WSJ article -- World Trade Center Letter Carriers Face Daunting Task, Sad Memories
October 17, 2001
World Trade Center Letter Carriers
Face Daunting Task, Sad Memories
By LUCETTE LAGNADO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Emma Thornton still shows up for work at 5 a.m. each
day in her blue slacks, pinstripe shirts and rubber-soled
shoes. A letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, she
still dutifully sorts all the mail addressed to "One World
Trade Center," and primes it for delivery.
But delivery to where and to whom?
Since Sept. 11, as many as 90,000 pieces of mail a day
continue to flood in to World Trade Center addresses
that no longer exist and to thousands of people who
aren't alive to receive them. On top of that is another
mail surge set off by well-wishers from around the
U.S. and the world -- thousands of letters addressed to,
among other salutations, "The People Hurt," "Any
Police Department" and "The Working Dogs" of
"Ground Zero, N.Y." Some of this mail contains
money, food, even biscuits for the dogs that were used in the early days to help try to sniff out survivors.
The mix of World Trade Center mail and Ground Zero mail represents a calamity for the U.S. Postal Service,
which served 616 separate companies in the World Trade Center complex whose offices are now rubble or
relocated. On a cavernous floor of the James A. Farley General Post Office in midtown Manhattan, the nine
carriers, including Ms. Thornton, who once walked the World Trade Center routes have been brought
together to help sort this out.
Her route in the North Tower has been transformed into a 6-by-6 steel cubicle
(called a "sorting case") surrounded by tall metal racks of pigeonholes. She and
co-workers have been told by supervisors to keep busy, and workers know they
shouldn't concern themselves with whether anyone will pick up the mail they are
sorting, or if the names correspond to any of the missing. But they do. She often
sees faces behind the names on envelopes -- people she saw five days a week and
joked with in the elevators.
These days, lots of people she bumped into every day are still unaccounted for, and
looking at a company's address, or merely the floor number, can plunge her into
tears. She worries about a kindly woman named Sonia who ran the freight elevator
at the Windows on the World restaurant and often gave her snacks and lunch.
Cantor Fitzgerald, Marsh & McLennan and Windows on the World were on her
route -- companies now seared in the public consciousness because they were high
up in the tower. Like any good carrier, Ms. Thornton can rattle off their floors and
suite numbers by memory.
"My whole career was at the World Trade Center," Ms. Thornton, 57 years old, muses. "I was at the World
Trade Center when it went up, and I saw it when it went down."
Technically, the Postal Service's "return to sender" policy dictates that uncollected mail be immediately sent
back. Since the vast majority of people who worked in the Twin Towers are still alive and most of the
companies are still operating elsewhere, the Post Office is planning to hold on to all mail for at least three
months, giving stunned companies and individuals more time to claim it. But the mountains of mail have
already swamped normal mail bins, and the Postal Service has had to bring in Dumpsters and rows and rows
of big plastic crates to store it all.
As for the "Ground Zero" mail addressed to "The Dogs," or "The Firefighters," the Postal Service isn't sure
yet what to do with it, and has sought advice from disaster authorities. It's "overwhelming," says Pat
McGovern, a Postal Service spokeswoman.
Before Sept. 11 -- and before an anthrax scare that has put postal workers on the front lines of another bout
with fear -- Ms. Thornton had exactly the job she wanted. A chatty, down-to-earth person now widowed,
she migrated to New York from Columbus, Ga., in her early 20s looking for work. She craved a secure job.
After taking a series of civil-service tests for New York's mass-transit department and even the police
department, she opted for the Post Office. Her reasoning: "I thought, 'Oh, if the government goes broke, that
is the end of the world.' "
'Nobody Wanted This Route'
She started in 1971 and since 1974 has delivered mail from the 77th floor to the 110th floor of One World
Trade Center. Some mail carriers shun high-rise work, citing fear of heights and elevators. Some postal
workers specifically avoided the World Trade Center because its upper floors were known to creak and sway
in stiff winds.
"Nobody wanted this route," Ms. Thornton recalls. But she had watched in admiration as the Twin Towers
went up and decided it was the only job she wanted.
She took to it readily, despite the daunting logistics and the need to change elevators frequently, and she
considered her route, with its own zip code, 10048, a "small town in the sky." She had numerous chances to
give up lugging mail for a desk job but turned them all down, even after a brush with catastrophe in 1993,
when terrorists first struck the World Trade Center and killed six people. Ms. Thornton had been in the
building fifteen minutes before that attack and despite it, vowed to carry on. "It was a way of life, and I got
used to it," she recalls.
