American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Rinaldi discussed the situation with a couple of Trade Center facilities men who had come along because of their expert memories of the buildings. Given the extent of the destruction that clearly lay ahead, it seemed unlikely that any of the chiller plant could have survived. In that sense, the work here might already have been accomplished—and there was certainly reason to be skeptical about the benefits of moving forward. At the same time, if for no other reason than the draw of the unknown, Rinaldi was obviously unwilling to retreat. Within the private culture of the Trade Center underground this was understood without explanation: it was simply very difficult to turn away from space that remained unexplored. Briefly, therefore, we were at an impasse. But then one of the engineers took matters into his own hands, and without saying a word descended the last steps into the water and set out alone. The police had given up any pretense of command. No one called the engineer back. Rinaldi watched him for a while—a tall, thin silhouette familiar to us all, pushing steadily into the ruins—and then he and I and most of the group set out too.

  The tall, thin silhouette belonged to a man already famous for his independence. He was Richard Garlock, age thirty-three, a boyish-looking structural specialist who worked for the Trade Center’s original designer (Leslie E. Robertson, the “engineer of record”) in a small company called LERA, which for thirty years had served as the main Trade Center consultant to the Port Authority, and which had its offices nearby. LERA was known at the site less for its history than for its current feeling of having been marginalized during the cleanup efforts under way. Certainly it had responded valiantly to the attacks of September 11: Garlock and others from the firm were running toward the Trade Center to provide a structural assessment of the North Tower’s wounds when the second airplane came in and hit the South Tower. They had returned to their offices and were volunteering their expertise to the Fire Department when the towers collapsed. Their firm had taken the lead after the terrorist bombing in 1993, and it was only natural to assume it would do the same now. Instead, when they made the offer to help, they found that LERA had been relegated to a minor role—to be called on by other consultants as needed. Understandably, they took this as a slight. They never said so publicly, but on the level of their front-line engineers it was clear. I repeated their tale of woe one evening to Audrey Rinaldi, who had arrived for dinner downtown from her job as a nurse and hospital administrator in the Bronx. She said jokingly, “You know, engineers are human too,” as if the point could be debated. But there was always plenty of proof at the Trade Center site.

  The prime consultant on the job was a large and well connected New York firm called Thornton-Tomasetti—the engineers of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, and of the United Airlines terminal in Chicago, among other monumental structures. With its 400 employees and enormous institutional expertise, Thornton-Tomasetti could have ignored LERA’s feelings entirely but for one important catch: since most of the complex’s technical drawings had been stored (and thus destroyed) within the North Tower, LERA had the only complete and readily available set of the original plans—and it was careful to hand over just what was needed. In fairness, LERA’s position probably had more to do with self-protection than with pique. The firm was badly exposed to the waves of lawsuits already coming into view, and it needed to maintain some sort of control. For similar reasons it wanted to make its own detailed assessments of the ruins. People accepted this, however grudgingly. LERA had been smart if not supple. Without withholding information or being obstructionist, it had used the technical drawings adroitly and had found a place at the center of the operation. On all the important surveys now, including this chiller-plant run, Garlock was the man holding the blueprints. And having fought so hard to be here, he wasn’t about to retreat or to leave these ruins unexplored.

  Actually, Garlock was fearless anyway. He was a moralist at times, but an affable fellow too, with a distracted graduate-student manner that contrasted pleasantly with the harshness of the surroundings. I found it interesting to watch him work—all the more so after I realized that he was not engaged in some sort of geekish theater (my first assumption) but was genuinely absorbed by the minutiae of even the most obscure corners of the ruins. When I described his enthusiasm to Audrey Rinaldi, who had taken it upon herself to explain engineers’ personalities to me, she acted unsurprised.

  I said, “But honestly, when you’re deep underground and everything is fine, just how fascinating can it be that this is Panel D-15 or A-5?”

  She looked at me pityingly, as if she hated to shatter my illusions. She said, “I keep telling you . . .”

  But Garlock seemed unusual even to the other engineers. Some of them started calling him “Planet Garlock,” as if he had descended from a faraway place. He would go wandering off through the subterranean ruins, gazing intently through small spectacles at the columns and beams, often with the hint of a quizzical smile, making notations on his cherished blueprints, with apparently only a vague awareness of the danger signs around him—the jolt of a collapse far below, the rattle of cascading debris, the ominous groaning of weakened structures overhead, or, in the early days, the streams of molten metal that leaked from the hot cores and flowed down broken walls inside the foundation hole. The others would exchange looks and ask Garlock to hurry. In my experience he never did. He was interested in every part of the ruins, but really relished the underground.

