City of Dust

by Anthony DePalma

  On October 17 Ausmus found out that Bechtel was not going to get the comprehensive contract it wanted. The company pulled out its entire staff and handed over its work-safety plan to Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, which had written additional liability coverage when the city—which was self-insured—tried to buy more coverage on the open market. Liberty Mutual then helped develop a health and safety plan in consultation with the city health department, contractors, and other agencies.

  The issue of who should wear respirators where and when was a constant topic of discussion at the twice-daily meetings run by the city. It was becoming clear that many workers were ignoring the advisories. The fire department’s incident action plans indicated that many firefighters were flouting the rules, the Operating Engineers Union watched the site through binoculars and found unsatisfactory compliance, and the Department of Design and Construction—which Giuliani had declared co-incident commander along with the fire department when the rescue phase ended—had its own proof that the message was falling on deaf ears. One of the first things Kenneth Holden had done when he was named commissioner in 1999 was purchase a dozen digital cameras to monitor construction sites. Violations could be recorded and quickly posted. Now at ground zero, his cameras were coming back with images of workers on the pile without masks. Even those who had masks often wore them around their necks. Besides making workers sweaty and uncomfortable, the respirators came with filters that clogged quickly in the heavy dust that hovered over the pile, and replacements weren’t always readily available. Wearing a respirator with clogged filters can feel like suffocating, and the first impulse is to tear it off.

  Firefighters were particularly lax about wearing their respirators, and the contractors, who were being hounded by OSHA, complained, “What about them?” When the safety director for one of the construction companies pointed out the lack of compliance to one of the fire department chiefs, the officer thanked him but then snapped “you are out of bounds,”9 meaning that the intensely proud and independent uniformed services would not take instructions from civilians.

  The inspectors had more leverage with construction company supervisors, but after a while, they demanded to know why they were being picked on when the cops and firemen were so clearly violating the rules. James Abadie, a senior vice president with Bovis, said his construction workers were upset because they were being hectored by inspectors for not wearing their respirators, yet they saw most firefighters on the pile and police on the perimeter without theirs. The signs, advisories, and warnings were being widely ignored, and Abadie, who was used to the roughneck attitudes that prevailed on many construction sites, knew that the men simply were not going to take precautions to protect themselves by wearing masks “unless [they had] their mother there to tell them to do it”—even then, he doubted they’d comply.

  Across the board, workers being pestered about respirators kept asking the same question: Why should I wear one of those damn things if everybody keeps saying the air is safe? Some men said it was too much of a hassle to wear one; others claimed they hadn’t been given anything to wear or couldn’t find replacements. Compliance rates dropped; resentment increased. Eventually, Holden was forced to take back the digital cameras and call off the visual inspections—construction workers resented being spied on and caught on camera.

  Many people thought it odd to have Holden’s department assume control of the cleanup. For the first weeks, Holden himself kept looking over his shoulder, half expecting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or some other government entity would step in, thank him kindly for all his hard work, and tell him to go home because they were taking over. But it didn’t happen. Giuliani didn’t ask for help, and the federal agencies didn’t insist on giving it. So the work proceeded in the same hectic way it had begun: balancing the desire for speed against the potential slowdowns that would come with precautions. Leo DiRubbo, a senior vice president for AMEC, was one of the construction officials escorted to ground zero in a police van just a few hours after the towers imploded. He worked every day through January except for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the day his father died. It seemed to him that the city’s demand for speed was relentless. “This job was driven by schedule, not by safety,” he noted. “We were told machines do not stop—they work 24 hours, 7 days a week, and nothing could stop this job. That was the driving schedule; it was schedule driven. We were actually threatened at meetings: If you are not done for the first of the year, you will not be here on the second.”10

  The construction companies were working so fast that they had not been able to negotiate a full written contract. Working on a time-and-materials basis gave the city incentive for keeping things moving forward quickly. The project was so big that the city had started handing out $10 million checks to the companies before the first week was over, assuming that the billing would come later. There wasn’t even time for the contractors to secure sufficient liability insurance to protect themselves under the precarious conditions of working on a shifting pile of red-hot rubble. Yet they continued to work without stopping, understanding that this was no ordinary job and these were no ordinary times. They tried to get additional insurance on the open market, and they raised their concerns with the city several times. They were told it would be taken care of.

  For the first two months, ground zero was in continuous motion, stopping only when the air horn blasted three times, indicating that another body had been found. Then if the body belonged to a firefighter, a somber procession moved over the debris as the remains were ceremoniously brought to the surface to be identified and laid to rest. The work was a constant reminder of death, sacrifice, and mission. These funerals later came to symbolize the futility of keeping the rescuers working long hours on the pile without protection, putting themselves at risk and inviting suffering and disease in order to honor the dead, a sacrifice that no one would publicly question.

