The view from ground zero

Sept. 15 - We’ve seen the emergency workers and firefighters from afar and heard their descriptions of conditions in the rubble of the World Trade Center. But what is the scene really like? MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield visited the site and filed this report.

MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield

DESCRIPTIONS PALE in the face of reality. It is like a thousand ants on a mountain trying to remove rubble, pail by pail.

They are working in highly unstable surroundings that include the site of the two World Trade towers and surrounding buildings. The workers are frequently ordered to evacuate: There’s a creak or a moan, a building sways in the wind, an “all call” goes out and thousands of people start running.

When they hear it’s One Liberty Place, a 50-story building, they run four blocks. When they hear it’s the debris pile, they run to the periphery of the wreckage.

There are dozens of buildings in the area that are unstable, or have not been assessed. But the immediate goal is to find any survivors, so inspections will have to wait.

There is a crater where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood, and

rubble everywhere. The rescue crews work diligently, showing little emotion. The operation is remarkably well organized given that many of these people have never worked together before.

There are so many clusters of workers digging in piles of debris for blocks and blocks that it’s impossible to really know what is happening here.

At one point, we got caught up in an “all-call” evacuation. People around us started yelling “Go, go, go — get out!” and bodies start hitting us from behind as everyone ran for their lives. That’s when we sensed the fear of the instability and the panic of escaping the same fate as the victims in the wreckage.

But within five to 10 minutes everyone streamed back to the debris piles.

The workers are very edgy about the instability of the site, but they also are determined. You can see it in their steely faces.