Chris Hawley wrote her name and her next-of-kin’s phone number on her arm before she ever set foot on what recovery workers called “the pile.” Twenty-five years later, Hawley is a medicolegal death investigator for the Knox County Regional Forensic Center, but every September, she says, the memories of Ground Zero resurface.
Hawley was serving as a Kitsap County deputy coroner when she was dispatched to New York City to assist with victim identification and recovery after the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to WVLT. With commercial flights grounded nationwide, she drove across the country alone for four days to reach the scene. She was first assigned to Pier 92, working five days of intake for missing-person demographic information, before she was reassigned to Ground Zero itself.
“The mission changed from search and rescue to search and recovery,” Hawley said, per the station’s report. She described conditions at the site in stark terms: toxic dust, underground fires, and heavy debris that workers moved by hand, five-gallon bucket by five-gallon bucket, in a manual brigade meant to avoid disturbing human remains. Subterranean heat was intense enough to melt the soles of responders’ fire boots, and Hawley worked 12-hour shifts alongside a 12-person international recovery team in unstable wreckage and buried fires.
‘A Burning Tomb’
“It was a burning tomb,” Hawley said of the site, the same account notes. She spent six weeks sleeping in hotels and aboard the USNS Comfort during the deployment. Outside the perimeter gates, families gathered holding photographs, asking searchers to find their missing loved ones — a scene Hawley has carried with her since…