  This was the most dangerous workplace most of the thousands of responders had ever known. It was more complex than any construction site they had ever been involved with. It was a more confounding fire than any they had ever fought. It was the most sampled place in the nation, but widespread confusion still circulated over what the risks were and how dangerous working there might be. But each day the pile grew smaller, each day more remains were uncovered, each day the city took another step toward recovery—and each day countless people were exposed to the dust that would cling to them and change their lives.

  What had ground zero become?

  • A fire without visible flame

  • The scene of a mass murder, witnessed by millions but with few bodies left as evidence

  • A rescue without anyone to rescue

  • An extensively analyzed and picked-over 16 acres, yet a void filled with lingering uncertainty about what was safe and what was not

  • Significant chaos

  Endnotes

  1 Deposition of Michael Burton, 8 September 2005.

  2 Deposition of Kenneth Holden, 10–11 August 2005.

  3 Deposition of Kelly McKinney, 19 October 2005.

  4 Deposition of Samuel Benson, 8 September 2005.

  5 Deposition of Salvatore Cassano, 30 September 2005.

  6 Deposition of Peter Hayden, 19 September 2005.

  7 Deposition of James Luongo, 21 September 2005.

  8 Ausmus, David In the Midst of Chaos: My Thirty Days at Ground Zero Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, 2004).

  9 Deposition of William Ryan, Tully Corporate Safety Director, 2 August 2005.

  10 Deposition of Leo DiRubbo, Senior Vice President of AMEC and licensed safety manager, 5 December 2005.

  4. Raising doubts

  Not far from the EPA’s formidable granite headquarters on Broadway, another office focuses single-mindedly on environmental issues and the frightening impacts those situations can have on the people who live and work near them. Their similarities, however, end there. After 9/11, these two offices became locked in a battl
e over science and fact, largely because of a rumpled hobbit named Joel Kupferman. Kupferman is the crusading attorney who heads the New York Environmental Law & Justice Project, an in-your-face legal hit squad that isn’t afraid to be called radical. Its offices, on the fourth floor of an old Broadway commercial building, are a world apart from the federal building’s grand formality and impressive architecture. The ancient elevator rises as slowly as fog on a spring morning, and the crowded floor offers just enough space to squeeze through sideways to get to Kupferman’s rat’s nest of an office. This is the epicenter of Kupferman’s world, the place where he keeps his files in boxes and daunting piles of dog-eared papers. Two laptop computers are always open, and several phones ring at once. Regulars know that if he doesn’t pick up, they’ll have to try again, because the message box is almost always full. Past the discarded electronics and the coffee-ringed papers is a dirty window that looks out over his beloved Broadway.

  Kupferman’s mind is organized along the same unorthodox lines as his office. Thoughts are piled on top of each other, seemingly at random, and at times several come spilling out in an avalanche of words that overwhelms anything in its way. But just as he can usually find the documents he is looking for in that junk heap of an office, he follows through on his ideas and concerns about environmental safety. Many of those ideas share the same origin, and that is the gutter smell of social justice in the big city. And because he considers this city—particularly this oldest, most crowded part downtown—to be his own, he was especially on guard after 9/11 when officials consistently said everything was all right.

  Kupferman has been a fixture in Lower Manhattan for a long time. He had already spent decades on these streets by the time the federal building that houses the EPA’s regional office was constructed in the early 1990s. In a way, he grew up downtown because of the family business, which was not law, but leather—specifically, the leather used to make the soles of shoes. Kupferman’s grandfather Harry started Worth Street Leather, later just Worth Leather, right before the great stock market crash in 1929. Harry passed it down to Kupferman’s own father, Saul, before Joel came to inherit it. Worth Leather was part of an industry that for centuries had thrived in an area known as the swamp, near City Hall on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge (where Pace University came to be built). Kupferman’s parents were New York Jewish liberals. His mother, Mollie, had volunteered for the American Labor Party and her father, Bernard, had been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies). Although the family had lived in relative comfort in Roosevelt, Long Island, his father had firmly believed in workers’ rights, and he’d passed along a rigid sense of social justice that took root in his four sons.

  Joel Kupferman was the only one of the four interested in keeping the leather business going, more out of a nod to tradition than to any thought that it could provide a living wage. When he entered the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island, he was already launched on a career in social justice. Kupferman studied human-scale economics and development, and in time he gravitated toward environmental challenges such as curbing water pollution and protecting forestry resources. One of the most controversial issues on Long Island at that time was construction of the Shoreham nuclear power plant. Kupferman dived headlong into the anti-nuke protests, which eventually prevented the plant from ever operating commercially.

