Doug Copp, in GOOD HEALTH before he got poisoned at 911

chapter 22                   11 September 2001

THIS CHAPTER IS IN OUTLINE FORM

This is a rough draft of Chapter 22 of my book. The book includes behind the scene ‘real life dramas’ of espionage ( most national rescue teams have intelligence officers implanted into their team) , murder ( Can you think of a better time to murder someone than a major disaster with 100,000 bodies needing to be buried immediately and all resources are overwhelmed), the FBI looting at 911, FEMA using it’s Fairfax County ( CIA) Rescue Team for covert military intelligence operations, the Yakusa or Japanese Mafia being the only source of water, food and blankets (in Kobe Earthquake). I have been there. I have seen it and I don’t have the good sense or sense of preservation to keep my mouth shut…here is a little bit of 911 info that wasn’t made public….

Remember I said earlier that 60% of people die in their first confined Rescue, and that I had been inside 894 collapsed buildings? Well, there will never be an 895^th, because building number 894 broke my back, and left me dying by slow degrees. I met my nemesis on September 11^th, 2001. The World Trade Center has, in all probability, killed me. My doctors are astonished that I have survived this long.

I was living in New Mexico, so for me it was 7.15 am when the first tower got hit. I did not have the TV or radio on: I had no idea it was happening, until I got a phone call. 1

The more bizarre your life, the harder it is to introduce yourself to people. For me, that makes introductions damn near impossible. But the impossible is what I have done every day for the best part of twenty years, so what the hell, here goes.

My name is Doug Copp. I am generally considered to be the most experienced Rescue person in the world. What I do is this: whenever there is a serious large-scale disaster somewhere in the world, I find a way to get to it – somehow, anyhow – and when I am there, I try to save lives. I find survivors, and I pull them out. At least, I used to; but since the World Trade Centre I can barely even walk across my bedroom. I started in Rescue in 1985, and since then I have saved lives at more than a hundred major disasters around the world. My Rescue Name – the name given to me by my fellow rescue workers –  is la Cucaracha, the Cockroach. They call me that because I can crawl into the wreckage of any ruin building, and because they think I am impossible to kill. Until recently, I believed them9-11, it was looking like they might even be right – and there were statistics to back me up.

The proof is in the numbers: 60% of all rescuers who go inside a collapsed building to search for survivors never come out again. More than half of all rescuers who go in, are killed in their first attempt. Knowing the statistics, very few rescuers ever take that first risk. Fewer still will risk it a second time – and there are only three or four rescuers in the world who have been inside ten collapsed buildings or more. I personally have crawled inside eight hundred and ninety-four. That is around eight hundred and fifty more collapsed buildings than any other human being on the planet.

I have wrestled more than three hundred people away from certain, gruesome death in the aftermath of major disasters. The team I put together has saved several hundred more. Plus, if you count lives saved through education, prevention, and the fact that my team stopped dead an outbreak of bubonic plague after a quake in India, then I reckon that between us around a hundred and twenty-five thousand people who are alive today would otherwise have died. That is a lot of people. It turns out that I have a gift for rescue. I discovered that gift by accident, and I have used it – because if I do not, then no one will – and people will die who could be saved. I do Rescue because I can, and because others cannot. There is a need I can fill: I fill it. A hundred and twenty-five thousand lives saved indirectly, or three hundred directly, take your pick. Either way, what could possibly be more important?

But there is one life I may have failed to save: my own. I am dying – or perhaps just barely surviving, I still do not know which. It has been this way for almost two years. My doctors are all astonished I am alive at all; they all assure me that it is just a matter of time. At the World Trade Centre, the Cockroach finally met its match.

Actually, in one way, I was dead already. At least, that is what Hartford Life Insurance told me. In 1989, my fourth year in Rescue, I approached them about life insurance. I had just got remarried, and I wanted to make sure Paulina would have a secure future despite the dangers of my work. They patiently explained that they were always prepared to quote a price wherever there was a quantifiable risk – a chance of death and a chance of survival – but according to their analysis, I should already have died, within two months of my first Rescue job.  From their point of view, there was no risk involved at all – I had long-since passed the point of actuarial certitude of death. For me, the extra fourteen years I have has since then are pure bonus.

