HOGANSBURG, N. Y. ? Driving a van-load of supplies and $11,000 in donations to Manhattan, St. Regis (Akwesasne) Mohawks continued their support for the rescue efforts at the World Trade Center attack site.
Michael Swamp, business manager of Ironworkers Local 440, and three retired union members made the 8-hour drive Sept. 24, bringing work gloves, work boots, urgently needed respirators and other supplies to the hiring hall of their sister local in New York City.
The delegation also presented a tribal donation of $10,000 and another $1,000 of individual contributions. Expenses for the trip will be partially underwritten by the Oneida Indian Nation, Swamp said.
Sept. 25, the ironworkers toured lower Manhattan. Although they were kept five blocks from Ground Zero, they received a warm welcome while visiting fire stations along Canal Street.
‘Once they found out we were ironworkers, the firemen came out of the woodwork to shake our hands,’ Swamp said. ‘Everybody heard about our volunteers going down.’
He said the rescue was still going on in ‘a pretty tense atmosphere.’ Fears of new truck bombs had tightened security.
‘They’re watching everything,’ he said. ‘Even when steel is going (in the debris removal), they’re timing the trucks. They’re frisking them when they come back in.’
Although guards stopped the group a distance from the former World Trade Center, Swamp said ‘we could see the site fine. It was still smoldering.
‘It looked like a war zone. Steel was piled up. It was smoking. It was devastating.’
Swamp also talked to Mohawks on the cleanup crews, including Richard Otto who saw the terrorist hijacked airliners fly right by his work site before they rammed the Twin Towers.
‘Everybody came down for lunch,’ Swamp said, adding he could see firsthand the emotional stress of the past two weeks.
‘It affected a lot of people,’ he said. ‘It affected our guys. They kept looking over there at the towers, and there was nothing there.’
Swamp said the tribe would provide trauma counseling for the ironworkers when they returned to the reservation on the weekend. The St. Regis Tribal Council and the Mohawk Council are cooperating to provide a session that would combine both traditional and modern psychological support.
‘We’ll have a couple of different types.’
Although the cleanup has moved from a volunteer to a contractor operation, Swamp said he expected more ironworkers from Akwesasne to be called down as the current crews tire out. The contractor operation ‘was better than volunteers. You get more done,’ he said.
‘It’s still chaos down there.’