Michael Saxe says he knows what the men and women combing through the rubble of the collapsed condo in Surfside are going through: He was among the first responders searching the rubble of ground zero at the World Trade Center as a police detective in New York, hoping to find survivors.

“I responded directly to the (World Trade Center) towers (in New York), and I got to the towers about 10 minutes after the second tower collapsed,” he said. 

The first responders in South Florida are under enormous pressure, said Saxe, who's served as a champlain in Central Florida.

“They’re on a critical timeline right now," he said. "The people that are trapped, they have to get them out within a certain amount of time, and that clock’s ticking.” 

It’s a painstaking process, searching for any clues of survivors amidst all that destruction, Saxe said. 

“Any time that they’re hearing a noise, they’re wondering, 'Is somebody trapped that I can get to?' ” he said. 

Saxe said the search has to go frustratingly slow so they don’t shift too much of rubble at once and cause even more of a collapse. 

“If they do it in a hot-dog way, and they do it quick, then survival won’t be a possibility," he said. "Then people can get hurt.”  

Professionals from Central Florida who are on the way to help know this all too well.

Members of the Orlando Fire Department and the Orange and Seminole county fire departments have deployed to South Florida as part of Florida Task Force 4 to help locate the more than 150 people still unaccounted for in the Surfside condo collapse.

“(We are) structural support specialists, structural rescue specialists, K-9 search specialists, so we have a lot of dedicated people who are highly trained and will be able to augment that rescue response down south,” Florida Task Force 4 leader Walter Lewis said. 

Despite the dire circumstances, leaders of the task force said they still believe there are people they can save. 

“If you reference the earthquake in Haiti, the task forces that were operational there were pulling out live victims seven days into the operation, so we wouldn’t be asking these men and women to put their lives in danger if we didn’t think they had a chance,”  Orlando Fire Department District Chief Spencer Bashinki said. 

Saxe's experience on 9/11 inspired him to become a chaplain for police departments in Lake County.

Giving back is helping him deal with his own trauma from his experience in New York.  

“It’s really helpful to me that when the first responders need help, I can then help them, and it gives me purpose in my life,” Saxe said. 

That's why Saxe says it’s going to be extremely important for the men and women from Central Florida and all the rescuers in South Florida to process what they're going through in a healthy way once they return home.

If they don't, there could end up being even more victims of this tragedy for years to come, Saxe said.