And fuck death anyway. I have faced death before. Death is an old friend. We have seen a lot of each other over the years. At those same disasters where I saved the lives I saved, there was death almost beyond measure. Six hundred and fifty thousand people have died in the buildings and cities I have crawled through. I have not just seen dead people – I have seen Death itself. I know Death. Death holds no fear for me at all. And, in any case, a sick Cockroach is not the same thing as a dead Cockroach. On my good days I still think that just maybe I can even get out of this one alive.

But it is the bad days that have made me want to write my story down. On the bad days I cannot even suck in enough air to sit upright. On the bad days, the deadness in my legs spreads up across my back and fans out into my arms, and eventually even my fingertips are numb. There are days – weeks, months – when pain clamps itself hard across my skull and I can feel myself fading. Sometimes, I am almost tempted to let go. These are the days that make me want to tell my story.

You see, I don’t see why I should stop saving lives just because I am probably dying. There are things I can tell you, things that could one day save your life. Disasters do happen, after all; and there are things you should know. For example: never duck and cover during a quake; it will almost certainly kill you. Did you know that? I bet you were taught exactly the opposite.

And there are people I need to warn you about, too. Many of those who flock to the scene of a disaster are profoundly evil. As you would expect, any large-scale disaster is horrific. There is chaos, a stink of death so you thick you can barely breathe, desperate survivors searching for their loved ones in a sea of chaos. There is rot, rats, corpses everywhere, shit flowing freely through the wreckage from ruptured sewers. The aftermath of disaster is a meaningless mangle of concrete and ripening pestilence.

But all that physical horror is trivial: the real horror at any large-scale disaster is less tangible. It is the horror not of natural forces, but of political ones.

When America sends a government rescue crew to help with a disaster in another country, it is members of their internal disaster agency FEMA… Except that, if you care to check, you will discover that FEMA has never heard of these people – these are people who are not even rescue engineers at all. In fact almost every country that sends a Rescue team sends mostly spies. I mostly do not care about this – after all, if they are actually doing the Rescue work that needs doing, then who cares if they are spying in their spare time? Some of my best friends are spies from various Rescue teams, and it does not bother me, why should it? But the Americans do not bother with Rescue at all. The American spies neatly peg out the area they are supposed to be searching – and then they disappear into the night. They will not even let anyone else attempt Rescue work on their patch, because it would show up the fact that they are not doing any; if you are alive under the rubble in the patch allocated to the American FEMA team, you are going to die – you are going to die – because they will not even try to find you. The CIA is not interested in lives, it is interested in how countries respond to chaos and emergency. In the name of the American people, these Americans let people die – this, from a country which they regularly ask God to bless… Well, I hope God has a sense of humour.

There is more. I have seen a country’s president halt all rescue efforts for five hours until the media were there to film him walking through the area caring; his own citizens were dying right under his feet – for a photo opportunity[1]. I have seen Japanese bureaucrats prevent foreign teams from doing rescue work, because they wanted the credit to go to their own team – and by the time that team arrived, all that was left to pull from the ground was corpses. I have seen FBI investigators looting stores after the World Trade Centre disaster. I have seen the greed of the American Red Cross kill people – they used vitally needed respirators as fund-raising props while half a mile away Rescue workers were suffocating in toxic smoke.

And I have seen another president[2] announce that the American people are forever in the debt of those who risked their lives in the aftermath of 9-11, in the hope of saving others. Debt? I am bankrupt! I am dying! And it took them a whole year just to issue the form to apply to the 9-11 fund; and when it arrived it was a pile of paper six inches thick, requiringrequired $250,000 of expensive depositions from doctors, lawyers, economists – and a stamina that is generally kind of hard to find while you are busy dying. It took me five months to complete enough of it to apply for an emergency medical payment. As I write, they still have not actually got around to looking at the submission. Debt?! I wish I could laugh at that – or shout – but my lungs are too fucked. Not to mention my liver, my kidneys, my eyes and my broken spine.

I have debts. I owe my doctors tens of thousands. I owe my lawyers. I owe rent, I owe the supermarket for the food I eat. I have to take a hundred and twenty-five separate medications every day just to have a chance of seeing tomorrow – and that costs me $3,000 a month. It is all money I do not have, because while I was even half-alive I put every penny I ever earned into Rescue. Debt?!! Hey, Dubya, come live with me for a week; because right now you do not even know the meaning of the word.

