The ambulances were lined up outside the Coast Guard station in Moriches, but they waited in vain.

They were among the scores of rescue vehicles that converged on eastern Long Island last night after the TWA plane went down. But it wasn't long before grim-faced workers realized they were there to recover bodies, not survivors.

Pilot Maj. Frederick Mayer was one of the first on the scene to look for victims. (Newsday / Michael Ach)

"It's absolute chaos," said John Tew, an EMT with the Bellport Volunteer Ambulance Corps. "At this point it's not a search, it's a recovery."

At the Suffolk County Morgue in Hauppauge, workers were getting ready to go down to the temporary morgue being set up in East Moriches to handle bodies from the crash.

Physician Assistant Dennis Kozik, one of the morgue workers charged with "bagging and tagging" the bodies, said, "I hope there are no kids among them. There's no way you could build immunity for that."

And a grim task clearly was ahead, based on the reports of searchers who had been to crash site. For example, Capt. Chris Baur, a helicopter pilot with the 102nd Rescue Wing, described with emotion how a routine training flight turned into a close-in view of tragedy.

"The first body I that saw was intact, a male wearing blue jeans, face down," Baur said last night from the Air National Guard station at Westhampton Beach. The helicopter hovered 20 feet above the crash scene. "Then, all of sudden, at least 20 to 30 bodies in different states of configuration. A lot of people without heads. We marked them in the area. I picked up two."

Every major roadway leading to the Coast Guard station was blocked off by police and emergency services who were diverting traffic to alternate routes to speed the flow of emergency vehicles to and from the compound.

At the East Moriches fire house, the parking lot was filled last night with about 30 police cars, an Emergency Services van and other equipment. A fire engine with big floodlights in the back of the firehouse was lighting the scene.

At the Suffolk County Emergency Operations Center in Yaphank, Hauppauge firefighters who were at the nearby training center on an exercise were staffing a bank of telephones, answering calls.

Another indication of the scope of the tragedy came when officials at the center collected four or five sets of local flood maps and sent a driver off into the night to deliver them to rescue workers along the shore.

The maps were to be used to figure out the most likely place to find bodies as the tide washed them ashore.

Outside the Coast Guard base in East Moriches, three Long Island priests sat on a concrete slab amid dozens of hustling rescue workers and Coast Guard officials organizing for a rescue mission. The priests said they were waiting to counsel the workers.

For one, the Rev. William Donovan of Huntington's Seminary of Immaculate Conception, this was his second plane tragedy. He also stood vigil at the 1990 Avianca crash in Cove Neck.

"I think when there's a tragedy people reach down for a spot inside themselves and want to do good to people around them," he said. "There's a feeling here at everyone here wanted to deal with survivors and use their rescue skills. But as time goes on there is sense there will be tragedy only."

Al Baker, Rick Brand, John Cornell Jr., Jessica Kowal, Samson Mulugeta and Mitchell Freedman contributed to this story.