JERSEY CITY, N.J. — They have the look of men and women who have seen too much.

        In a tightly guarded staging area here, they file silently back from the carnage, as if even among themselves words could not come.

        John Hamrick, a firefighter from Fort Wayne, Ind., left home on Tuesday afternoon, arrived in New York at 4 a.m. and went to work six hours later.

        He is one of about 50 volunteer firefighters and disaster workers — including more than a dozen from Ohio — who have spent the past several days in a military-like encampment at Liberty State Park in Jersey City.

        Periodically, they are ferried in shifts across the Hudson River to the ruins where the World Trade Center towers stood.

        Mr. Hamrick, 40, came here to save lives. It's his passion — the reason he uses vacation time to hurry to disasters in his customized Humvee vehicle.

        In New York this week, , Mr. Hamrick mostly finds himself groping along flooded basements near the tower ruins, prying open doors, hoping to find someone behind them.

        Instead, he discovers twisted steel, crumpled concrete and layers of trash, like artifacts from an archaeological dig.

        He helps sift through piles of rubble from the collapse of the towers.

        “There were a couple of feet,” he says, eyes red with exhaustion as he leaned against his vehicle late Wednesday. “The feet didn't have any shoes on them. You don't know who they belonged to or anything like that.”

        He pauses.

        “If there's an upside to it, it's a fast death.”

        The workers have found their own way to pay their respects, he says.

        “When the cranes were in there and somebody was going for a body bag, everybody stopped and there was just silence,” Mr. Hamrick says. “It was their little way of giving condolences to the person without really knowing who.”

        Also at the disaster site for 24 hours straight this week is Mike Mills, a volunteer heavy equipment operator from central New Jersey. He went to work at the tower ruins at 10 a.m. Wednesday and didn't stop — except for a few hours of fitful sleep near the rubble — until noon Thursday.

        He came here alone, in jeans, work shirt and hard hat, driven by patriotism.

        “It's sort of like when you go off to war,” says Mr. Mills, 56, a Vietnam veteran. “Your country's in trouble and you go off to help.”

        Mr. Mills runs a large machine called a grappler, picking up sections of steel and transferring them to flatbed trucks. Later, he spends hours helping carry rubble in 5-gallon pails.

        One hundred men and women stand in line like the fire brigades of old, passing the buckets away from places where people still might be alive.

        He is calm and matter-of-fact as he describes the scene, an Army man with memories of an earlier war behind his eyes.

        “It's just part of the deal, I think,” he says of finding the remains. “You expect to find it. It's going to get much worse.”

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