BATH – It finally hit home to firefighter Mike Clarke amid the mountains of rubble at ground zero. He had been there two days when his path crossed that of an old friend, a New York City Fire Department chief.

“His eyes were glassy,” Clarke said, “his face covered with dust. He looked at me. ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘they’re all dead.”‘

Clarke had been working so hard that it wasn’t until then that the significance of the attack on the World Trade Center set in. “It was unbelievable,” Clarke said. “The smoke, the concrete dust, the utter devastation.”

Clarke, who is a Bath firefighter and a member of the New England branch of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Urban Search and Rescue Team, started preparing to leave as soon as he saw the images of the terrorist attacks on TV.

He arrived after nightfall in New York City, which was Clarke’s home for much of his life before he moved to Maine in 1982.

A fifth-generation firefighter who grew up on Long Island, Clarke said the New York firefighters missing in the rubble were not just names to him. “I knew a lot of them,” he said.

Clarke’s job was to try to clear out the “voids,” areas where there might be pockets where bodies might be found, where people might still be alive.

“It was like an orchestrated ballet,” he said. “We had a command post and our team of 68 went out and began digging. I was six, seven stories down. The amount of rubble and debris is hard to imagine.”

Firefighters were shocked they were finding no bodies. “We couldn’t figure it out,” he said. “Before we got there, we thought we’d be stepping on bodies all over the place. We heard there were four or five thousand people there when the planes crashed.”

After a day or two, the rescuers changed strategy. “We got architectural drawings and began to study those, looking for elevator shafts, stairwells, places where there might be survivors,” Clarke said.

One afternoon he was taking a nap at a convention center where the team was resting when his cellular phone rang. It was Gov. Angus King. “He just wanted to thank us for helping out,” Clarke said.

Clarke spent a full week at the site, arriving back in Maine Tuesday night. He and his team are tentatively scheduled to return to New York City Sept. 29.

The tragedies in New York City and at the Pentagon are the kinds of situations Clarke and his colleagues are trained for.