"Volunteers No Longer Needed" Heartbreaking to Some

construction.com September 17, 2001

By Judy Schriener

WTC Volunteer Kelly Clark Photo by Judy Schriener

Ironworker James Kelly Clark emerged from Ground Zero on Sat., Sept. 15, and headed home to Lindenhurst, N.Y., head hanging, tears in his eyes. After four days of working as a volunteer--doing everything from running water in to the firefighters and EMS workers before the first building, the north tower of the World Trade Center, collapsed on Sept. 11 after a terrorist act to cutting steel so it could be removed--he was no longer needed. "I've been kicked off the job," he said tearfully.

Contracts for cleanup were awarded to four contractors late last week and, after sleeping on the concrete floor of a men's clothing store one night, working til he dropped and risking his life to help, Clark, who goes by Kelly, was told he had to leave. The message to him and hundreds of other volunteers who had helped during the chaotic and uncertain first four days was that only workers hired by the officially designated contractors would be allowed in. "I sort of felt like I got kicked in the face," he says.

The move was necessary for a number of reasons, say the contractors who were marshalling the workers over the weekend from makeshift headquarters in Jacob Javits Center. They have to make sure that the workers are qualified, that they come in through their union halls, that they have the proper safety briefings and that the contractors have jurisdiction over them. When a supervisor asked a worker to come help in another location on one occasion, he said, "I don't have to do that--I'm a volunteer, and I'm going to stay where I am," reports one contractor.

Nevertheless, being asked to leave doesn't feel good for Clark and his fellow volunteers. "Everybody's been busting their ass for the past three days, and they just kicked us out," he says. "I wasn't asking [anybody] for money," he says. "They couldn't do what they had to do without us" in those first few days.

Clark had a special tie to the World Trade Center towers. He spent his first year of apprenticeship to become an ironworker working on Tower 1 and worked in all of the WTC towers on interiors construction as tenants moved out. Building 7, the third of the towers to collapse, was the last place Clark worked with his father, a union lather, before the elder Clark died seven years ago. "I built the damn building--it was my right to take it down," he declared, tears running down both cheeks.

He was "on the mountain" of debris, he says, cutting steel for endless hours. "You just went until you couldn't do it anymore," he says.

Clark's union card had expired several years ago, and he had been working all over the country as a roofer on multi-million-dollar homes, most recently in Vermont. His ironworker brother, Jeff, broke his neck several weeks ago, so Kelly Clark grabbed his brother's union card from Local 46 in New Jersey and signed in with it as "J. Clark," which both brothers are.

Kelly Clark's experiences from Tuesday through Saturday leave him forever changed. He saw sights that horrified him and touched him. The enormity of the devastation and the complexity of the debris is astonishing. "It's all a big puzzle. It's like working with pick-up sticks" in that moving or removing one thing could then shift everything nearby around, he says. Workers kept having to use fire extinguishers to douse the sparks thrown by the torches. "But we were winning," he says.

Periodically, someone would call for silence and it would get totally quiet while everyone listened for some sign of life. Or they'd have to wait an hour or so for the dogs to come in, then another hour while the dogs did their work, and then they would regroup and start all over again. "Everybody was working together--we were watching each other's backs," he says.

When Clark and his fellow workers emerged from the site of the collapse to go home two days earlier, they were met by cheering New Yorkers waving American flags. "That's when my emotions came out," he says. "We didn't even know anyone was there."

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