"Everybody's got a story," Robert Antonek, Vice President of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC), said this week when asked about his experiences at ground zero in the hours and days after the collapse of the Twin Towers.

That's about all you'll get out of him.  While hundreds of Island residents and hospital personnel were standing transfixed on the East River promenade, watching the great plume of destruction, Antonek was hitching a ride from his home in the Bronx, driven, as were so many others on Sept. 11, to be there, to do something.

He knew people who worked in the World Trade Center; he knew there were State agencies with offices in the Towers.  He is a State employee, and he felt that he needed to do something – that he couldn't just go to work as he normally would on such a day.  He arrived at ground zero about an hour after the towers collapsed and was among those who dug into the vast pile in a vain attempt to find survivors or even the bodies of the victims.

He found a few scraps of evidence in those first hours.  Later, he learned that no one he knew was among the victims; they all got out.  He also took a picture, he doesn't remember exactly when, and it looks like Hell.

The photo, framed, is about the only thing on the walls of the office of RIOC President Robert H. Ryan.  It's smudgy and dark and looks as though it was taken in black and white, although Antonek says it was a color photo.  It shows two firefighters on the rubble, some intact structures of the World Trade Center in the background and a mountain of rubble.  Ryan says there's a flag in the picture, but it's hard to make it out.

Antonek and Ryan spent two weeks at ground zero; about ten other RIOC workers, including Island residents Carl Crews and Eddie Perez, who work in RIOC's program management, and engineer Vincent Kopicki, also volunteered their time.

"We were just helping out where we could help out," Ryan said.  "We were doing logistical stuff, we were helping see that food and supplies were delivered.  We were working out of Pier 40, which is a State facility.  We were basically seeing that whatever needed to get down to ground zero, whether it be food or water, clothing or equipment, that it was moved and got down there.  We were all working like 18, 19-hour days."

"We were there every day, 20 times a day," Ryan said.  "The first night, myself and Rob Antonek, we spent the whole night driving around, distributing water to the firemen.  They had no water at the site, no drinking water, we were driving around with a vehicle loaded down with cases and cases of water for the rescue workers."

"The first day, after I was sure everything was secure here, we all felt we've got to do something," Ryan said.  The RIOC personnel worked out of the Hudson River Park Conservancy facility on Pier 40, close to ground zero, which had small all-terrain vehicles that could get into the site.

Ryan said that Perez and Crews were involved in the bucket lines in the first days, helping to remove debris from the pile.  "I'll never forget one night, it was like one in the morning and the two of them (Crews and Perez) were just sitting there on a couch in the office, totally exhausted, and I said, 'You guys gotta go home,' and they looked up at me and said, 'We can't, Mr. Ryan, we got to go down there and help.'"

Ryan also paid tribute to RIOC's homefront, praising Frank Nazario, RIOC's Director of Human Resources, who camped out at the office overnight for the first few days, and Board members Patrick Stewart and David Kraut, who he said helped out at the office, and visited with RIOC's commercial tenants and tried to bring some calm to the situation.

"I don't think that anybody who was down there and saw everything will ever forget it, and I think we're all probably changed a little bit," Ryan said.