But the fire department handled the bulk of the work in the early days. The trade center was a working fire (and would be for months), and the fire department brass were designated incident commanders, which put them in charge of the sprawling operation. Several of the department’s top officials had been killed in the collapse, and a makeshift command had to be quickly put in place. A handful of firefighters continued to battle the subsurface blazes, pouring thousands of gallons of water on the pile. Most others focused on the rescue. The water itself kept hope alive that, deep down in the six stories below ground that had once made up the parking decks and the concourse, lined with cafes, restaurants, and stores, pockets of water, food, and air might be keeping survivors alive.
Using shovels, pickaxes, and often no more than their own hands, firefighters inched onto the shifting rubble, listening for cries of help and clawing through smoking debris when someone spotted a bit of clothing or anything else that looked hopeful. The air tanks that were standard issue for New York City firefighters were useless because they carried only about half an hour of compressed air. Some firefighters wrapped pieces of clothing around their mouths and noses on the first day, and later some picked up dust masks, if they could find them. Most worked unprotected, and nearly all thought little about their own safety while the possibility of rescuing survivors was still considered real.
Deputy Chief Peter Hayden had arrived four minutes after the first plane hit and set up a command center in the lobby of Number One World Trade Center (or World One, as some knew the North Tower) until it came down. In the disturbing aftermath of the collapses, Hayden and other fire officials scrambled to regroup. New York firefighters are bound by deep tradition and fierce loyalty. They attracted a huge amount of public sympathy when the devastating losses became known, and those who survived were treated as wounded heroes. The rest of the city vowed not to get in their way as they searched for fathers, brothers, and sons. Even the volunteers who flew in to offer their help didn’t know quite how to approach the department. Several days after the attacks, a man came up to Chief Hayden and announced, “I’m here to help you.”5 Hayden turned around and looked at the stranger as though he were seeing a mirage. The man wore a T-Shirt from the U.S. Forest Service Incident Command Team. How was Smokey the Bear going to help when two of the biggest buildings in the world had been turned into dust? But his offer actually made sense. The Southwest Forestry Service had sent a 35-member incident command team to help the department deal with a blaze like none the city firefighters had ever encountered but that, in some ways, the rangers could recognize. Whereas most urban fires can be brought under control within an hour (which is why tanks containing 30–45 minutes of compressed air were usually sufficient), open-range fires in the Southwest can last for weeks. The rangers had developed a command structure that brought together logistics, performance review, and a daily update that kept a multifaceted response under administrative control for long periods of time.
The forest service rangers helped Hayden establish incident-management teams and provided the backup to augment the daily incident action plans that were distributed to all agencies at morning meetings. The plans listed available resources, the number of police personnel and firefighters on-site, the accomplishments of the previous 24 hours, and a plan of action for the next one to three days. They also included a daily safety message reminding everyone to use personal protective equipment, including the recommended respirators.
But Hayden and the other fire officials decided not to discipline firefighters who failed to heed warnings about respirators. Although the firefighters were taught to follow orders and to be more than cautious about safety, this was an extremely emotional issue. The experienced brass were no more insulated from the tragedy than were the freshest newbies, and in deciding how to proceed in this unprecedented emergency, they took into account all the information they had available and acknowledged the personal intangibles of sorrow, loss, and hope. The environmental reports they received showed that levels were generally acceptable, although there were hot spots and spikes. However, the need to shout orders and steer clear of the bent steel, busted concrete, and mammoth machines was constant, and respirators simply got in the way. Putting all those needs together, Hayden voiced the sentiment that many felt, acknowledging that some firefighters had lost family and friends but continued working under perilous conditions. “I don’t think it would have been appropriate to discipline any of them because they failed to wear a respirator,” he recounted.6
Besides, many of the men on the pile didn’t have any compelling reason to take such precautions. The word at daily safety meetings was that air samples did not continue to show any increased risk. All the federal, state, and city agencies said the same thing: The air was safe. The testing did show occasional hot spots above the pile, but they were considered anomalies instead of justification for changing the requirements for respirator equipment. Officials were looking for consistently high readings that made a strong case for taking further steps, and those readings did not materialize.
When the private construction companies began to show up with their heavy equipment, some temporary confusion arose over what the site had actually become: Was it still a working fire, or had it morphed into a crime scene or, worse, an urban junkyard? Now cops and firefighters were working side by side with crane operators and construction laborers in a vast and complex zone of labor. Sorting it all out while still responding to the tremendous emotional pressure to recover bodies and restore normalcy to the financial district was an unprecedented challenge that led to some ad hoc decisions, with severe consequences.
One of the most important decisions was how to handle workplace safety rules. The agency normally charged with ensuring that workers do not face unwarranted hazards on the job is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA’s own offices in Number 6 World Trade Center had been crushed by debris falling from the twin towers. The agency’s employees had escaped unharmed well before the towers came down, but they had lost their desks and their files. Within a few days, they were ready to go back to work, but as the magnitude of the recovery operation became apparent, they were stymied. The dangers of the site were many. In fact, there may have been no more dangerous workplace in the country at that time than ground zero. The debris pile was unstable, undercut by jagged steel and raging fires. The trade center complex housed hundreds of offices and businesses, with an almost infinite number of potential dangers, from the freon of the complex’s huge air-conditioning system to the guns and ammunition held in the offices of the U.S. Customs Service. To get through the mountain of debris, the construction companies rolled in their big equipment: 300-ton, 400-ton, 700-ton, even gigantic 1,000-ton cranes and heavy-duty grapplers that could pick through the jack-straw tangle of steel to look for survivors.
