A 'SHIVERING SCENE:' Leone visits ground zero in New York
By Manuel García Sánchez
When you think of New York City, you may think of a city with a lot of people and you expect a lot of noise; but that is not what Giacomo Leone, humanities and fine arts division chair, saw and heard.
A huge and yet quiet city was the ironic picture that Leone witnessed in New York. There, he had the opportunity of seeing first hand the magnitude of the destruction in the World Trade Center site.
Leone visited the Big Apple Oct. 31 to Nov. 4 to assist a theater tour.
"The biggest thing I saw was that there were thousands of people [in ground zero] and everybody was very quiet," said Leone. "It was very disturbing."
Besides the obvious devastation on the site, there are also signs of destruction even four or five blocks away. There is a layer of dust of more than four inches high that covers the ground.
According to Leone, it is true that the images on TV do not show how massive the destruction is.
"The rubble is 25 to 30 stories high," he said. "There are still lots of streets closed because they are trying to take care of the problem and what is left there."
There is still smoke on the site. The streets are impregnated by a persistent and intense odor coming from the debris that is burning.
"It is a strong chemical odor, kind of plastic burning" he said. "It gets to your throat."
Close to this tragic area, Leone saw pictures of people who went inside the buildings and died. There are thousands of personal messages accompanying those pictures.
"I read a couple and I could not read anymore," he said. "It was very emotional for me. There are people crying. People who knew somebody who died there."
This was not Leone’s first visit to New York, and he said that the good part of this tragedy is that all kind of ethnic American backgrounds have unified into one.
One of the significant aspects he has noticed on this trip was that New Yorkers are friendlier.
"That’s unusual for New Yorkers," he said. "Like we talk to each other on the street here, that was happening over there."
He talked with police and firemen as well as people on the street; Leone went to Duane Fire Station, which is the closest one to the site and the first one to go to the rescue.
Surprisingly, "No one from that Fire Station died that I understand," he said. "They were lucky but a lot of their friends died."
During his visit, Leone delivered money to the relief fund. He brought $3,205 to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) raised by students in La Salle area. "There is a banner there now hanging in the FEMA headquarters," Leone said. "It has signatures on it and it says from the Illinois Valley. It makes you feel good about it."
Leone flew to New York and, when asked about his feelings during the flight, he said that he was not worried about safety during the flight.
"A week before, I was in Denver for a training session and I was a little concerned on that flight," he said. "But I wasn’t concerned this time."