American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  The underground, beneath the pile, was a wilderness of ruins, a short walk from the city but as far removed from life there as any place could be. It burned until January, and because it contained voids and weakened structures, it collapsed progressively until the spring. From the start its condition dictated the nature and location of the work on the surface. Specific knowledge was necessary not only to protect the people on the pile, particularly from cave-ins, but also to maintain the integrity of the now precariously supported “slurry wall,” a seventy-foot-deep concrete shell that enclosed the foundation hole to keep the tidal waters of New York Harbor from flooding in. The job of mapping the chaos fell to a small team of about six engineers who did some of the riskiest work at the site, climbing through the crevices of a strange and unstable netherworld, calmly charting its conditions, and returning without complaint after major collapses had occurred.

  The engineers finished the initial surveys in a couple of months, which was fast, given the size of their domain—six levels of ten acres each within the foundation hole, and an adjacent two levels of six acres each in the Trade Center complex to the east, all lying in confusion. By mid-November only one important underground area remained to be explored—a place people called “the final frontier,” located deep under the center of the ruins, at the foot of the former North Tower. It was the main chiller plant, one of the world’s largest air-conditioning facilities—a two-acre chamber three stories high that contained seven interconnected refrigeration units, each the size of a locomotive and capable of holding up to 24,000 pounds of dangerous Freon gas.

  Freon is a manufactured product containing chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and its use has been restricted by international accord because of the damage it does to the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer. The threat it posed at the Trade Center was more immediate, and stemmed from the fact that it is a heavy gas and it aggressively displaces the oxygen in the air that people breathe. With the huge quantities potentially involved here (as much as 168,000 pounds, under pressure, if the tanks remained intact), a sudden leak would fill the voids underground and spread across the surface of the pile, suffocating perhaps hundreds of workers caught out on the rough terrain and unable to move fast. To make matters worse, if the Freon cloud came in contact with open flames, of which there were plenty here, it would turn into airborne forms of hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids and also phosgene gas, related to the mustard gas used during World War I. Then it would go drifting. Evacuation sirens were installed around the edges of the pile, but in tests they often failed. Evacuation maps were printed with elaborate routes and mustering points, but of course they were not read. People accepted the danger. The standard advice, “Just run like hell,” was delivered with a little shrug. Everyone knew that if the Freon came hunting for you at the center of the pile, you would succumb.

  So for two months the Freon lurked like a beast inside the ruins, hiding in its den deep among channels that were venting noxious smoke and steam. By mid-November it seemed that the diesel excavators, which were digging in a valley of ruins between the mounds of the Twin Towers, would soon be encroaching on the chiller plant from above. If in the natural confusion of the work one of them tore into a loaded refrigeration unit, or merely damaged a pipe or a valve, the effect could be catastrophic. In private conversation the engineers speculated that the chiller plant had been severely damaged by the North Tower’s collapse, and that most if not all of the Freon had vented immediately into the rising column of smoke and dust. But they did not know this for certain, and could not gamble with people’s lives. Moreover, now there was disturbing news that traces of Freon had been found in the water that was pooling just above bedrock seventy feet down, at the lowest (B-6) basement level of the foundation hole.

  Since the water came primarily from the efforts to suppress fire and dust on the surface—from streams being played into the eruptions on the pile—it was possible that the Freon traces had simply been washed from tainted debris. Alternatively, the traces perhaps indicated a leak from one of the auxiliary tanks located in a less heavily damaged structure at the north end of the foundation hole—tanks that would soon be emptied by a specialized crew. But it was possible, too, that the engineers’ speculation had been wrong—that the main chiller plant remained largely intact, and that the Freon inside it was somehow starting to escape. Either way, the time had come to take a look around.

  In preparation for the effort, additional pumps were hooked up on the B-6 level, and over several days the flood in the foundation hole was drawn as low as it would easily go—to a depth of about one foot. The engineers knew that the route through the ruins would be tight and uncertain. A “spelunking run,” they called it, and because they would go deep, a “B-6 crawl.”

