dust covered surrounding businesses, windows were blown out and debris was scattered through the streets. The work itself was solemn. Crews were still using buckets to sift through the rubble in search of survivors and remains.
Whenever remains were recovered, he said, the entire site seemed to stop.
“Everybody would go silent,” he said. “Everybody would stop what they were doing and just stand still and pay tribute as they pulled the remains out.”
He remembers walking to the medical stations past crushed fire trucks, ambulances and police cars. The medical station where he worked was set up inside a deli overlooking the ruins.
Certain smells still bring him back to the site, he said. So does the image of a cross formed by steel girders in the middle of the wreckage.
Amid the “apocalyptic” atmosphere, people lined the streets as the medical team traveled into New York, applauding and waving. Along the streets near the site, residents and businesses set up tables with food, clothing and other supplies for responders and recovery workers.
He had never been to New York, and the impression he got wasn’t that of the Big Apple, but of a small town.
“Everybody just was focused on helping each other,” he said.
Twenty-five years later, Constantine said the lesson he hopes people take from Sept. 11 is not simply to remember the attacks, but to remember how people responded to one another. He believes communities should continue to show that same care and dignity in ordinary times, not just during disasters.
“Everybody was just part of the human family,” he said. “Everybody took care of each other.”
He returned to the World Trade Center site with members of his team in 2013. The memorial pools and exterior memorials left a strong impression on him, but he found the museum difficult to walk through. Seeing artifacts such as the crushed emergency vehicles brought him back to what he had witnessed firsthand.
At first, he struggled with the museum. Eventually, he came to see its importance.
“People need to see these things,” he said. “Obviously in the future, people who weren’t there or never experienced it, so they know about this past.”
He still keeps his respirator and helmet from the deployment. On the wall of his office in Easthampton are framed newspaper clippings, and stored away is a piece of rock from the World Trade Center that he collected while on duty there.
For the paramedic, however, the most enduring memory is not a medical emergency or a particular moment of destruction. It is the sight of New Yorkers setting aside their differences and helping one another.
“I think that’s probably the big piece that stuck with me,” he said. “How people just came together through differences to help each other.”
That, he said, is what people should carry forward from Sept. 11.
“Not only in times of crisis, but in the daily struggles of life,” he said.