When the heavy equipment moved in, firefighters needed to be stationed close by to signal the crane operators when a body was found. Instead of establishing a 50-foot radius around the machines that normally was a no-enter zone for workers on foot, firefighters stood within 6 feet of the biggest equipment. Some of the cranes and grapplers were designed for huge open-pit mines, not city streets, and were so heavy that officials feared they might collapse the honeycombed streets. After the overlaying debris was cleared from an area, ironworkers with acetylene cutting torches sliced through the mangled remains so the biggest girders could be quickly moved out of the way.
OSHA was well aware of the dangers. The agency also recognized that this was no ordinary worksite. It was still under the control of the fire department and still considered not only a working fire, but a crime scene where thousands had been murdered. Workplace safety regulations were not suspended, but the agency couldn’t impose its normal method of enforcing those regulations—issuing fines for noncompliance—as long as it was a rescue operation. Strict adherence to the rules would have essentially halted the work, as Kelly McKinney of the health department had initially feare
d. Each worker would have to be fitted with a respirator, instructed in its use, and given a physical examination to determine whether using the restricted breathing of the respirator could lead to other health issues. If inspectors then found workers without respirators, they would issue warnings first, then fines.
Besides slowing down operations, OSHA believed fines would have had minimal impact because the contractors were working on a time-and-materials basis, charging the city as they went along. The fines would go to the employers, who would merely roll them into other charges, in effect fining the city itself. Even labor union leaders were skeptical of the power of fines to improve safety because they could merely be written into contracts and their relative value was nothing compared to the cost of time and production. Perhaps most significantly, the culture at OSHA had changed under the Bush administration. Strict enforcement of regulations had given way to an idealistic cooperation between regulators and management, which sped up production. New York City officials did not insist that OSHA strictly enforce its rules, but rather asked the agency to remain in an advisory role. OSHA would not have had authority over the police and firefighters anyway. Eventually, the city, the contractors, and OSHA entered into a voluntary agreement: the contractors themselves would enforce employee compliance with safety rules while OSHA agreed to monitor the site but not issue fines. OSHA had found this kind of voluntary arrangement effective in other instances. Given all the complex operations going on at ground zero and the apparent need to move ahead quickly, it seemed like a workable solution.
One other city agency that had responded quickly to the disaster was an unlikely one, the Department of Sanitation. Collecting garbage is a Herculean task in New York City, which generates 25,000 tons of residential and commercial garbage every day. The unique logistics of the waterbound city make getting rid of the trash a complicated choreography involving trucks, cranes, trains, and sometimes even barges. At different times over the last century, the city had tried burning its trash in incinerators, dumping it into the ocean, and finally burying it in the world’s largest landfill, called Fresh Kills, on Staten Island. Community opposition in the city’s most suburban and conservative borough had led Giuliani to agree to close down Fresh Kills, even though he hadn’t come up with a permanent alternative. The last loads of garbage were dumped on the towering mounds in March 2001. But in the days after the 9/11 attacks, the department mobilized some of its heavy equipment, and the Giuliani administration determined that the most efficient way to clear the debris from ground zero was to reopen Fresh Kills on an emergency basis.
The sanitation department quickly mobilized pieces of heavy equipment, and the first material to be taken out of the pile was loaded onto New York City Housing Authority dump trucks and transported over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. A 175-acre section of Fresh Kills was reopened, and a huge sorting and disposal operation was established there under the command of one tough New York City cop, Deputy Inspector James Luongo. It started small, but in no time, as many as 1,300 people a day were sorting through the material for human remains and any items that could help identify the victims. By the time Army Corps of Engineers debris-removal specialists showed up, Luongo had established such an efficient operation that they stood down, offering whatever help they could but gladly allowing the local officials to run the show.
Almost from the beginning, Luongo strictly enforced personal protective equipment rules.7 Believing that the material handled there contained asbestos, silica, and other harmful materials, he ordered everyone working in several “hot zones” to wear respirators. He also issued Tyvek suits, although he said it was mostly to protect his officers’ clothing. His message to wear protective equipment came across loud and clear, and through most of the operation compliance rates hovered above 90 percent (compared to compliance at ground zero, where rates dipped below 30 percent). However, police officers and detectives outside the designated hot zones often worked without protection.