  I was invited along, as I’d been many times before. The pile that day was burning heavily under a south wind that spread ash and the sweet smell of the ruins far into the city, eliciting complaints. The sky was gray with autumn clouds; the air was soft and cool. Amid the roar of machinery we met at a plywood shack near the southwest corner of the ruins—twenty men in helmets, hardhats, and high rubber boots. The shack was a doorway to the underworld. It covered the top of an old stairwell that descended into the ground within the so-called South Projection, one of two protrusions under West Street, where the foundation hole had been extended toward the Hudson River to encompass the PATH tubes. Since September 11 the South Projection stairwell, like that of the North Projection, had provided important access to the ruins below. For the first few weeks it had been choked with rubble, and had required careful negotiation, like a steep and unstable switchback trail. By now, however, it had been cleared, and could be taken without effort, twelve flights down to the abandoned tracks.

  At the bottom, in the dungeon light from an overhead crater nearby, we collected in the mouth of the PATH tube for a brief discussion. The air smelled dank and musty, in a fading combination of train brakes, oil, and steel. Some of the people were new to the scene: a police rescue team of five men, looking dandyish in their kneepads, carabiners, and helmet lamps, and an equal number of firemen, less proudly dressed, who had recently arrived for the standard one-month rotation. The firemen were young, and visibly more relaxed than the police. Several ventured like sightseers into the PATH tube, playing the beams of their flashlights across its iron rings, into the green and red puddles of oily fluid, and down the rusting tracks that stretched westward into the blackness under the Hudson River. In about two hours you could walk through the tube to New Jersey and back, as people sometimes did, if only for the solitude. But today the job was serious, with risk involved, and it lay in the other direction, northeast across the complications of the ruined basement and into the unexplored.

  The expedition carried several emergency air packs and an electronic sniffer to warn of low oxygen and the presence of Freon—but none of this would help in a collapse, which the engineers still believed was the greatest danger we faced. It was reassuring, therefore, that the group included underground veterans—indeed, some of the Trade Center’s most experienced men. These were people unheralded on the outside, several of whom in retrospect now stand among the greats in the recovery effort. One was a watchful and laconic fireman named John O’Connell, a specialist in building collapses, who had served as an example to the crews from the very start, calmly smoking cigars in even the most threatening conditions, and providing people with a necessary model of skepticism in the face of all the hype.

  Beside him stood Sam Melisi, another fireman, whose talents turned out to be even more valuable. He had a gentle and self-effacing manner, which seemed out of place at first but stemmed from profoundly altruistic impulses that over time became widely recognized, eventually giving him a moral authority that no one else at the site came close to matching. That authority translated into the power to make suggestions that others were willing to follow. The power surprised and plagued him to the end; he did not think of himself as a leader, and in other
circumstances he probably would not have been one. Nominally he was always just a fireman, a collapsed-building specialist like O’Connell, with front-line duties that included assisting the engineers on these underground runs. But already by mid-November some people had started calling him “Saint Sam,” as in “Saint Sam the Fireman.” He rose to it uncertainly, but gradually assumed the all-important role of mediator.

  The French flew him to Paris for a day to plant a tree in the Luxembourg Gardens, as if he were just another New York “hero,” good for a photograph and a night out on the town; they had the luck of the draw and never knew it. Melisi remained unknown to New York, too, which had nearly as distant a view of the site, and had actually been surprised by the outbreak of fighting there between firemen and the police on November 2—a power struggle that came to the surface after weeks of mounting tensions. Afterward the political operatives at City Hall must secretly have believed that they maintained the peace between the multiple opposing forces on the pile, but in truth, if anyone did, it was Sam Melisi.

