A New Jersey State Police lieutenant and member of the Lambertville-New Hope Ambulance and Rescue Squad, Tex Huggins is called to city as part of state Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue Team.
By: Cynthia Williamson
LAMBERTVILLE When Tex Huggins was accepted in November on the highly regarded New Jersey Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue Team, never in his wildest dreams or worst nightmare did the city resident contemplate he’d be faced with the aftermath of the gravest terrorism attack in U.S. history.
Even before the pager eternally anchored to his waistband went off Sept. 11 at 9:15 a.m., Mr. Huggins knew there was a good chance he and those in the 130-member-plus search and rescue unit would be deployed.
A New Jersey State Police lieutenant in charge of its electronic surveillance unit, the 28-year law enforcement veteran was mulling over the day ahead when a colleague called with the news hijacked commercial planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon. Another airliner also believed to be hijacked still was unaccounted for.
At first, Mr. Huggins said, he and his co-workers were disbelieving until they tuned into the news.
Miles away from State Police headquarters in West Trenton, Mr. Huggins’ wife, Patti, a custodian at South Hunterdon High School, where the couple’s two children, Brian, 17, and Tracy, 14, are students, also was absorbing the horrific events.
By noon, Mr. Huggins and the rest of the team had assembled at Task Force I headquarters in Lakehurst, where they also conduct quarterly training exercises, and were preparing to depart on buses to a destination that has become known as ground zero.
For the next 10 days, Mr. Huggins and hundreds of others would spend their waking hours sifting through a 16-acre virtual field of destruction at the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan.
"It was just a horrible site," Mr. Huggins recalled was his initial reaction. "It was like something out of science fiction."
His team arrived at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center in Manhattan Tuesday afternoon. There they unpacked gear and prepared to head for the crash site, only to be "pulled back" when it was feared a 48-story building was in imminent danger of collapse, Mr. Huggins said.
It would be 11:30 Tuesday night before it was deemed safe enough to go back to the site and search for survivors of the attack officials now are estimating has claimed more than 6,400 lives.
"We were searching for anybody alive but we were finding bodies," he said. "I’ve never seen anything like it before."
Amidst the carnage were fire trucks, ambulances and police cars buried under tons of rubble from the collapsed towers.
"You’re kind of in shock," Mr. Huggins said. "But you’re there to do a job, and you have to do it."
His team did not rescue any of the five survivors located up to two days after the attacks but they did uncover aircraft parts vaguely identified by a team member who was familiar with the type of rivets used in their manufacture.
"It was really hard to tell because there was so much sheet metal and debris," Mr. Huggins said.
He said the final moments for those who were unable to escape the towers before they collapsed "had to be horrifying."
"There had to be a lot of people that were vaporized right off," he said, referring to the intense heat from the aircrafts as their fuel tanks erupted on impact.
At home, Mrs. Huggins tried to maintain a stiff upper lip, quelling her children’s fears as they waited patiently for calls from her husband that usually came daily but not with any predictability.
"I had to be strong for the kids," she said. "But it was terrible; it was horrible."
Interrupted dinners, time away from family, are situations Mrs. Huggins has grown accustomed to over the 34 years her husband has been a volunteer for the Lambertville-New Hope Ambulance and Rescue Squad.
But nothing could have ever prepared her for the peril her husband faced, particularly the day he and two team members embarked on an eerie reconnaissance mission five stories below the World Trade Center to what once was a vast underground network of parking garages, a shopping mall and entrances to the city’s mass transportation system.
Donning respirators and other rescue gear, their mission was to search for survivors, but what they found were more daunting images.
"You could hear noises under there; you could hear the metal twisting, the workers on top," he said. "You could see through some daylight but a lot of places were dark."
There are several ways to reach the subsurface areas but many of them were blocked so they would have to have to take another stairway or route but they could only go as far as the fifth floor because the remaining two floors were flooded, he said.
"After a collapse you always have a fear of more collapse," he said. "We knew on the other side of some walls, there was fire. The whole area was always smoky not to mention the smell."
For the first couple days, the team "basically worked around the clock," cutting back to 12-hour shifts that often went into 16 hours.
"By the time you got back, you were lucky to get four or five hours sleep," he said. "You’d dose off but you weren’t totally asleep."
They slept on the sidewalk their first night but moved into the convention center the second night where they slept on the floor. By the third night, they slept on cots or in tents.
"You lose all track of days and time there," he said. "You had to look at your watch to see what day it was."
A team of counselors were always on hand to talk "if you needed help," he said.
"They told us we’d probably have aftereffects," he said, such as nightmares and depression.
The stench of burnt flesh and decomposed bodies "stirred the most emotion," Mr. Huggins said. "Just knowing what happened, everything like that is very emotional."
The task force returned home Sept. 20.
"I wouldn’t really want to go back to something like that," Mr. Huggins said, but he would if he were needed. "I can see why all the cops and firemen went in to help people get out. Somebody’s got to do it."
Mr. Huggins is captain of the squad’s technical rescue and water rescue teams. He was captain of its former heavy rescue team, which captured four world championships before it disbanded in 1995.
He is a certified emergency medical technician, certified CPR instructor and a certified swift water technician.
He works part time for START, a Southampton, Pa., company specializing in technical rescue training.
He also is a member of the Union Fire Company in Lambertville.
He was a major in the Marine Corps Reserves before retiring in 1991.
Mr. Huggins will retire from the State Police when he turns 55 June 1.