To her, the tower's firms were more than addresses. These were her friends and customers, people who
plied her with steaming cups of coffee and Danish in the morning, and invited her to their Christmas and
office parties. "They would give me food. I partied with them -- good people," she says. Postal supervisors
say so many carriers like Ms. Thornton are breaking down on the job every day that they've had to organize
regular counseling sessions for them.
The morning of Sept. 11, Ms. Thornton was sorting mail at the Church Street Post Office a block away
when the first hijacked plane struck. Recalling 1993, she didn't wait for instructions. She began to run and
didn't stop till she arrived at City Hall, about seven long blocks northeast of the disaster. Only then did she
look back at the towers in flames. She watched from afar as the offices she had known so well collapsed
into a roaring avalanche of rubble.
She is still incredulous: "There is no building. After 30 years, there is no place, there is nothing."
The next day, she and other World Trade Center carriers, plus an additional 60 or so relocated from the
Church Street station, were summoned back to work at the ancient Farley building on Eighth Avenue and
31st Street. Ms. Thornton decided to take a few days off, however. "I couldn't take it," she says. "I stayed in
my house."
At the Farley building, there were already piles of mail to sort -- the charred, dusty pieces recovered from
Church Street station, itself inundated by debris and dust from the collapsing towers, as well as new mail that
continued to arrive, unaffected by the disaster.
Together the carriers have recreated in miniature a semblance of their old routes. The World Trade Center
buildings were allotted sorting areas ringed with dozens and dozens of beige and gray metal pigeonholes to
accept the buildings' mail. Ms. Thornton's cubicle is marked with a large sign that reads, "1 World Trade
Center" in bold black letters. Each of the companies on her old route has its own pigeonhole. She sits in this
cramped, dim space for eight hours a day sorting mail. When a pigeonhole fills up, workers come and dump
the overflow into large, marked crates.
Ms. Thornton says she doesn't want to feel ungrateful. After all, she is alive and getting a paycheck. But
most days, she feels lost and disoriented. She misses the din of the building, the rush of the elevators, the
friendly chats in the lobbies. "I have no place to go," she says. "It is like I am homeless."
Piling Up
She is also obsessed with the missing. In the first days after the explosion, few companies came to pick up
their mail. Then, in a trickle, people began to show up, even from the hardest-hit firms such as Cantor
Fitzgerald, which lost an estimated 700 of its 1,000 employees, and Marsh & McLennan, an insurance
company where almost 300 people died. For weeks, the mail to Windows on the World, where an estimated
166 people, including scores of diners, were killed, continued to pile up. At last, a week ago, someone arrived
for the first time to get it. "It took people a while to get themselves together," Ms. Thornton figures.
Some companies still have sent no one, and latecomers often carry bad news. "There's that sad situation on
79," she says of a company called International Office Centers Corp., a provider of furnished office space
that occupied some of the 79th floor and leased most of the rest. "They had a Christmas party every year and
invited me," Ms. Thornton says.
The company had been in the North Tower for 22 years, almost as many years as Ms. Thornton had
delivered there. She was friendly with an assistant office manager whose nickname was "Bisi." They chatted
almost every day, Ms. Thornton recalls.
An International Office official came by not long ago to claim mail and confirmed what Ms. Thornton feared.
Bisi, whose real name was Olabisi Yee, died with three other workers on duty that day and six tenants who
rented space from the company. Says Sean Keegan, whose wife, Burdette Russo, owns the company:
"Nobody got out of our space."
There are some happier endings, too. Ms. Thornton had worried about employees of a small firm called
Alliance Continuing Care Network, a nursing-home concern on the 77th floor. Two weeks ago, a postal
colleague came up to Ms. Thornton with a business card from a man named John David Smith of Alliance
who was there to pick up mail. Ms. Thornton barged out screaming with glee and hugged Mr. Smith in the
hall.
"Oh, my God, I wondered what happened to you," Mr. Smith said to Ms. Thornton. Mr. Smith, who
confirms the reunion, calls Ms. Thornton "a very wonderful woman" who always had a cheery word when
she delivered the mail.
And then there's Sonia. Ms. Thornton finds herself preoccupied with the woman who ran Windows on the
World's freight elevator. They chatted often as Ms. Thornton moved the mail up and down between the
106th and 110th floors. They were roughly the same age, had much in common, called each other
"mommy."
"She was such a kind woman," Ms. Thornton says.
The woman's full name was Sonia Ortiz. She had immigrated, impoverished, from Colombia and loved her
job so high above Manhattan. Her son, Victor Ortiz, says his mother was thrilled to be working in a place
where she'd gotten to meet stars such as Michael Jackson and Eddie Murphy, among others.
She was "home there," says Mr. Ortiz. Sonia is missing and presumed dead.
Write to Lucette Lagnado at lucette.lagnado@wsj.com
Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