OK, so I think we have probably established that I am a tad bitter. Who would not be? But the bitterness is only partly from self-pity. True, the neglect of people like George Dubya Bush is helping to kill me, and that does tend to piss me off; but I am mostly bitter for all the lives these people could have saved – could still be saving – but choose not to.

Disasters have a kind of magnetism to them. They draw both good and evil things towards them. In my life in Rescue, I have seen miracles many times – and just as often, I have seen monsters. In the aftermath of any great disaster, when the normal rational world is in ruins, dark souls appear – and they revel in the destruction and the pain and the endless, overwhelming despair. But in twenty years of Rescue, I have met very few ordinary people. I have yet to meet anyone who has not actually been at a disaster who can grasp what it is really like: how intense, mystical, nonsensical, horrifying, and downright funny a massive disaster can be. Laughter and near-mystical experiences and horror are strange bedfellows: I think perhaps they are the only things in a shattered world that remind you that you truly are still human. So if anything in these pages seems strange, or so comic or so obscene that you cannot quite accept it, please remember: my only reason for writing this book is to tell the truth. And the truth of my life has been so strange that I could never have invented it.

This is the story of a life spent saving lives – and of how saving lives has killed me. I hope it will be an education and a warning. For me, it begins one night in Mexico City in 1985, in a primary school.

2

At least, it had been a primary school until just over a day ago. Now, it was just a pile of rubble, two hundred feet across, perhaps eight feet high at its tallest point. Each storey was pancaked down to two feet, a four-storey school collapsed into an eight foot sandwich. Three hundred kids in there, the French guy who brought me here had said. So I asked him if he thought we’d save many. He stared at me. Then he laughed.

Whatever it had originally been, now it was just a mangle. Slabs of concrete eight feet across at crazy angles. Boulders of concrete, concrete grit, grey concrete dust coating everything in a slippery film that clogged your eyes and choked you. Tangled shards of metal window frames, shattered chair legs, tiles, glass that had shattered into powder. The moonlight smeared it all to grey and black.

In the middle of it two slabs had collapsed together to form a triangle, maybe two feet high and one and half wide, a gaping triangle in all the grey, blacker than the darkest moon-shadows. This was the moment I had to choose: die inside there – 60% die their first time in, Doug, that’s more than half of them, Doug, don’t do this, Doug – or else stay safe, but die somewhere inside myself.

As I walked towards that gap, the world slowed down. It was just me and this building, the slow crunch of my boots in the rubble, the black hole waiting for me. I was scared. There was fear in my mouth. It was in there with the concrete dust, caked, packed-in, dry. This building could kill me. So I let my legs do the walking while my thoughts had the debate.

Hey, Doug, you’re not serious, right? Right, Doug?… Doug?

Crunch.

I gotta do it.

Yeah, but we’re gonna die.

Gotta do it.

You’re gonna die, Doug.

Crunch.

Dead anyway. If I don’t. Dead inside.

But you got a life.

Lucky me, right?

A good one. What about Natasha?

Hey, I care…

Crunch.

You don’t. You can’t.

I do. For real.

You’re insane, dead man.

Crunch.

I’m scared…

Oh, you’re scared?

Crunch.

I’m scared. Oh God…

Crunch.

How could the French guy be so sure anyway? Maybe there was someone alive. I mean, that was the whole point. It was why I had come to Mexico while everyone else fled the chaos and the aftershocks. I had to go in there: it was why I was here.

60%, Doug. Just walk away. Just leave, Doug, we can do that.

Dead inside… Remember?

I freely admit that I was scared as all hell. There was this huge split inside me: one half had all the purpose and determination, and the other half was absorbed in a reality-check – aware of the insane risk, worried how this would affect my daughter Natasha, my girlfriend, me… And if I let that part come inside a collapsed school with me, ‘he’ would get us both killed without a doubt. So what I did that day is what I have done every time since: I temporarily ignored the part of me that held all the fear, the part of me that is beset by care, horror, imagination, love… Because to rescue effectively, you have to become a kind of machine; that is the only way you can function. And if you fail to function, you die, and you take with you whoever you were trying to save. The only thing that has saved me all these years is Purpose.

