## The Specific Work of the Bucket Brigade
The bucket brigade that Buscemi described joining is worth explaining, because it represents both an ancient firefighting technique and a specific logistical response to the conditions at Ground Zero.
A bucket brigade in its traditional form is exactly what the name suggests: a line of people passing buckets of water toward a fire. The technique predates motorized fire apparatus and pressurized water supply; it is the original community response to structural fire. The chain of people allows a quantity of water to be moved across a distance more efficiently than any individual could move it alone.
At Ground Zero, the technique was adapted to a different purpose. The pile was not primarily a fire to be extinguished — by the time Buscemi arrived, the fire suppression operations were being managed with conventional apparatus — but a debris field to be excavated. The excavation had to be done carefully in some areas, because any remaining voids that might contain survivors, or remains that needed to be recovered with dignity, could not simply be pushed aside by heavy equipment. Human hands, working in chains, moved material in the way that human hands had moved material in collapse sites for as long as humans had built structures and those structures had fallen.
The bucket brigade at Ground Zero moved rubble: pieces of concrete, sections of steel, the pulverized debris of two 110-story towers and everything they contained. Occasionally, the line passed other things: body bags, recovered remains, items that identified the people who had worked in the buildings. These were the moments that Buscemi described as disturbing — “body bags would sometimes pass through” — in the careful, indirect language of someone who was reporting an experience without either dramatizing it or suppressing it.