American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  The North Tower died a half hour after its twin, but because it showed fewer symptoms, less is known about its end. The attack it suffered was similar. It came from another 767, American Flight 11, which was light on passengers and fuel, and flying 100 mph slower than the United flight, though still very fast. The initial impact involved a full, clean entry, almost perfectly centered. The airplane sliced through thirty-six of sixty-one columns on the north face, tore through four floors, and slammed squarely against the weak axis of the core. It took out all three stairwells, destroyed the sprinkler system, knocked the fireproofing from the steel, and blew a piece of landing gear and a fireball through the far wall. Lifejackets and parts of the seats ended up on the roof of the Bankers Trust building. The North Tower swayed, the jet fuel was rapidly consumed, and a terrible office fire broke out.

  There were differences, too. The North Tower had the advantage of getting hit high up, thereby requiring less performance from the weight-bearing steel in the fire zone. This must certainly have saved lives. The external columns held. But by 10:28 their integrity was not enough. In this design of a tube within a tube, both tubes had to stand for either to survive. The North Tower core was aligned on an east-west axis, and it had been severely damaged—probably along its full length—by the airplane’s centered impact. After nearly two hours of progressive weakening by fire, the remaining columns reached their limits. There was no sign of this on the outside. The South Tower of course had already fallen, and smoke was rising from a wound near the North Tower’s top. Nonetheless the building remained a monolith, seemingly as permanent and strong as stone. But then the 351-foot transmission tower on the roof sank a little. The movement was barely perceptible. Half a second later the floors above the impact zone dropped as a unit straight down through the office fire, creating a flare-up and the illusion of a secondary explosion before striking the first blow in the chain of blows that pancaked the monolith to the ground.

  Is there any wonder that Frank Lombardi, the Port Authority’s exalted chief engineer, had no understanding of what he had just seen? For the second time in an hour the Trade Center’s dust darkened the sky. Lombardi walked to the Hudson’s edge, where the dust cloud abruptly ended, and after a while he found his way onto a small ferryboat—one of several that had responded to the disaster and were nosing up to the shore, evacuating the shell-shocked survivors. The boat took on a full load of them, and headed across the river for New Jersey. Lombardi stood in the crowd near the stern, and gazed numbly at the receding city. From a hole where the Twin Towers should have been, a column of smoke and dust rose into the blue of the sky and, widening slowly, streamed out toward Brooklyn. This was the view already made famous around the world by television, evoking widespread fear and anger, and in some places celebration. Encountering it in reality on this river, with a warm wind on his face and the sound of the ferry’s engines in his ears, Lombardi found it more than strange. By then he had heard a rumor about the cause—two airliners, it was said, involved in a coordinated attack—but people everywhere were full of frightened chatter, and he had no way to judge it. He may have sensed that he of all people should have been able to reason things through, but he could not. This must have been deeply disturbing to a man who was nothing if not pragmatic.

  The ferry kept moving confidently toward New Jersey; that much at least was normal. But then, as it approached the far shore, its engines suddenly idled, and the captain leaned out of the pilot house and called, “Man overboard!” Lombardi checked the wake for the victim, and to his continuing confusion saw no one there. Instead, someone was in the water ahead—and he appeared to be swimming toward the Trade Center site. The captain brought the boat slowly up beside him, and the crew dropped a ladder. The swimmer was tiring. He reached up, and was about to be helped aboard, when someone shouted, “Don’t let him in! Shoot him. He may be a terrorist!”

  This halted the proceedings.

  A policeman stepped forward uncertainly, and leaned over the rail. He said, “Excuse me, but what are you doing in the water?”

  The swimmer said, “I thought I could swim over to New York to help people.”

  The policeman hauled him up on deck. He said, “Let me get this straight. Let me understand this. We’re bringing people over on a boat from there to here. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you want to swim over there?”

  “Right.”

  The policeman did what policemen do, maybe for lack of imagination. He said, “You’re under arrest.” He probably figured the man was unbalanced, and dangerous at least to himself. He was still holding him when Lombardi got off the boat.

  Lombardi found his way to the Port Authority offices in Jersey City, above a commuter station known as Journal Square. It was there in the early afternoon, when he saw the events replayed on television, that he first was able to understand what had happened to the buildings, and to begin the slow process of acceptance. Two months later, when I met him in midtown Manhattan, he had come a long way but was still not all the way there. He had a manner of talking about the towers as if they had once been alive. He had obviously been thinking heavily about their deaths.

  He knew many details of the attacks. He told me he thought that the terrorist who came in first, against the North Tower (in which Lombardi himself was sitting), had intended to knock it right over—a motive that explained the perfect centering and the high hit against the weak axis of the core. Furthermore, he proposed that the second terrorist, while crossing the Hudson and setting up his own attack, had observed the wounded building still standing, and at the last moment had decided on a strategy of avoiding a direct hit against what he knew was the strong axis of the South Tower’s core, instead choosing to hit the building low and on one side, in an attempt to undercut it and trigger a collapse. If so, he was fantastically nimble. I had another view of the attack—that the terrorists were operating not as engineers but as executioners, that they were imbued with clumsy metaphors of swift swords and decapitation blows, and that the second one had simply missed his stroke by a few feet, as is easy to do with a fast-moving airplane. Lombardi, I thought, was sometimes still thinking like a defeated man, investing too much competence in his enemies.

