First a Responder, Then a Hero: New York's Finest Dedicate Themselves to Recovery Effort

Kenny Winkler is trained to rescue people with sophisticated equipment and tactics. He'll scuba dive into deep waters or rappel off a building or even out of a helicopter, if necessary.

A member of the New York Police Department's (NYPD) elite Emergency Services Unit (ESU), Winkler spent his career preparing for difficult emergency situations. But not even he could have imagined the crisis that erupted on September 11.

Winkler had finished his overnight shift and was about to head back to his home in Staten Island when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He raced to the site of the World Trade Center and set to work manning the radios, becoming the main point of contact between the ESU teams already in the building and officers throughout the city on their way to the scene.

"I looked up and saw what I thought were paper streamers falling from the sky," Winkler recalls. "They were 15-foot steel beams that crashed to the ground, one crushing an ambulance a block away."

Not long after, the second plane hit the South Tower and Winkler started calling in off-duty officers while maintaining contact with those already inside the fated towers.

"I was on the radio with a team on about the 20th floor," he says. "They were telling me that it was difficult to go up because of all the people coming down and then we heard this loud locomotive roar, and communication went dead."

That was the last Winkler heard from anyone on that team. As the South Tower collapsed, Winkler dove under a car, still holding his radio. "Everything went from gray to dark gray to black," he says.

Still under a car, he radioed his teams in the second tower to evacuate.

"It was hard for them to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened because they were still inside," says Winkler. "Many of them didn't rush out. They continued to look for people who needed help."

One team that had been on the 31st floor made it down to the lobby and across the street just as the second tower came crumbling down. "One more minute and they all would have been killed," says Winkler. "The time between both towers collapsing was 30 minutes. They made it out in 29."

Sadly, others were not so lucky. In all, 23 NYPD officers were killed, 14 of them ESU members.

Initially, Winkler's job was to make sure everyone had the supplies they needed. He stood on a steel beam, amidst the rubble of the towers, directing supplies to officers doing search and rescue operations. To make matters worse, a lot of resources had been destroyed in the collapse. "You never knew if one of the walls might start caving in or if the floor would give out below you," he says.

By nightfall, Winker got word that two Port Authority officers had been trapped under layers of concrete and steel. The only way rescuers could get to the trapped officers was to crawl on their stomachs, using small shovels, picks, and battery-operated saws to cut away the steel, piece by piece, as fires burned around them. "It was hotter than a furnace," says Winkler. "And it was pitch black. All we had were hand held flashlights." Compressed air bags, capable of lifting eight tons, were used to remove what couldn't be budged by hand.

Four hours later, the first officer was rescued. He was placed on a stretcher and a human chain of officers passed him over the rubble to a waiting ambulance. It would take another seven hours to free the second officer.

Winkler and his wife, a detective with the NYPD, worked long hours in the months that followed.

"We kept saying there's got to be more voids in the debris where someone could survive," says Kenny Winkler, who worked 18-hour shifts, searching through the rubble. "There were, but no one was in them."

Until January, Winkler had, at most, two days off per month. He continued the grueling pace until May, when the site was finally cleared. "My oldest daughter is 12," he says. "She had to grow up real fast."

Almost one year after the attack, two of Winkler's fellow officers were identified through DNA. "I knew every one of those guys who was lost," he says. "You never know when you're going to miss them. I remember when President Bush visited New York City after the attack. I knew two guys who were snipers that would protect the president when he came. I looked up on the roof tops expecting to see them, like I always did. But they weren't there."