Don’t, Doug. Listen –

I leaned forward, settled onto my elbows and knees, and snaked in between the slabs, my shirt and jeans slithering on grit and fine dust.

*

I made my first turn before my feet were even inside. A jagged edge of a slab stuck out at me at an angle, with twisted ends of steel bar sticking out from it. I shifted my torch to my mouth, kinked my upper body round to the left, careful to keep my hips and lower legs absolutely still – because brush something and you die. There was nothing obvious stopping the ceiling a few inches above me from collapsing – leftovers of cinder block, crammed-in rubble, what remained of wooden door supports, splintered and dangerously leaning. Catch yourself on something, and it will almost certainly trigger further collapse. With five concrete floors above me, if that happened I would be paste. I could see for maybe three feet in front of me, after that the mangled remains of the school obscured my line of sight. There wasn’t an obvious path through, not even one with twists and turns. I just edged forwards,  inch by inch, careful – careful! – to make sure my whole body followed the exact path set by my head and shoulders. And eventually I reached my three-feet-distant goal – a slab, maybe, or the twisted ruin of an aluminium window frame – and I wrenched myself around, back muscles groaning, until I saw another tiny void that might move me a few feet further in. It wasn’t a path, there was no certainty that the next turn would not leave me with no way forward; I just kept going, inch by inch.

It took me fifteen minutes to get twenty-five feet into that school, no more than three feet of it in a straight line, with the ceiling often threatening to scrape my back, and with my elbows inches from the wreckage that held up my roof, with my body following my head like I was a snake. Or a cockroach, maybe.

Eventually, a crushed-down room stretched out ahead of me. I could see four or five feet ahead. It felt like miles. On both sides, there were desks, flattened down to a foot or so, their undersides smashed flat against the floor, half hidden in concrete rubble. A classroom. I hitched myself further round the shards of door jamb, twisted my hips to ripple them over the ground-up block that I had been holding my chest away from – and I slid into the room. Four relatively clear feet, and I had to dog-leg left to bypass a slab-edge that had tipped down onto the floor. I hunched round the end of a desk, more caterpillar than cockroach  now, and found another space in front of me, maybe three feet, the width of a kid’s desk.

They must have been good kids at that school. Because they had all done exactly what they were told to do. Duck and cover, you have to duck and cover… They had hidden under their desks.

A hand poked out from the thin slit of space between the desk and the floor. It looked like the way a child’s hand can look if it is hung over the edge of a bed while they’re asleep. Except it was grey with dust, limp, and grotesquely larger at the wrist than the gap under the desk it came from. I looked at that gap for a time. It was just shy of one and a quarter inches. The child under there was now one and a quarter inches thick. A few inches out from under the desk, and that kid would have been alive – because I was just next to the desk, and I was in a space almost two feet high. But they had been good. They had done what they were told. And now they were dead.

The next hand was a few desks down. This hand had its palm facing upwards, absolutely flat-grey with the dust. The fingers curled gently upwards, the wrist tilted slightly down. Half the forearm was there too, smooth and hairless and utterly grey. I almost brushed it as I squeezed past. If I had, it would have fallen off; all that held it in place was a paste of flesh one and a quarter inches thick.

Poking out from the next desk was a foot: a white sock and a buckled-up sandal, and the ankle pinched into the one and a quarter inch gap under the desk.

I reckoned the kids must have been ten or eleven, but there was no way to know for sure. That guess was based purely on the size of their hands and feet. Boys or girls, or both? I have no idea. Truth be told, I don’t care. Take a man or a woman, any age you choose from eight to eighty, any colour skin – then smash them to a paste, and cover the remains in concrete dust so thick that it swells your tongue and you can’t talk and every breath is a rasp – and then try to classify what sex or race or age they once were. You wouldn’t even want to try. They were kids, that was all, and they were dead.

So was their teacher. She was lying in the largest space I found in the whole school, next to her desk. I could see for nine feet in every direction. She was dead, but unharmed – by which I mean she hadn’t been smashed to a jelly. What I could see of her legs were blue and green, a mass of bruises. Thinking now, that probably means she survived the quake and died slowly afterwards – because dead bodies don’t bruise.