  He was a gentle person. You could see him actively trying to recover his equilibrium—swinging between the old-fashioned Port Authority can-do confidence, which was coming back, and a persistent fatigue, a vagueness that was said by his friends to be something new. In many ways he was the ultimate Port Authority man, and he seemed to embody the organization especially in its ambivalent response to the Trade Center disaster. He rarely came to the site. It was as if the loss there was still too painful to contemplate. But he also told me that he was proud and glad for Peter Rinaldi, his chosen representative, who had seized this chance to take action.

  Rinaldi was the lucky one. He worked seven days a week, often fifteen hours a day. His base was the city’s emergency operations center, in the kindergarten rooms of Public School 89. The school occupied the second floor of a new red-brick building just inside the emergency perimeter, two blocks north of the Trade Center site on West Street. It had been safely evacuated on September 11 before the towers fell. When the city’s recovery team set up headquarters there a few days later, there was time only to dump the food from the children’s lunch boxes so that it would not rot. The lunch boxes themselves stayed in the classrooms, piled in rows on the shelves, with the names still displayed: Patrick, Elizabeth, various Jennifers, and all the other children who had fled with their parents to safe havens and new schools elsewhere in the city or beyond. For two months afterward the classrooms remained as they were, with strip posters of the alphabet taped to the chalkboards, and colorful, childish art pinned to the walls.

  The inner sanctum was a corner room with cinder-block walls painted creamy white, and linoleum floors now brown with the dirt tracked in from the site. The shelves that lined the walls were still filled with blocks, toys, and plast
ic crates of Dr. Seuss and other children’s books. At the center stood four folding tables that had been pushed together, along with some folding chairs that had been scavenged from somewhere. When the tables grew crowded, people simply used the kindergarten stuff—pint-sized furniture built low to the ground, which was discovered to be strong enough even for 250-pound construction workers. Visitors often remarked on the strangeness of the scene, in which full-grown men and women, including powerful executives and renowned engineers, sat around as if they were playing at being children again. In fact the stakes were large, and so were many of the egos involved. But the room did not allow for displays. People there dressed alike in dirty boots and rough clothes, and no matter who they were, they had to prove themselves again. Their conversations were held in the open for lack of choice. There was no time for memos, or for chain consultations. The e-mail connection was permanently down. The phones did not work. When problems arose, they were dealt with right away, either in the room or, if more information was needed, with a walk down the street to the pile, and a decision on the spot. This is what Peter Rinaldi encountered when he first arrived. As the operational center of a billion-dollar effort, Public School 89 was a highly unusual place.

  Leading the effort was the unlikely duo of Kenneth Holden and his lieutenant, Michael Burton—the two Department of Design and Construction officials who had emerged from bureaucratic obscurity on September 11 to orchestrate an effective response to the disaster. Holden, the DDC’s shrewd and intellectually sophisticated commissioner, was a heavyset man who had grown up in an atmosphere of suburban ease, had worked on a kibbutz in Israel, and had studied history at Columbia. Having drifted by chance into a city-government job, he was now, at forty-four, one of the youngest department heads in New York City government. Burton was a slightly younger man, a thirty-nine-year-old marathon runner and construction-industry insider who, having been raised in modest circumstances, had earned a degree in engineering and an M.B.A. from colleges in the Bronx, and was aggressively climbing the ladder of social and material success.

  The two men made an awkward pair. Each had rushed independently to City Hall at the first news of the attack, and had been caught on the streets and forced to run when the towers collapsed. By that afternoon they had met up and, with no thought beyond a few hours into the future, had begun to enlist the help of others within the DDC, and to organize the arrival of expert engineers and heavy equipment at the Trade Center site. They did not ask permission to do this—nor, at first, did anyone pay much attention to their work. The DDC was not even mentioned in the city’s official emergency-response plan. The focus over the first few days was mostly on the drama of the bucket brigades. But as is widely known, Mayor Giuliani had smart reactions to the crisis. Later it seemed that one of the smartest was a back-room decision to scrap the organization charts, to finesse the city’s own Office of Emergency Management (OEM), and to allow the DDC to proceed. The federal government was poised to intervene, but agreed to hold off, and then to hold off again. The result was the classroom at PS 89, that strange kindergarten scene through which control of the contractors was exercised and federal funds flowed.

  Holden spent months on his cell phone there, marshaling resources for the operation, defending it from political attack, and creating the shelter in which Mike Burton then could operate. Burton’s job was to oversee the practical details of the cleanup. He was tireless: he excused himself from his home life in suburban Westchester County, moved to an empty apartment in Battery Park City, and began spending eighteen hours a day at the site, roaming the pile even late at night, searching for efficiencies, forever urging the crews to work faster. He was not a popular man. He was extremely ambitious. He was determined to finish the project in less than a year. The firemen in particular distrusted him for what they saw as his disrespect for their dead. There were days when it became awkward for him to go out onto the pile, because of his sour relations with the men there. Not without irony, people called him the Trade Center Czar. But such a boss was probably needed to get the job done. The scale and complexity of the ruins required it. And on a level just below him there were too many other bosses who did little more than eat and mill around.

