Ohio Task Force One's Ground Zero mission turned from rescue to recovery.

Byline: Cornelius Frolik

Sept. 10--En route from Dayton to New York City, members of Ohio Task Force One, an urban search and rescue team, were anxious to get to Ground Zero to start retrieving survivors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Television images depicted massive devastation resulting from the two hijacked airliners crashing into the Twin Towers. But the hunt for survivors had just begun, and rescuers assumed there were many people trapped in the rubble who needed their help.

"From responses to earthquakes, you learn that people survive these things for days," said Fairborn fire Lt. Joey Lykins, a former technical search specialist with the task force. "We were thinking we would be plucking people right and left out of this pile."

But unlike many natural disasters, the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 caused destruction so sudden and violent that rescue searches primarily became corpse-recovery operations.

Looking back a decade later, local task force members said they are glad they went to Ground Zero, but the aftermath of the …