  Kupferman helped run the leather business, but it had changed substantially. As the shoe part of its business declined during the 1960s, Worth Leather had expanded into crafts, supplying the leather straps and metal buckles that counter-culture entrepreneurs used to fashion hippie couture. Kupferman took to the road, sometimes with his father, calling on craft shops throughout the Northeast. He discovered that nearly every one of the shops also functioned quite effectively as a local campaign headquarters for liberal presidential candidate George McGovern. Over time, Kupferman developed a special rapport with grass-roots organizers, and he continued to nurture the relationship after graduating from Stony Brook in 1978.

  Working at Worth Leather a couple days a week provided a modest living, while also allowing him to devote his energies to advocacy. Then came one of those defining moments when, without warning, something happens and suddenly the world seems clearer. He was invited to a dinner party at the home of a liberal friend on Long Island. While casually passing a plate at the dinner table, the host asked his wife, who worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory near Stony Brook, about rumors of a hazardous material spill at the lab. “Oh yes,” the woman said, there had been a spill, but when reporters called Brookhaven, officials had denied it because, she said, “the people of Long Island wouldn’t know how to handle the information.” For Kupferman, it was as though a bowl of hot soup had spilled in his lap. He realized that everyone at the dinner table portrayed themselves as environmentally sensitive and committed to the right side of things. Yet they seemed all too willing to withhold or distort information, and that realization transformed him in significant ways that shaped his future. “It made me realize that I had to have a healthy skepticism whenever there’s an announcement that something is safe,” he said.

  By 1986, Kupferman decided that he had reached the limit of his effectiveness as a socially aware small businessman and probably could have a greater impact as a lawyer, especially if he practiced public interest law. He brought his admission application right to the Touro Law Center in New York, an accredited law school that advocated studies in social justice and is closed on Friday evening and all day Saturday in observance of the Jewish Sabbath. It was the very last day applications could be filed, and before he left the admissions office, he asked to see its director. Kupferman had been arrested eight times already during civil disobedience marches, and he needed to know whether that record would hurt his chances of being accepted to law school and to the bar. He wasn’t sure what to think when the admissions director pulled him into the office and closed the door. “I was at Seabrook, were you?” she asked him, referring to demonstrations at the construction site of the Seabrook Nuclear Plant in New Hampshire in 1977. Kupferman acknowledged that he had been there, and at Shoreham, too. With that, they established a special bond. The admissions officer not only told him not to worry, but she gave him details about a dean’s fellowship for public advocacy law and encouraged him to apply for it.

  It took Kupferman four years to complete his degree. He attended classes at night while still running Worth Leather during the day. In 1991, Kupferman had his law degree—and his passion. With fellow students from Touro, he hung out his shingle as the New York Environmental Law & Justice Project. He had no foundation grants, no outside supporters. His practice was done literally on a shoestring: Kupferman took some of the proceeds out of Worth Leather, which for years had supplied shoelaces to bowling alleys all over the Northeast. The business was in steep decline and, by the mid-1990s, closed its doors. But Mollie and Saul Kupferman’s lasting legacy would be the social activism that the humble workshop had instilled in their son. Kupferman never forgot what it was like to work with men who wouldn’t eat the edges of their lunch sandwiches because they couldn’t wash the work stains from their fingers. The years he spent handling the heavily processed materials at Worth Leather taught him about the environment and the grave consequences business can have on water and land. He embraced the concept of social justice, and he developed the ability to recognize when it was threatened.

  Kupferman first set up his legal SWAT team on Long Island, but by 1997, he had moved to the city, back to the old neighborhood downtown. He occupied a tiny space, an office within an office, and was still located there when the planes struck on September 11. Kupferman had continued his broad interest in social justice issues. Besides fighting cover-ups of toxic spills and developments that destroyed wetlands, he helped immigrants in trouble. On the morning of September 11, he was due in an Elizabeth, New Jersey, courtroom to defend an Eritrean immigrant threatened with deportation. As he bo
arded a train at Penn Station that morning, Kupferman heard a brief news report about the first trade center tower being on fire. He wasn’t sure what it meant, and he had desperate people waiting for him, so he didn’t turn around. By the time he got to the Elizabeth courthouse, the second tower had come down. The court session was cancelled, and all transportation into the city had been cut off. Kupferman was stranded in New Jersey. He had to spend several days with relatives before he could make his way back to New York.

  When he finally returned, Kupferman walked in a daze through the streets he had known since he was a child. “It looked like Kansas after a dust storm,” he said. He talked to the people he passed on the streets and, instinctively, worried about what they were breathing. His answering machine was filled with frantic messages from people who hadn’t been able to reach him for days and feared he was dead.