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Apparatus Operator Darren Bobrosky, of Berkeley’s Fire Station 5, recently returned from a 10-day stint as a rescue worker in Lower Manhattan. Bobrosky and his partner, Dylan, a highly-trained search and rescue dog, are affiliated with Oakland’s Urban Search and Rescue team, one of the 28 FEMA-affiliated USAR teams nationwide. Following is Bobrosky’s story, edited by Daily Planet reporter Hank Sims.  

This is the first of a two part series. Look for the second part in Thursday’s edition. 

I was here at the firehouse when we got the word. We all got up at 8 o’clock that morning, the 11th, and we were watching what was going on. They paged me at about 8:30 and said, “You’re on standby. Do you have your stuff together?” 

I got a number of other calls that day, asking about my status. The state Office of Emergency Services called me, a fire chief from Sacramento called, the USAR team manager from Oakland called – they were just checking and double-checking the members to see if they were available and ready to go.  

I normally keep a 10-day supply of food for Dylan and supplies for myself in my truck at all times anyway, so we’re always ready. We are supposed to have a two-hour response time to get to our rendezvous point in Oakland, so that’s no problem. 

But then we got put on standby, and then we were told to stand down. Then again – standby, stand down, all throughout the two weeks we were ready to go. It was terrible. I had a few chances to go with the Sacramento team, but I was fifth on their roster. One guy couldn’t go, and they couldn’t get ahold of another one, but then it didn’t happen. 

I knew I would get to go with Oakland – that’s the team I’m assigned to – but since there aren’t enough dogs to go around, they send whatever dogs they need with whatever teams go out. So we can cross over to other teams, whereas other members – the engineers, or the logistics people – don’t. 

I was concerned that if they wait and don’t send us until late in the game, we wouldn’t go at all. Generally, the dogs are not required to be certified as cadaver search dogs. I do train Dylan with cadavers whenever possible, just so I know his reaction, but they are primarily live-find dogs. 

It was hard to get solid information, even at the task-force leader level. I’ve got things going on in my life – I was trying to maneuver things around, get things squared away. My wife’s birthday was October 8th, so I was hoping to be back by then. 

They finally activated us on the 26th. We met at Oakland two o’clock the next afternoon. They bussed us out to Travis Air Force Base at 5:30, and we waited at Travis until midnight. Then they flew us to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. 

We took another bus into New York, and got our accommodations set up. They put us up in the Javits Convention Center. Usually they try to give you that first day off as a rest period, so you can get your bearings. They took us out to the pile the next morning. 

It was bigger than I thought it would be. I’d seen it on TV a few times. When you initially saw it on TV, you saw everything from a distance, from ground level. It looked pretty amazing, but you couldn’t get a feel for it. Then they took it to another level when they let the helicopters fly over. From the top, you could see that it was huge. 

But you don’t get the true sense of it until you get right up to it, or right in it, and you see people 200 or 300 feet from you that look like ants compared to the structure they’re looking at.  

When you tour some of the buildings around the perimeter, you see how much destruction and debris hit the building that surrounded the towers.  

The concrete was turned into powder. That was another problem we had with searching and digging through the rubble. We train in rubble all the time, pieces the size of a picnic table down to pieces the size of bricks. This pile looked like steel with dirt thrown on top of it. All that concrete just became dust.  

There were areas you could see around the fringes that looked like the rubble we’re used to seeing – broken-up concrete like a recycling plant would have, or a small, recently-demolished building. This one, though, it came down with such force that it pulverized concrete and twisted those big I-beams in half.  

They split our team in half. The next day, the New York City fire department asked us to cover for their Collapsed Structure Response Unit, up in Queens. They had lost all the guys from that unit in the rubble. Since we were collapsed structure specialists, basically, they had us cover. The other half of our team went to the pile. 

USAR teams are designed to split in half. One half takes the first 12-hour shift, the other half the second. Once we got there, we found out that we weren’t going to be working 24 hours a day. So we switched to day shifts only, and half of us went to Queens first. 

We were in Queens for two and a half days. It was away from all the action, but it was nice – very relaxed and peaceful. You could get sleep up there, which you couldn’t do in the Convention Center. The dogs had a park to play in. 

But knowing that we had things to do back in Manhattan, we were tense about being up there. We didn’t want to be there, we wanted to be back working on the pile.  

Knowing that we were doing a service for the fire department in New York made us feel better. They asked us to help, and cover that area for them. We were doing something, even if it wasn’t what we were planning to do originally. Their Collapsed Structure Response Unit deals with 150 collapsed buildings a year, but we never got called. 

We were staying in the officers’ quarters at an Army base. We had one New York fireman with us, who was going to be our liaison if we ever got a call. We didn’t know the city, so were going to have to follow him. We had three trucks full of gear that we would bring, so we would go in a convoy if we got any type of call. 

He was the only fireman we talked to up there. But as we got more involved with the pile, at Ground Zero, we started to talking to more guys. They were happy to see us there. They knew what we could do, and that we weren’t there to take over from them or anything. They were in charge of the rubble, and they wanted to get their people out. That was their deal.