  Of all the people setting out now for the chiller plant, twenty men redefined by these ruins, the one who would have the greatest influence on the unfolding story was an obscure engineer, a lifelong New Yorker named Peter Rinaldi. At age fifty-two, Rinaldi was an inconspicuous olive-skinned man with graying hair and a moustache, who observed the world through oversized glasses and had a quirky way of suddenly raising his eyebrows, not in surprise but as a prompt or in suggestion. He had grown up in the Bronx as the son of a New York cop, had gone to college there, and had married a girl he had met in high school. Though he and his wife had moved to the suburbs of Westchester County to raise their three sons, he had never cut his connection to the city, or ever quite shed his native accent. For twenty-eight years he had commuted to the World Trade Center, to offices in the North Tower, where he worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, deep within its paternal embrace and completely secure in his existence. There was an early warning in the terrorist bombing of 1993, an attack that trapped him in an elevator. Nonetheless, he was wholly unprepared for the destruction that followed in 2001.

  The institution for which he worked, known simply as the Port Authority, is as much an empire as an organization—an insular and enormously wealthy bi-state agency, exempted from ordinary governmental constraints, that was created in 1921 to build and manage the area’s transportation facilities, and was given the right to finance itself by issuing bonds and collecting its own tolls and taxes. It operates every major airport in the area (Newark, La Guardia, Kennedy, and Teterboro), manages all the ports (including one of the world’s largest container facilities, at Newark), runs a busy railroad (PATH), owns New York’s commuter-bus stations, controls many of the city’s lucrative tunnels and bridges (among them the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the George Washington Bridge), and even has its own private army—an independent police force 1,300 strong. More to the point, it also built, owned, and until recently operated the World Trade Center, where it maintained its headquarters; on September 11 it occupied space on thirty-eight floors and on each of the six subterranean levels. All of that was lost when the buildings collapsed, along with the lives of seventy-five Port Authority employees, some of them maintenance men who could have escaped after the South Tower fell, but went grimly back underground to find their co-workers. It would be hard to overestimate the ensuing sense of exposure and uncertainty for their colleagues who survived. During the days after the attack, when to New York City officials the Port Authority seemed to have disappeared, it was hunkered down across the river in its New Jersey offices, suffering through a collective emptiness so severe that people themselves felt hollowed out.

  Peter Rinaldi felt it too, though he was far away at the time of the attack, vacationing with his wife, Audrey, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The North Tower was like a home to him. He’d had a corner office on the seventy-second floor, and a satisfying job there overseeing the engineering for all the Port Authority bridges and tunnels. He especially liked the George Washington Bridge, and had once appeared on the Discovery Channel to praise its resilience. Recently he had found a million dollars in spare funds, and without going through all the usual bureaucratic rituals had spent it on decorating the span with permanent lights. Others in the Port Authority had criticized him afterward for bypassing procedures—but only in private, and as friends. Rinaldi took it in stride, and never felt threatened, because the atmosphere at work was always so stable.

  But on the Outer Banks, on television, he watched everything come apart. It took merely two ten-second pulses. Months later he was still struggling to describe the shock. To me he said, “It was surreal. You’re on vacation, and you’re looking at this, and it’s a place where . . . I knew all the people there. It’s a place you’re supposed to go back to work, your office. It’s everything you do. You just watch this thing collapse. It was like, you couldn’t really believe it, in terms of all this loss. You say, ‘That’s not really real. This can’t be gone.’ And then you think, Well, what’s going to happen afterward? What are you going to do? How are you going to do this? Where are you going to be? What’s going to happen with the agency? How many people were lost? It could have wiped out our whole two thousand people we had in that building. Or the whole organizational structure. The whole center of the PA was in that building.”

  The whole center of his life. He said little at the time, and spent another day at the beach, but the event had devastated him. His wife told me that he became a man she had never seen before—preoccupied, passive, withdrawn. Part of it was that he knew so many people who had died, several of whom were close friends; back in New York he went to their wakes and funerals. But another part of it was that he had been stripped of his shelter, irrevocably, and that, as he told me later, he doubted his ability to proceed in a disorderly world.