  The truth is, we all liked it there, if not to the degree that Garlock did. The underground was the Trade Center’s inner realm, the destination at the end of a progression that with each step took people closer to the heart of the ruins: across the perimeter, to the edge of the pile, onto its surface, and then down into its insides. It was also simply an intriguing place to be, and less macabre than outsiders supposed. The dead lay nearby, but for the most part they were buried in the inaccessible cores—debris so tightly compressed that even the rats, said to be arriving from all over downtown, were unable to burrow in (or so we told ourselves). The cores were shaped like inverted mountains, or cones, that grew narrower with depth. They filled the towers’ footprints to bedrock and occupied the center and south end of the foundation hole. They were bounded by looser ruins and basement structures in an arc from west through north to east. And it was among those looser ruins, after Garlock spurred us into motion, that we continued now to explore.

  Garlock roamed south into the darkness among the piles of debris. Others roamed north. Rinaldi and I moved slowly to the east. In an area of mountainous collapses we came eventually to another catwalk, which we climbed until it ended in a slope of loose rubble. There was nothing but blackness behind and ruin ahead, and no sign or sound of the others. Blocks of concrete the size of cars hung over our heads, one dangling on rebar.

  Through the respirator mask I asked Rinaldi, “How stable do you think that is?”

  He said, “It’s not.”

  I asked, “Have you noticed how guys will pretend not to notice?”

  He said, “Yeah,” and we both laughed. But we knew that if it hadn’t fallen yet, it wouldn’t fall now.

  Almost by chance then Rinaldi’s light picked out a man-sized hole in the debris slope, above us and to one side, and through it, faintly illuminated, the form of a rounded mass of steel. It was heavy equipment of some kind—and given its location, it had to be inside the main chiller plant. Rinaldi crawled up and in, spilling dust and broken concrete down the slope, and I followed close behind. The space in which we found ourselves gave the impression of an oversized version of a ship’s engine room, but reduced and hemmed in by massive collapses, and lying in complete ruin. There was no sign of the missing Port Authority man and, though we lifted our masks to check, no smell of his death. We squeezed between a partially crushed tank and its battered pumps, and were barred from further progress by a wall of broken slabs and twisted steel. After a while one of the Trade Center facilities men arrived, followed later by Garlock and the young fire crew. For no good reason one
of the firemen tried to climb a twenty-foot chimney in the unstable rubble, and he had to be pulled back and told to calm down. No one thought much about it, because so many of the firemen were emotional, especially when they were new. Rinaldi took pictures of the ruins. The damage was even worse than the engineers had expected it to be, and it offered the first hard evidence of a fact that was eventually verified during the excavation from the surface—that the Freon had vented, and the beast at the center of the pile was a myth.

  At its most chaotic the underground was like the abstract netherworld we encountered during the chiller-plant run—as shredded as the surface of the pile, yet without the organizing principle of the sky. But that was the extreme. Much of the underground was intuitively easy to understand. It consisted of parking garages, often in some stage of collapse, where more than a thousand cars now stood abandoned and covered with the standard gray concrete dust. A disproportionate number of the cars were BMWs, Jaguars, Lexuses, and the like—indicating, if nothing else, the preponderance of a certain culture that had thrived here. Although a few seemed strangely untouched, most were crushed, sliced, blasted, or burned. Along the north side, where the basement structure remained strong and intact (and was ultimately preserved), the fire had been so intense in places that it had consumed the tires and interiors, and had left hulks sitting on axles above hardened pools of aluminum wheels. Three presidential limousines stood in there too, but they were locked away, and remained unscathed. When access was opened, the Secret Service rushed in and with a great show of secrecy loaded the limousines onto flatbed trucks, covered them with tarps, and hauled them back to Washington.

  There was a romantic idea, widespread at first, that the Trade Center underground would contain wonderful and varied treasures—but it never quite panned out. Along the north side before the collapses there were firing ranges and gun rooms for various police agencies, and vaults containing confiscated narcotics and cigarettes, and there was a collection of artifacts from a Colonial-era African-American burial ground, but aside from the garages and the PATH facilities, the basements consisted for the most part of utility spaces and storage rooms in which the things that were kept were basement things—tools, wire spools, spare chairs and partitions, and, in one particularly claustrophobic corner, glossy brochures from the former 107th-floor observation deck of the South Tower. Out beyond the foundation hole, in the burned-through remains of Building Five, a Citibank vault was stacked with a fortune in bundled currency—which, however, had been baked and turned to ash. Nearby, a vault left open at Morgan Stanley turned out to be almost as disappointing. It contained $2.7 billion, but in financial certificates that would have been nearly impossible for a thief to translate into cash. A Brinks car reportedly holding $14 million was stuck in the ruins for a few weeks, adding an exotic touch to the underground until Brinks was able to remove it. The newspapers reported the loss of government safes containing top-secret documents, for what that was worth. They also reported the loss of important legal documents, news of which caused no stir.

