Man from Union toils at N.Y. site Rescue expert calls job ‘gruesome’

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Crawling each night through the remains of an underground shopping mall near the site of New York’s World Trade Center must seem worlds away from his childhood in rural Union, Maine.

But for Paul Doughty, helping to find survivors of this sort of disaster is just what he has trained for, and what he has trained others to do.

Speaking to the Bangor Daily News by cell phone Friday evening, Doughty said morale wasn’t good for rescuers.

“It’s really declining pretty fast,” he said.

Doughty had been awakened two hours before the interview – an hour or so earlier than had been the norm – because President Bush was on the scene, touring the disaster area. After speaking outside, Bush filed past many of the rescuers inside, Doughty said, thanking them for their efforts.

The president passed within 10 feet of Doughty, he said.

Doughty, 36, is the son of Paul and Charlotte Doughty of Union. He graduated from Medomak Valley High School in Waldoboro in 1982, then attended Providence College, where he studied fire science. He later completed law school at Roger Williams College, and began working in Providence as both a firefighter and attorney.

“He’s a type A personality,” his mother joked Friday. She and Doughty’s father anxiously are watching the television coverage, hoping they won’t hear of any injuries suffered by the rescuers.

“He knows what he’s doing, but you can’t anticipate the dangers,” Charlotte said.

Since the mid-1990s, Doughty has served on a regional Federal Emergency Management Agency team. He was sent to Atlanta in 1996 to be on hand for the Olympics, and in recent years, has taught urban search and rescue at the Rhode Island fire academy.

Doughty’s father is a firefighter with the Union Fire Department, and even though he lives in Providence, the younger Doughty maintains his membership with the small department in the Knox County town where he grew up.

Doughty and his colleagues were mobilized within two hours of the attack on New York.

They arrived in Manhattan on Tuesday evening. He has been sleeping, along with 500 or 600 other emergency personnel, in a large convention room at the Jacob Javits Center on West 39th Street, he said.

The first challenge he faced was adjusting his biological clock to working nights and sleeping days.

“It’s very grueling, trying to change your whole body,” he said.

The men traveled from Rhode Island with 24-hour packs, he said, and as the stay stretched into a third day, his clothing was showing the wear and tear.

Thursday night saw heavy rain, which added significant weight to the concrete and plaster dust that dominates the rubble pile, Doughty said, creating fears of more collapse.

What has not been pulverized, he said, resembles a giant’s game of pick up sticks, as 1-foot-by-1-foot concrete columns, between 30 and 60 feet long, lay scattered across the pile.

Maneuvering among the rubble is difficult.

“It’s like doing the lobster crate race,” he said with a slight chuckle.

Doughty supervises a crew ranging nightly from three to eight to as many as 16 men. His focus has been on a six-floor underground shopping mall on the Church Street side of the plaza. There also are some subway cars nearby, crushed in their tunnels, but believed to have been empty at the time of the collapse of the buildings.

Doughty said hope for finding survivors will be fading by today.

EMS workers talk about the “golden hour,” the first 60 minutes that follow, for example, a car accident. In that period, medical personnel have a good chance of saving a victim, he said.

In urban search and rescue, the window of opportunity may be as long as a week, he said, but since no survivors have been found in the last few days, the likelihood of finding any now is rapidly diminishing.

Doughty said he and his crew have found surprisingly few bodies, though he adds, “We have found and removed some body parts.”

Even though he is trained in such work, the horror still overcomes him, Doughty said.

“It’s pretty gruesome. It’s pretty scary,” he said.

In part because he is on the night shift, working 12 to 14 hours at a time, he was largely unaware of the news developments of the last several days about the attack.

“We’re very isolated,” he said.

One bit of humor that has emerged in the work, Doughty said, is the teasing he and another firefighter from Bath direct at their Massachusetts counterparts, joking that Mainers were needed on the job.

Doughty has three daughters in Providence.

“He’s a very brave person,” his mother said.