Editor’s Note: Last month, students from the Get and Give Afterschool program chose “The Twin Towers” as their topic for several interviews. .
In February, several of the students interviewed Maurice McGrath, a business representative with Local 608, a carpenters union that covers Manhattan and the Bronx.

At the time of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, The World Trade Center was included in McGrath’s coverage area, and he exited a subway just five minutes after the second of two airplanes hit the towers.

Following the attacks, McGrath volunteered for two days to help clean up debris from the WTC site and also advocated for workers’ compensation and health care rights for carpenters in his union.

What follows are excerpts of McGrath’s introductory comments to Get and Give’s student reporters and then a question-and-answer session conducted by the students. 

McGrath: “I got down there, I walked upstairs out of the subway, and I saw all those people standing there.  I’ll never forget this: I walked up and this guy was wearing brown pants, brown shoes, brown hair, brown shirt. I said ‘What’s going on?’ and he just pointed. I looked up at the north tower and there was a big hole from the plane. And I didn’t know what to think…..

“Personally,  I have a very strong sense of The World Trade Center. We work in buildings and we feel that they’re part of our lives. That we really own that building.
And I’m very attached to the World Trade Center…. My first son who just turned 20- I remember I was standing there on the night of (September) the 12th on the bucket line and looking up at all the bright lights, and I was working on the 82nd floor of the north tower the day that my wife called me to tell me she was ready to give my birth to my son....

“We lost 18 people from our union down there, and some of them were pretty good friends of mine...And it was pretty powerful when we found out exactly where they were and how they died. But we just did everything we could possibly do to get everything cleaned up and get it going, and now they’re starting to rebuild the buildings now.”

Get  and Give:  How many people did you treat with lung problems from 9/11?

McGrath: I’m not involved with the medical [aspect]. But quite a few members of my union have lung problems. I, myself, I’ve been tested twice at Mt. Sinai clinic, and each time I’ve had to take the breathing test four times before I was able to  pass it. A lot of our members ,because of the chemicals and the smoke and everything, have had major problems breathing.

Get and Give: In what specific ways did you help victims or people that you knew on 9/11?

McGrath: I was able to help people with workers' compensation claims, helping them to get the coverage they needed to pay for their medical care. And also to be able to talk to people. Because one of the things that happened is a lot of people emotionally shut down from what happened and they weren't able to talk.

Tony Richards: What was it like for you in those first 2 days after 9/11 ,when you were there with the buckets, dealing with the emotional loss of people you knew that had died, and also doing all this physical work to clean up?

McGrath: You had to learn to shut down your emotions. How to block everything else out because a job had to be done. Even though you knew people that were missing or had died in there, you had to detach that from what you were doing. Put it all away until you had to get done what you had to get done.

Get and Give: But why do you have to do that?

McGrath: I would have been physically and emotionally overwhelmed. I wouldn’t have been able to do what I felt I had to do to help clean up the area. If I kept thinking about these friends of mine that had been killed there and all the other people that had been killed, I don’t know if I would have been able to do what I went down there to do. 
Get and Give: Were a lot of people shook up about it? Were they speechless?

McGrath: Oh yeah. Because of the terrible way that everything looked, a lot of people couldn’t talk about it, even though they were standing right there, because they didn’t know what to say.
Get and Give:  Did it take a long time- like months and months- to clean up everything?

McGrath: It took us approximately ten months. We actually saved this city and the country a lot of money because of all the volunteer work that was done, and also the agreement that everyone had that was down there about how we were going to work together to get the job done.
Get and Give: What needs to be done to clean up Ground Zero?

McGrath: The city government, state, and federal government have to become honest and talk about what was really in the air and the dust that everyone was breathing. The second thing is a total cleanup that was never really fully performed in the area. They’re still finding buildings that have dust in them two or three blocks away from the World Trade Center site. To really get the cleanup done, there’s gotta be honesty and a lot of people have to come forward and do it properly.
Get and Give: You said they are still looking for buildings with dust in it. How many miles do you think the dust went?

McGrath: Because of the wind, it went anywhere from Brooklyn over into Newark, New Jersey. It was blown across the Hudson River, from the World Trade Center on the West Side of Manhattan, across the East River well into Brooklyn, and again across the Hudson into New Jersey. And then north again- they found dust originally as far up as 42nd Street.