Luongo later said getting his people to watch out for their own health wasn’t difficult. “You stood up at roll call, you said what was expected, and it was complied with,” he recalled. Of course, there were substantial differences between Fresh Kills and ground zero. Although it’s part of New York City, Staten Island is far removed in both miles and attitude from the hustle of the financial district. The mostly treeless mounds of garbage at Fresh Kills tower over the island and feel like a moonscape, save for the gulls that hover out of habit. Access to the site was strictly controlled, and it was so remote that people who didn’t belong there stayed away. Ground zero, on the other hand, was a bizarre world unto itself, a construction site moving backward in time disassembling the once-mighty towers before hordes of onlookers. There the President of the United States embraced workers without wearing a respirator. Congressional delegations and international dignitaries tramped through without wearing protection. Workers, residents, and tourists came by in an unending stream, day after day, most without masks. Armed National Guardsmen watched high-heeled starlets gawk at the pile, unprotected by any kind of respirator.
Conflicts over how best to proceed inevitably arose. The city health department wanted trucks carrying debris from ground zero to be thoroughly washed down before leaving the site, to limit contamination on city streets. But the FBI objected, arguing that the operation would wash away important evidence. The agency reversed itself when it learned that water could trigger the locators on the airplanes’ black boxes, which had not yet been found. As the cleanup continued, a more efficient way of moving the twisted steel girders had to be found. A loading dock was proposed for the Hudson River so that workers could transfer the debris to barges, but once it began operation, neighborhood residents objected. They believed the dock was spewing contaminants in the air. Parents also complained that the dock was too close to a nearby school. But the city held that the environmental monitoring of the site did not warrant such concerns. Clearly, operating a loading dock near thousands of school children was not an ideal solution, but as in so many instances in the recovery operation, it was a matter of balancing interests and selecting among imperfect alternatives. The dock remained in operation.
After more than two full weeks of frantic digging on the pile and nonstop attempts to get the city back on its feet, Mayor Giuliani made the announcement that everyone knew needed to be made but that no one wanted to hear. He said that, difficult as it was to face, there was no chance of finding any more survivors. That meant the frenzied rescue part of the operation was over. Most people had given up any real hope long before, and only the pursuit of a miracle delayed the official declaration until the end of the month. By then, what remained was recovery—recovery of the remains of the victims, including the 343 firefighters and medics, and recovery of the city itself.
The fire department’s daily incident action plan, the coordinating document that the forest fire service had helped craft and that fire officials have acknowledged was of significant assistance, reflected the change in the status of the operation. The earliest of the daily plans stated that steel cutting and debris removal should move “at the most rapid pace possible” and that although ironworkers would assist the department, “keep in mind—this is a rescue operation.” The same words were repeated in every day’s rundown of planned actions and operating instructions. But in the plan that was released on the morning of September 28, the admonition to remember the rescue nature of the operation was dropped, although most activities remained unchanged. There was no slowdown, no evident switch in tactics, no directive to increase the use of personal protective equipment despite the low compliance rate. Each day’s action plan continued to stress safety: Wearing gloves, safety shoes, and respirators with filters was mandatory. The overall objectives for the work included “health, safety, and welfare of all personnel working in and around the incident.” Most often, the safety admonitions included personal messages directed at the firefighters themselves. One said, “Take time to protect yours
elf. The life you save may be your own.”
That was on paper. Out on the street, the city was intent on moving the cleanup ahead as quickly as possible. On October 22, Burton sent out a memo repeating the city’s position that the worksite was safe. In part, the memo said “all D.D.C. personnel should feel confident that they’re not being exposed to unhealthy levels of chemicals and that the air quality at the WTC is generally good.”
The unique demands of building in Manhattan had long before 9/11 created a subculture of construction companies that was hard for outsiders to break into. The four prime contractors at ground zero all had long resumes of building in the city. But their experience with environmental cleanups did not compare to that of Bechtel, a large engineering company with ties to the Bush White House. Bechtel had successfully put out the Kuwait oil field fires in the first Gulf War and helped with the cleanup at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl. The company had arrived in New York almost immediately after the towers fell. Although Bechtel hadn’t been part of Michael Burton’s contractor outreach, it had started work on a health and safety plan for the overall site. (For good measure, the company also told Mayor Giuliani that it had contributed $100,000 to a fund for fallen rescue workers.) Bechtel hoped to secure all or at least part of the recovery project. For the California company, this was a chance to break into the New York market. Within days, the company was sending teams of demolition experts and construction safety managers to New York. Bechtel had the resources and experience to handle the job, although it did not understand how New York worked. One of its safety specialists, David Ausmus, arrived in New York on September 26 from Oak Ridge, Tenn., where Bechtel handles environmental cleanup for the U.S. Department of Energy. Ausmus immediately noted that most workers on the pile weren’t bothering to wear hardhats, safety glasses, or respirators. “Our job is to assess the situation, install safety procedures, and assist the rescuers and workforce with a safety mindset,” Ausmus noted at the end of that first day. “In other words, we are to restore some semblance of safety order.”8 The city allowed Bechtel to submit a bid for the overall project, but then it asked the four companies it was already dealing with—AMEC, Bovis Lend-Lease, Turner Construction, and Tully, the local company working on the West Side Highway—to resubmit their bids. There was no way they were going to let the big job go to an outside company, no matter who Bechtel knew. Bechtel determined that if it was going to be limited to just the safety role, it wasn’t worth staying.
City of Dust Page 7