  And then, adding to his uncertainty, having briefly reunited with his old staff at temporary quarters in New Jersey, Rinaldi was reassigned to New York City’s recovery team—a small group of strangers to him who were camped in the kindergarten rooms of Public School 89, near the ruins, and, in the midst of the most disorderly conditions imaginable, were improvising a response. These were primarily Kenneth Holden’s people from the DDC. Rinaldi was given the job of supervising the consultants who had been brought in for the specialized belowground engineering. I met him at the start, when he seemed tentative and out of place, and I watched him through three seasons to the end, by which time he had become, both above and below ground, the one man everyone turned to for an opinion.

  The attempt on the chiller plant happened about a third of the way through his odyssey. Rinaldi was nominally in charge, but he neither gave commands nor asserted himself by taking the lead. I think by then he had already discerned what some others never did—that the imposition of conventional order on these ruins was a formalism or a fiction, and unnecessary. Progress was made instead in the privacy of a thousand moments, on loose, broad fronts, by individuals looking after themselves and generally operating alone. This was how we turned now and drifted toward the jumping-off point for the unknown, twenty men, each picking his path.

  Under the crater and by the light of the sky far above, Rinaldi and I paused by a pile of rubble that we had occasionally crossed before, and we discussed the news that a fireman’s body had recently been found there, buried under a thin layer of dust and debris. It seemed strange that for two months neither we nor anyone else had noticed him. Rinaldi mentioned that in the chiller plant—should we find a way to it—we might encounter the body of a certain Port Authority employee, a man who was believed to have sheltered there. So be it. After so many other encounters at the site, the prospect elicited neither hope nor horror. People grow used to the dead.

  Beyond the crater our route was lit by a string of utility lamps installed for the pump crews that had been drawing down the basement flood. We gathered where the pumps were running, on a concrete platform abo
ve an area of black water. John O’Connell, in a wide-brimmed fire helmet, slouched by a steel column, smoking a cigar and looking typically unimpressed. The police seemed to think that their sergeant was in charge, and apparently the sergeant did too. He announced that he would be probing the water with a steel pipe, and he advised everyone to stay in line close behind him. No one quite looked at him, or responded. The sergeant warned about ten-foot sumps now hidden within the flood, into which a person could disappear and drown. Sam Melisi checked a map for the specific locations, which indeed were shown near the chiller plant. Rinaldi reminded us of our schedule. One by one we stepped off into the flood, and with flashlight beams probing the huge forms of ruined structures, we waded in a single long file into the darkness.

  The sergeant at the lead soon gave up trying to sweep water with his pipe and began to use it as a crutch to steady himself as we moved across submerged debris. Each man felt his own way, not walking so much as sliding forward experimentally, sloshing through the opaque water and taking care not to trip over fixed objects or to step heavily on the looseness underfoot. It was clear that anyone falling here risked injury and, if cut, a serious infection. Nonetheless, our progress was fast, and it soon reduced the view of the pumping platform behind to a distant light, and then to nothing at all. We moved across a cavern bordered by massive collapses and traversed by man-sized pipes, one of which, labeled “River Water” and known to be closed off, was the main intake line for the chiller plant. Whether because of nearby fire or ongoing collapses, the air turned thick with dust. With the exception of the ever dismissive John O’Connell, we donned our respirators, limiting conversation. The cop with the electronic sniffer was clearly concerned, and was checking the indicators so often that he began falling behind. He lifted his mask and called, “Oh-two’s okay! All gasses okay!” We slowed to let him catch up. The darkness grew loud with the sound of falling water, which turned out to be bands of a mysterious subterranean rain—too heavy to result from the firefighting on the surface—falling from the confusion of ruin overhead. We moved through the rain, and fifty yards farther on climbed onto the dry ground of a catwalk built above an area of heavy machinery. We paused where the catwalk ended, in latticework stairs leading down into the flood-water on the far side. By then we had progressed deep into the pile, and by ordinary measures were only a short distance from the main chiller plant. There was still no indication of Freon. The ruins, however, were closing in oppressively, with crazily angled slabs tilting down into the waters ahead amid a confusion of rubble slopes that obscured the blackness beyond, where an access route might possibly be found. The place looked like a trap, and dangerous as hell. The police apparently thought so too; they bunched on the stairway and tested their radio link.