NEW YORK — Bryan Kemp shuffled away from the wreckage, the old overcoat he had been given swishing in time with his leaden pace, an ill-fitting hard hat bobbing up and down. He had been awake for 30 hours, and for the last 24 he had been doing all he could to help the rescue effort at the site of what used to be New York's World Trade Center.

As an Administration of Child Services worker for the city, Kemp was used to dealing with the plight of some of his fellow New Yorkers. But he, like everybody else helping in the relief effort, was totally unprepared for what he saw.

"There's nothing there. There's just rubble and steel," he intoned. "They hit them all, every building. They're all burned."

Kemp was working three blocks away from the World Trade Center complex when the twin towers collapsed Tuesday morning. He and several other employees immediately ran to the complex to help with the relief effort. In the next few hours, he and the masses of police officers and firefighters would be joined by hundreds of other volunteers from all walks of life in the bustling city.

Guardian Angel Bill Coscarelli

Bill Coscarelli is a professional volunteer of sorts, a member of the Guardian Angels, a group in the city that was formed to patrol unsafe communities and help others in need. Of Argentinean descent, he spoke in a clipped accent as he described a daring mission he led other rescuers on into the underbelly of the trade center complex where a concourse of shops and a commuter rail station used to be located.

"Nobody wanted to go down underneath, they said that the building might collapse. But I'm thinking that if anybody is alive, well we better go now, because we don't have time," Coscarelli, a 36-year-old motorcycle technician, said. "So I was talking to a cop and they agreed to come with me underneath, down to the PATH station to look."

The group made it way down through a tunnel into the underground catacombs, finally reaching the "collapsed" PATH station which was empty of bodies but quickly filling with dank water. Coscarelli says that he assumes everybody underground was evacuated and made it out alive before the structures collapsed.

Although at least nine people, six firefighters and three police officers, have been pulled from the wreckage alive, Coscarelli said that most of the discoveries have been much grislier.

"(The building) squished so hard, you mostly find nothing. We find pieces of persons like this," he said, his hands held a foot apart, his lips trembling. "And we put it in a bag."

Brian Van Flander

A much less gory, but no less disturbing, discovery was made by fellow volunteer Brian Van Flander. A 33-year-old resident of lower Manhattan, he was sifting through debris when he came upon a small and dusty doll that had somehow survived the devastation.

"It was lying among the wreckage, kind of telling a story," he says. "Your first reaction is to be thankful that there's not a little girl nearby who had the doll. Luckily that didn't happen. But your second reaction is that there's probably a child who owned it that, along with hundreds or thousands of other people, is buried in there."

Van Flander clutched the doll tightly, and said he'd already decided what to do with the toy.

"I'm going to clean her up and give it to a young girl in memory of the people who died and in honor of them," he said. "Maybe when she's old enough, she'll appreciate what it means."

According to police sources, any volunteer work that involves traversing the wreckage itself is highly dangerous.

"Everything is wet, coated with ash and debris," said Brian Iarrapino, a 31-year old officer from the Southfield Police Department in New Jersey. "You really have to be careful in everything you do. There's a lot of power equipment, jaws of life and torches being used."

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that authorities had enough rescue volunteers on Wednesday but that the city was looking for more people to come forward in the future when police and fire department personnel get tired.