  Ultimately, only one Trade Center treasure was worthy of the name. It was a hoard of gold and silver ingots, valued at about $250 million, that filled a two-story vault in the remnants of an old railroad station under the ruins of Building Four.

  A quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of gold and silver turned out to be a lot of ingots—more than 30,000 in this case. The ingots weighed up to seventy pounds each, and were stacked on wooden pallets that could be moved within the vault by forklift and internal elevator. Their total weight was 1.9 million pounds. The vault belonged to the Bank of Nova Scotia. The bank held the treasure to legitimize trading in the precious-metals market. In practice it was expected that the metal would remain in the vault, even as it was bought and sold in various forms. There were guards to make sure that nothing went wrong with the stock. It never did. Even after the attacks of September 11 security was not a worry, because the guards had bolted the door before fleeing, and mounds of heavy debris blocked any conceivable access. The treasure lay locked in a vault inside a vault. At least that was the thinking.

  But when, at the end of October, a pathway was finally cleared, down a truck ramp from the north and through an old railroad tunnel, the bank’s initial entry team discovered that others had been there before, attempting to pry open the vault’s door and to cut in from above, in both cases unsuccessfully. Though it was presumed that the intruders had been construction workers, it never became clear who exactly they were, where they had come from, or how they had proposed to get away through these ruins with more than just a few ingots. But if the unbuilding of the World Trade Center had already shown one thing, it was that the workers there were resourceful and persistent. The bank hurriedly organized a convoy of armored trucks and over the course of several days, amid another display of pomp and secrecy, moved the gold and silver out. It took 120 trips. No one was supposed to know that the destination was the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but everyone did. Over the weekend people made a point of getting past the security detail—cops in bullet-proof vests, cradling riot guns—and down into the vault to watch the treasure disappear. It was an innocent distraction. The vault inside was not merely undamaged but well lit and pristine. For one weekend it served the underground as a tourist destination.

  But the most popular place down there was always the two-story PATH station, which stretched along the eastern wall at the deepest levels of the foundation hole, and was the most public of the Trade Center spaces that remained at least partially intact. Although it had suffered heavily, and continued to collapse throughout the fall and winter, it was considered to be relatively safe. In the last days of September, Peter Rinaldi pioneered the early route in, down the North Projection to the PATH tube and then by rubber raft along the heavily flooded tracks, a River Styx flowing deep under the ruins of Building Six. It was Rinaldi’s first underground exploration. Richard Garlock went along, as did two other young engineers, who worked for the famous foundation firm Mueser Rutledge and played important roles at the site—a huge and garrulous man of Ecuadorian origin named Pablo Lopez and his wry, cerebral partner, an ex-carpenter and Columbia graduate named Andrew Pontecorvo, who was small by comparison and did some tough duty crawling into tight spaces. They were accompanied by a typical phalanx of firemen and cops.

  They had three rafts, two of which were leaking air and on a couple of occasions had to be reinflated. The men pushed and paddled the rafts for forty minutes up the railway, eventually through widening spaces as the tracks branched into the PATH station. The water came up almost to the level of the station platforms, which remained dry. The men disembarked, grounded the rafts, and began to explore. Rinaldi was the one most familiar with the place, but he moved through it as if in a dream, noticing the complete silence and the little clouds of dust that rose in slow motion with every step he took. The darkness was so deep that it seemed to defeat his flashlight beam. A ghostly train stood there in an image of abandonment—the first cars crushed under heavy slabs, the remaining ones intact but empty, with their doors ajar. Rinaldi knew already that no one had been inside on September 11—the train had been sitting idle in the station all morning, and it had simply remained. Two other trains, full of passengers, had left New Jersey and were bound for New York when word of the first attack came. In one of the more elegant moves of the morning they did not stop but with typical Port Authority aplomb continued to roll smoothly through the Trade Center underground and, without rushing, slipped back beneath the Hudson to safety.

  Rinaldi had the wit to appreciate that sort of thing, but he wasn’t in the mood for it now. Others on the team had started into the technical work of the survey—Garlock with his close-up inspections, Lopez and Pontecorvo with more distant views—that ultimately, after many more surveys, would result in a decision to restore PATH service quickly and reuse this station while a new permanent one was built. But that, of course, was the future, and for now Rinaldi was thinking more about the past. He
climbed a dormant escalator to the station’s upper level, and for old times’ sake continued to take in the sights: the melted plastic signs, the pay phones on pedestals, the turnstiles, the candy kiosk still offering sweets, and then the part of the station that became a photographed favorite—the prominent Commuter Bar, with its bottles of booze, its racks of inverted glasses overhead, its open Heinekens on the counter.