UFT nurses lay their lives on the line

With transportation severely disrupted on 9/11, Michael Soccio, a member of the Visiting Nurse Association/UFT Federation of Nurses, used a bicycle to reach patients.

Rushing to volunteer at makeshift triage stations near Ground Zero and on both sides of the Brooklyn Bridge soon after the towers collapsed, UFT nurses had to deal with filthy gray air and ash-strewn streets, dodging fires that would last for weeks to treat office workers, police, firefighters and rescue workers for burns, cuts from strewn glass and metal, and smoke inhalation.

Away from Ground Zero, things were precarious, too. Electricity in operating rooms was disrupted, communication in hospitals was down and power outages not only trapped infirm patients in buildings but made reaching downtown’s 1,600 homebound sick and elderly clients of the Visiting Nurse Service (VNS) problematic.

With the area a virtual no-go zone and few supplies coming through, nurses worked with the Red Cross to ensure that residents in congregant care homes had food, medicines and other necessities. And with water cut off, Federation of Nurses/UFT Special Representative Anne Goldman remembers nurses carrying bottled water and other supplies up flights of stairs, helping not only their own patients, but neighbors, too.

Michael Soccio, then a VNS RN and now an agency clinical director, remembers bicycling downtown and through National Guard checkpoints, where he donned respiratory equipment to work amid a level of destruction he likened to “a war zone.”

Federation member Millie Moy-Thompson was in a Chinatown patient’s 17th-floor apartment when she saw the second plane hit. With the air foul for weeks, “breathing for my patients became much more difficult, and access to proper food was bad,” especially for an aged Chinese immigrant population accustomed to an Asian diet. “There was also a lot of anxiety on their part, which I had to cope with daily,” she said.

Joy Lee was at a Brooklyn VNS staff meeting during the attack. “Ten of us immediately went downtown to do triage,” she said. She remembers how, by 4 p.m. at Police Plaza, “the worst thing about the day was the anticipation of waiting for casualties.” Lee later went to join the overworked Beekman Hospital staff, where “the atmosphere was something out of the Twilight Zone.”

Lisa Heller Salmon, formerly a Federation of Nurses/UFT member and now a VNS administrator, remembers “wearing my VNSNY-issued navy blue sweater so I could be easily identified.”

At one triage center, furiously washing out the eyes of smoke-damaged firefighters, she remembers seeing there “the most profound childlike sadness and fear I had ever seen and have not seen since. I left a piece of my soul, many, many prayers and my VNSNY navy blue sweater there.”

She has never replaced the sweater.