There was a dark shape on her leg. I shone my torch at it. It was a rat, one of the largest I have ever seen – and, trust me, I have seen a few. It was eating her – and it was not alone. When the torchlight hit, it lifted its head and stared right at me. Alert eyes, bright and assessing. I didn’t stare back, I glared; I could feel the hatred pouring out of me, like a thing you could touch. The rat snapped its head round and bolted. Three other shadows scrambled after it.

But apart from the rats, there was no sign of life, so I moved on.

It was maybe an hour later when I found myself at an exit point. A section of ceiling had caved in – and so had the floor above, and above, right up to the roof, perhaps six feet over my head. Moonlight shone in. I snaked up onto the mound of rubble in the centre of the hole, poked my head out, and looked around. I was about seventy-five feet from where I had gone in. The French guys had set up lights while I was inside, and I could see them all clearly: they were around two hundred feet away. I waved my torch. One of them noticed, and started waving frantically at me. I was so relieved to see them that it took me a few moments to realise that this wasn’t just because he was glad to see me. This guy had something serious on his mind. Something urgent. Puzzled, I turned around.

Twenty feet behind me was a bulldozer, grinding towards me, sweeping rubble and debris into neat rows, like a snowplough. It was pointing straight at me, and moving fast. I had seconds. I moved. Fast. I was out with maybe a handful of seconds to spare. I scooted over the rubble and rejoined the French team, shaken and very alert. I glanced at my watch. Nearly midnight. The night of the 20^th September, less than twenty-four hours after the earthquake had struck.

My first building. My first attempt at Rescue.

And I had survived.

*

Before I ever started in Rescue, I knew why collapsed buildings are dangerous; because in my life before Rescue, I collapsed buildings for a living.

By the time I left college at twenty-two, I  had a degree in Philosophy, but I also had three business ventures up and running, earning me something like $150,000 a year – seriously big bucks in 1975. I had set up a company assembling bespoke hi-fi systems (and at the time, hi-fis were expensive and damned fiddly); I had used the cash from that business to buy nine properties which I was renting out and doing well on; and I did xyz… By 22, I was one of Canada’s self-made rich, a full-scale entrepreneur in the making: I was worth a million, I owned nine buildings, and more cars than I could drive. And with college behind me now, I had time and energy to burn. I started looking for new business opportunities – and the first one that came along was a demolition contract.

It was a government job: a complex of administrative buildings on the outskirts of Halifax in Nova Scotia, now disused. The government wanted to redevelop the site. I figured that smashing things apart could not be that difficult, so I went and took a look. The guy who showed me around was helpful enough; he told me all about the problems of demolishing the place, and even suggested what kind of quote the government was hoping for; the other firms who were tendering had all quoted about the same, he said… I quickly realised that demolishing buildings cost a lot of money – the quotes ranged from $100,000 to $1,000,000. And that puzzled me, because assuming all these other guys were right about the costs of taking the place apart, I could already see a way to do it for almost nothing.

One floor of one whole wing of the primary building was covered in beautiful wood panelling, and there were thousands of feet of redwood beams. I could sell the wood in there for at least $200,000. None of that made any difference to how much the building was going to cost to dismantle, so for me the calculation was simple enough:

Cost of demolishing buildings $30,000

Value of contract  $35,000

Value of salvaged wood $250,000

…Well, you work it out…

With a quote of just $35,000, I easily won the contract. In my first month as a demolition contractor, I made $255,000 clear profit. I had just turned twenty-three.

So by the time of the Mexico City quake in 1985, I had been involved in the demolition of many hundreds of buildings. I had also had a messy divorce, left Canada, and taken a job with the California Wrecking Company – one of the three largest demolition contractors in the world. When it came to making buildings collapse, I knew what I was doing. My main concern in demolition work was always safety – preventing the carcass of each building from killing my crew in any number of unpleasant ways. And to get that right, I had to learn to understand in detail exactly how a building collapses, and what exactly it collapses into.

There is structure in a collapsed building, any collapsed building, from a farmhouse to the World Trade Centre. As the walls come down vertically, the floors collapse from the middle, and pull parts of the wall in, push others outwards. With experience, you can tell where the rubble will be thickest, where it will have spurted inwards or outwards, where cladding slabs will be lying like concrete seesaws over mounds of shattered brick, where wooden joists will have cantilevered out from the remains of an internal wall to make a cavity that is ripe for further collapse, where doors and windows might have slumped sideways to make little wooden or aluminium tents… and where not. You have to know these things. You have to be able to survey a pile of rubble and map out in your head exactly where those voids are, where are the points of potential further collapse, where the large structural elements might be buried – because if you try to lift out one end of a girder, the other end could change the structure fifty feet away. You look, you think, you plan – and then you act.

