Covenant News

Young Engineer Moved by Events at 'Ground Zero'

NEW YORK, NY (November 8, 2001) - The cleanup effort at the World Trade Center may not be the lead story for news organizations nearly two months after the terrorist attacks, but for the son of one Evangelical Covenant Church conference staff member it has become part of daily life.

Greg Freeman is a structural engineer at Weidlinger Associates, Inc., a New York-based engineering company that is involved with safety issues as work continues to clear debris from the fallen twin towers. Freeman is the son of Robert and Beverly Freeman who are members of Bethany Covenant Church in Berlin, Connecticut. Mrs. Freeman works in the East Coast Conference office.

Freeman works each day in the area known as Ground Zero as an advisor to the work crews. He has witnessed first-hand the human drama that continues to unfold. One day in particular has been etched into his memory.

It was October 21 and Freeman was working an 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift when a dozen bodies were located in the rubble. "They stopped all of the other work - the fire people were doing rescue work there - and the chief of the rescue work came by," Freeman recalled. "He realized I was an engineer there and he wanted me to go over there and check out a hole they had dug. I had to go out there on a pile of rubble in the hole they were digging to see if it was safe.

"People knock down buildings on purpose all of the time, and that's what it looked like at first," Freeman continued. "But here, chaplains would be around and the chaplain would say a prayer and have a brief funeral service. They did it immediately, five minutes after the body was taken out. Then they'd have a small vehicle that would take the bodies away. Five times in the span of about two hours we would stand at a funeral service for someone I had never met."

Freeman said that locating the bodies of victims is important to the firemen as they understand the importance of closure for families who grieve for missing loved ones. "They found the helmet of one of the guys and it had his number on the front," Freeman said in reference to a missing firefighter. "These guys were obviously moved by this - they were thinking things I could've never imagined, seeing people they know."

The immensity of the physical damage in the area contributes to the surreal atmosphere in downtown New York City, Freeman noted. "It is kind of unbelievable, just seeing the extent of all of the damage," he said. "There is so much - so much more than what you see on television. When you stand on the edge of the debris, it just goes on and on."

Freeman had planned on visiting a polling booth in the World Trade Center on the morning of that fateful day - September 11 - to cast his vote in the mayoral primary. He decided instead to vote later in the day and was not at the site when two planes hit the towers shortly after 9 a.m.

"A lot of my co-workers saw the planes hit because we're only about a mile away," Freeman said in describing his workplace that morning. "We weren't thinking the buildings would collapse, to be honest. We didn't think the planes were commercial airliners with full tanks of fuel. After it collapsed, we figured out pretty quickly why it had happened."

Freeman grew up in Connecticut attended Bethany Covenant Church when it was located in New Britain - it is now located in nearby Berlin. He said his own spirituality has been challenged by the recent events in New York.

"I think the toughest thing about it from that standpoint is the fact that the people who did this thought they were doing something good," said Freeman. "They had their own religious beliefs and by their standards this was what they thought they should be doing. It's just hard to think that there are people who feel that way. But at the same time, it's been uplifting to see what people have been doing in terms of helping or supporting others.

"That's one thing I've gotten from being down there," he continued. "The Red Cross has set up a center for workers down there with food and medical supplies. In the cafeteria, there are letters that have come from people all over the world, mostly children, telling everybody in New York that they are thinking of them. Seeing all of that really gives some relief that there are so many good people in the world - people are willing to do selfless, generous things when it is necessary."

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