  Indeed, for the first two months the site’s outer zone was so dense with agencies and their equipment that the debris trucks at times could not get through, and the hauling operation had to shut down. It sometimes seemed that every official with a uniform or a badge within a hundred miles wanted to put in time there. Even the dogcatchers from Long Island showed up. They hauled in a mobile spay-and-neuter clinic to use as a command post, and sat around on lawn chairs for weeks, wearing T-shirts imprinted in block letters with SPCA—LAW ENFORCEMENT. They carried pistols, too—part of the impressive brandishing of weapons all around the ruins. One afternoon, as we walked toward the pile, Pablo Lopez, the indomitable Ecuadorian engineer, said to me, “When you see even guys from the EPA carrying guns, you’ve got to wonder. What’s an environmentalist doing carrying around a Glock? Who’s he gonna shoot?”

  The weaponry made people seem impotent and out of touch, as if they had showed up too late for the fight. The frustration was that you couldn’t dislodge the debris by shooting it. Because of the bodies that lay there, you couldn’t dynamite it either. Because of New York’s sensitivities to noise and dust, you couldn’t even use small demolition charges to fill dangerous cavities or bring down the skeletal walls. There was no choice but to cut and pull and unbuild the chaos one piece at a time. Burton understood this early. While others stood around with their guns, he and Holden imposed a rough order on the site by dividing it into quadrants, roughly equal zones that he assigned to four large construction companies: Turner, AMEC, Bovis, and Tully. The first three were essentially management teams—multinational corporations in the high-rise construction business, which had little equipment of their own and relied on other contractors to get the work done. The fourth company, Tully, was quite a different thing—a family-owned New York paving contractor with little structural experience but plenty of trucks, heavy equipment, and experienced workers of its own. All four companies had teamed up with the DDC before and were major players in New York.

  The quadrants were never as neatly delineated on the ground as on the site maps, but during the critical opening stages of the project they served to concentrate each company on the debris immediately at hand, and to keep people from being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the process that lay ahead. The effect across time was a shaping of the pile according to the respective corporate personalities: Turner in isolation on the ruins of World Trade Center Seven, efficiently disassembling the debris and making almost tidy work of it; AMEC in the northwest corner of the foundation hole, often bumbling, arousing the ire of the DDC, and falling behind; Bovis in the southwest corner, progressing steadily in the difficult area of the Marriott ruins and the south skeletal wall, while playing off its management skills to spread incrementally throughout the site, most significantly by taking on the all-important job of saving the foundation hole’s walls; and, finally, Tully, everyone’s favorite, the hardworking red-meat guys, who kept pulling recklessly ahead and devouring the ruins along the entire east side.

  These were the forces, roughly 3,000 strong, that Ken Holden and Mike Burton unleashed. In a painful and probably necessary process they slowly wrested control from the firemen. In late October the operation became a “joint command” between all the uniformed services and the DDC. Realistically, because the uniformed services were split by long-standing rivalries and had little of technical value to contribute, the joint command left the civilians in charge—a fact that became increasingly obvious at the regularly scheduled “unified” meetings, where the Fire Department retained a functional veto power, but only the DDC seemed capable of moving ahead.

  Emotions were raw. One of the unacknowledged aspects of the tragedy was the jealous sense of ownership that it brought about—an unexpected but widespread feeling of something like p
ride, that “this is our disaster more than yours.” The feeling started at large in the United States, and became more acute with proximity to the site—a progression of escalating possessiveness that ran from the halls of Washington through suburban New Jersey to New York, and from there through Lower Manhattan to the pile itself, where it divided the three main groups (fire, police, and construction) and sometimes set them against one another. The firemen in particular felt that they had a special relationship with the site, not only because they had lost 343 people there—out of a force of 14,000—but also because afterward their survivors, along with their dead, had been idolized as national heroes, and subjected to the full force of modern publicity. A few of them reacted embarrassingly, by grandstanding on television and at public events, striking tragic poses and playing themselves up. Even at the site, where people generally disliked such behavior, you could find firemen signing autographs at the perimeter gates or, after the public viewing stand was built, drifting over to work the crowds. Most of them behaved more soberly, no matter what pride they may secretly have felt, if for no other reason than that their firehouse culture had until now frowned on self-aggrandizement. Still, there was resentment by the police, who had lost plenty of their own people, and by the construction crews, who took it upon themselves to remember the far greater number of civilian dead. These tensions flared especially over the differing treatment of human remains—on the one extreme, the elaborate flag-draped ceremonials that the firemen accorded their own dead, and on the other, the jaded “bag ’em and tag ’em” approach that they took to civilians. A strange blindness caused them to persist with this behavior despite the ease with which it could have been remedied. Even Sam Melisi participated in it, for instance once bemoaning a “drought” to me when the remains being uncovered were merely those of civilians. It was a surprisingly ganglike view, and it encouraged a gang mentality among others on the pile.