What you do not do – not ever – is just plough straight in with bulldozers. You would never do it on a demolition site – and to do it in the aftermath of an earthquake when there is a genuine chance that there might be people alive under the rubble. In my eyes, that is tantamount to murder. There is no uncertainty about this: if there are people in there, the voids will collapse, people will be killed.

When I woke up the morning after the Mexico City quake and saw it on the news, what I saw was bulldozers. Bulldozers and cranes, ripping at the rubble, tearing out great gouts of concrete, levering girders up and out with no regard to what the effect might be. The news talked of rescue efforts; but what I saw was the unthinking slaughter of anyone who might have survived.

I watched for less than two minutes before I reached for the phone and rang the Mexican embassy. The line was engaged – and engaged again, and again. I could imagine distraught relatives frantically trying to get through. Clearly, the phone was not going to get this done. So I checked the embassy’s address in the phone book, grabbed some stuff, and headed out.

Five minutes after I walked into the embassy I was face to face with Mexico’s ambassador to the UN. Five hours after that, I was on a plane to Mexico City – and my new life had begun.

*

The ride through the city was surreal. The city was half in ruins, and half completely normal. We drove to the hotel; that means the roads were open. Weirder still, there was no rioting or looting at all. The traffic lights were not working, there were no police officers in white gloves with whistles, but what the hell, you could drive. Yet if you looked down the side-roads you saw nothing but rubble. Some skyscrapers were untouched, but most of them were collapsed; right next door to intact buildings, there were mounds of meaningless bricks and dust. The parts of the city that had survived seemed to add to the general chaos. They made no sense to the eye. As an engineer, though, to me it made perfect sense. Buildings have different resonances: hit the right frequency and a breath of wind can shatter concrete. Different materials, different shapes – different results. This is how to build quake-proof buildings. And in some parts of the world, there are even institutions that are wealthy enough to do it.

Most of Mexico City is not wealthy. Most of its buildings were damaged or in ruins.

Outside the hotel, there was a school bus full of firefighters. They had to be doing Rescue, so I went over and said hi. They were French, they spoke almost no English, so the conversation was pretty stilted, and probably incomprehensible unless you were there. One guy – the team leader but not big brass – did all the talking. I told him I had just arrived and was looking for wherever I could help. He told me they were going to work on a school.

“Moi, je viens?” I asked. “Je veux vous aider, je suis ici pour sauver les vies,” This is about as good as my French gets – pathetic for a Canadian, I confess. “Attendez, je vais trouver mon sac…” – my shoulder bag, the one I had taken to the Mexican Embassy and now the only luggage I had.

The French guy shook his head briskly. “Nous partons sans delai.” Then, helpfully, in translation: “Zere ees no time.”

It was obviously a lie because the guy stayed there and argued with me about it for another five minutes. The other members of the team were getting restless. eventually one of them muttered something about les americains, and set the others sniggering. Which was when I realised that they thought I was American.

“Non, je suis Canadien,” I grinned, and slapped my chest. “Pas americain. Les americains – pah!” The atmosphere softened immediately. We talked for a couple of minutes about Canada, about where I was from, how my best friend was French Canadian and had been living with a French girl for two years, about why I spoke so little French…Then I risked asking again.

“Alors, je viens? Je suis ici pour sauver, pour faire le Rescue.” I hoped that saying the word in a French accent would be enough to get the idea across. It seemed to work.

The team leader pursed his lips – but only for effect. “Mais oui. On attend.” We’ll wait. He even told me to take my time.

I hurried anyway, just to be safe.

As we drove, I tried to find out more about the school. The lieutenant didn’t know much, not even how many people had been in it.

“Mais combien pour sauver?” I pressed. “Combien de victimes?”

That was when he laughed. Oh, they’re dead, he told me. All dead. We’re just searching for bodies. By the time our bus full of firefighters pulled up outside this school full of corpses the sun had set, and I had begun to learn a few things about Rescue.

