I was at Bellevue Hospital, in the emergency room, where we cleared out almost the entire hospital for the only time in my memory.and set up a system of triage for how we would take care of the sickest and most injured patients first.The survivors we were expecting never came because there were so few, as I wrote the next day for The Post.trying to rescue people from the burning buildings, becoming the first certified fatality of the terrorist attacks.
Father John was nowhere near as eloquent, but he was and is a man of great heart, which he showed in the days to come. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the World Trade Center Health Program, a commitment to provide free medical care for 9/11-related conditions to all responders and survivors through 2090.
The country was lost in the days that followed, until Sept. 14, when President George W. Bush stood on that car hood amidst the World Trade Center rubble at Ground Zero beside a retired firefighter and called out through a bullhorn, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”