Cop Pays for His 9/11 Effort With Kidney
Sept. 8, 2001 — -- NYPD Detective Richard Volpe was knee-deep in soot on 9/11, digging with buckets, shovels, his bare hands -- anything he could find -- trying to find survivors.
Volpe, 38, had worked a 4 p.m.-to-midnight tour the night before, and had had trouble sleeping.
Clicking through the morning news on TV, Volpe came upon the image of a smoldering tower.
Having participated in rescue operations during the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, he said his instincts kicked in almost immediately.
"I just got in my car and drove down there," he said to ABC News.
As he drove, Volpe did what any good cop would do. He tried to prepare himself.
"You put through in your mind, you know, different things that could happen and how you [would] react to things," he said. "So that's basically what I was doing -- trying to prepare myself."
It was a useless exercise.
"You couldn't see your hands in front of your face," he said. "The air was so dark. There was soot that was, like, up to your knees."
He said he remembered walking by St. Paul's Chapel, one of the oldest buildings in New York and where President Washington prayed after his inauguration.
The chapel is surrounded by a cemetery with tombstones that date back to the 19th century.
"You couldn't even see the tombstones in there. The debris was piled so high," Volpe said. "It looked like a war zone."
Volpe, a self-proclaimed "gym rat" who said he had worked out six days a week before the Sept. 11 attacks, said he gave it his all -- until exhaustion literally overtook him.
"I actually remember going back to my car, and a [police] lieutenant was walking around and he looked at me and said, 'Detective, are you all right?'" Volpe said. "I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm fine.'"
"I just, I couldn't remember where I parked my car. That's how confused I was from everything that was going on," he said.
He returned and continued to work at ground zero, day after day.
"After the first couple days, I was coughing up blood and every time I sneezed, blood would come out of my nose," he said.
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