We climbed out into perfect darkness – no electricity here, no artificial light to disturb the moon. The rubble glowed silver. The shadows were pitch. The silence weighed a ton.

Time to go to school.

*

3

There’s a lot more I would like to tell you about Mexico City. Like I said before, at major disasters there is always hope as well as horror. There is laughter too, and miracles. My time there was unreal, intense, terrifying and uplifting. There is so much in this book that I do not have space for. Or, since I am probably dying, time.

I wanted to tell you how the American Embassy loaned me a limo for the duration of my time there. I was chauffeured around by a guy in a suit for ten days: this perfect, polished stretched-out car would purr up to a mound of rubble, and out would get this wild-eyed Canadian called Doug Copp, exhausted, manic, and stinking of the death and rot that was smeared over his clothes. He would brandish papers from the Mexican ambassador to the UN, yell loudly in English because he spoke no Spanish – and suddenly find himself directing crews of fifty or more. Then, half an hour later, he would clamber back into his swanky limo, still stinking of decay, and purr off to the site of another disaster. I wanted to tell you how my chauffeur, Jorge, gave me my only hour off during the whole time I was there: he felt himself cracking with the horror of it all, and dragged me off to spend time with his friends – at a meeting for Alcoholics Anonymous.

And the hope. The baby I rescued from the remains of a maternity ward – a three week old baby – and how I had to crawl over the smashed remains of all the other babies that had been in the ward to reach her – and then back, ploughing over the same tiny, decaying corpses, now with this child in my arms.

There was the woman who sat for three days beside the ruins of her son’s apartment block, knowing he was dead but daring to hope, who was suddenly seized by something completely Other, and took my hand, and told me with extraordinary clarity and force that I walked with God – and how, in a way perhaps that was true; because how else can I explain the fact that we talked for ten minutes in Spanish, clearly and precisely, yet it was a language which at the time I had no idea how to speak?

Laughter – and horror. Hope – and horror. Mystery, and horror… In Mexico City, horror became my life, and these other things did too.

*

When the Rescue work was over, after perhaps three weeks spent retrieving bodies, and saving my first X lives, the Mexican government thanked me, and flew me to an exclusive resort at Cancun for a week’s recuperation at their expense.

I was in shock, utter shock. I could never have imagined anything like what I had just experienced. I remember, when I was fourteen, a neighbour had a heart attack while shovelling snow in his front yard. I did not see him die – but the body was there outside our window – and I was too scared to even look. I was no more able to confront this massive avalanche of death and horror than anyone else. I had survived my time in Mexico City by not confronting it. I had done what had to be done, and suspended all the questions and the terror and the voices inside me: those voices had had to wait; there was work to be done.

But what now? What could possibly keep the horror away from me now I was faced with nothing more challenging than a luxurious room with excellent food and drink and a view of a crystal beach? How was I supposed to cope?

Your mind continues to race. Pointless thoughts whir through your head at breakneck speed, flashes of grotesque imagery, mangled babies, rats feasting on corpses, smells surge up in your memory, shit, and rotting human bodies, and despair. Your head fills with sounds, ideas, moments. None of them make any sense to you. They do not mean a thing, they are just what happened, but they somehow demand that you respond to them, grapple with them, make them into some sort of order. And that, of course, is impossible. Disasters do not make sense. Disaster is the word we use tyo describe the times when the ordered world collapses. And now you have a disaster in your head. And what are you going to do about it, what can you do about it?

So I did what everyone had told me I would eventually do, what they all do. I pressed on with this newly unreal life of mine – and then, very suddenly, I began to cry. I did not even know I was doing it until I saw myself in a mirror – and there was this tear-streaked face; but the moment I realised, then suddenly all that horror and despair washed over me, and indescribable internal howl. It was overwhelming, paralysing. I spent a day sitting cross-legged in the ocean on perfect white sands, facing a perfect azure sea, with tears rolling down my face, swamped in grief and horror, veering between an intensity of emotion that I simply cannot describe, and a feeling that I might as well already have been dead. I tried top pray. I failed. And then a miracle happened.

A cloud of tiny fish drifted towards me – the first I had seen in Cancun. They were each about two inches long, and almost transparent except for flashes of colour along their sides. They swam straight towards me, and then began swimming round me. But they swam in such a strange way… They were so close that they were all actually touching me, I could feel them as a constant caress as they moved. And they swam in a perfect figure of eight – around my back, in under one leg, round the outside of the other, then back in under it, round the outside of the first leg, and then around my back again in the other direction. They did this continuously for about half an hour. It felt as though the fish somehow wanted to reassure me. It felt like a sign: as though the God I had earlier tried to pray had sen these creature to comfort me, caress me like the father I never had, remind me of His presence, and that if He was here, then everything was, in the end, all right.

And I rose from the water with new purpose. All that energy, that grief and horror that had so nearly overwhelmed me: I would harness that energy and I would use it to do good. I would turn it into the power to save lives. At this moment, my entire future became clear to me. While I could, wherever I could, I would take the extraordinary inward horror that mentally cripples so many Rescue workers – and I would cope with it by using it, turning it into action. Nothing – nothing – would stand in the way of this one great purpose. I would save lives

*

I did not return to my girlfriend in New York. I did not split with her, not she with me – but I needed time to sort myself out, and I really could not face the pressures of managing a relationship.

How can you come back from an experience as intense as Rescue, and just pick up your life where you left it a few weeks before?

Think about it. Every day, in all our lives, there are decisions to be made, discussions to be had: what shall we eat, what we shall we do this weekend, how’s it hanging Doug, is four o’clock good for you, seeing anyone for lunch, do you think we should call I don’t think we should call you know how sensitive she gets and anyway guess what she said when I asked about… Well, what the fuck does any of it matter? It is garbage. It is background noise, a meaningless jumble of words and ideas, little nonsensical fragments of a life. I mean, who fucking cares? I had just come back from crawling through rats and pieces of dead baby, I was planting my elbows in bits of baby because there was nowhere else my elbows could go, and if I didn’t slither over those scraps of dead flesh then a living baby, a baby I could hear screaming somewhere inside this tangle of concrete and death, if I didn’t then she would die as well and if that happened –

This is what fills your head. There is no space left for normality. Why answer the phone? Why chat to people, and what about? Why bother with reassurances or hugs or intimacy? None of it matters at all. Rescue is realler than the reality you return to.

How are you supposed to cope with that? How is each day supposed to go? And how are those you love or love you supposed to cope?

At the time, I was with a woman called Carol. I had met her in San Francisco, having left Canada to escape the misery of a spiteful divorce that saw my ex walk off with all those houses, the cash from all those business ventures – and with my two year old daughter Natasha. I had got my job with the California Wrecking Company, and had been rapidly promoted to Vice President. I decided I would build a boat and live on it, and in the meantime I had rented a room from a girl I had met at a friend’s party. This girl was Carol – and soon enough I moved out of the spare room and into her room. Then Carol got a Job in New York; and by now things were serious enough that we agreed I should follow her there. Carol had already moved. So I packed my bags and got on a plane.

The day I saw the news about Mexico City was the morning after I arrived there. Carol had just gone to work. We were together less than twelve hours before I set off for the Mexican Embassy.

I cared – but I just could not face going back to that just now. So I rang and explained – and then I went back to San Francisco, and I worked on my boat.

I worked like crazy. All that pent-up horror was still in there, and I worked it out of me by labouring on the boat at a furious pace. The work I had planned to do over the next eight months was all done within two weeks. I drove in 9,000 screws. I did X. I did Y. And only then did I begin my real work, of working out how best to save lives.

I started by ringing the emergency departments for every county in California. My list of questions was always the same. I had discovered exactly what you need for Rescue the hard way – and I wanted to know if California was truly prepared for a large disaster, or if they just had departments and half-baked plans. Did they keep their emergency vehicles outside – because getting your emergency vehicles out of a bulding that has collapsed on top of them is kind of hard to do? Did they have pre-agreed teams with pre-assigned roles? Did they have a system in place for issuing Ids to Rescue workers for access to cordoned areas? What was the plan if their communications centre was one of the places that got hit?

If I am honest with myself, I think I hoped that they would be able to reassure me, explain exactly how it was all going to work – and I would be able to rest easy, perhaps even get a plane back to New York. Instead, what I heard appalled me – and defined for me the struggle I have been involved in ever since. I began to realise that I might have bitten off more than I could chew.

*