American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Burton had grown up in modest circumstances in a suburb called New City, upriver from the Bronx. His mother was a nurse. His father was a New York precinct cop, who after retirement became a security guard at a suburban hotel—a job he continued to hold now. Burton had one brother and two sisters. As a boy he was unremarkable, an uninspired student lost somewhere in the middle of his class, and so unmotivated that he did not consider going to college until his parents told him late in high school that he would. He went off to Manhattan College, a Catholic school in the Bronx, because it was nearby, and he chose engineering there because he was never much of a reader. His roommate, Bill Cote, had a wider, more promising intellect, and they had good times together, but Burton seemed destined for an unexceptional life. Then somehow that changed: Burton’s spirit did not necessarily widen in college, but he became alert to the possibilities of wealth and success. By graduation he wanted more than an engineering job could give him, and he went to work in the New York construction industry, and eventually earned an M.B.A. by taking night classes at a branch of Fordham University, in Manhattan. He worked hard, and began to make a good salary. It was the classic American story of a man’s pulling himself up through sheer determination. When he went to work for the DDC, in 1996, it was not to take refuge, as so many do in government, but to gain experience in wielding power. He married a smart woman with a flourishing career in the telecommunications industry, and they had a child. By the time the Twin Towers fell, they were expecting a second child, and living in the wealthy Westchester community of Chappaqua, near the Clintons, in a beautifully remodeled schoolhouse—a showcase of elegant living that Burton had created largely with his own hands. They had a live-in nanny and a vacation house at a ski resort in Vermont. They chartered sailboats in the Caribbean and Greece. They scuba-dived, played golf, and toyed with the idea of learning to fly. They threw catered parties, and sipped fine wine. It was not always easy to have to answer to Ken Holden, a bureaucrat who lacked Burton’s technical training and shared neither his values nor his drive. But that was a temporary condition, which Burton could soon leave behind. He was a confident man. He believed that every move he had made so far had been right. And if by his own measure the success he enjoyed still seemed a little thin, he was certainly off to a good start.

  Now came this attack. Burton’s reactions in the first few days were patriotic, compassionate, and completely unselfish; he had not the slightest thought of advancing his career. Nonetheless, by the end of the first week it was impossible to ignore that a great opportunity had arisen here. People already were calling him a “czar,” and the press had picked up on the metaphor, and at the twice-daily meetings he was wielding more power than he had thought possible before. In immediate terms the experience was exhilarating. Burton had a hard time not showing it. He gave some self-aggrandizing interviews to the press, most notoriously to the premier heavy-construction journal, a publication called Engineering News-Record. Holden thought the resulting article implied that the City of New York had hired Bill Cote and selected the four main contractors essentially because they were Burton’s friends. Holden called Burton into an empty kindergarten room and threatened to fire him if he ever gave such an interview again. Holden pointed out that there were other people who could handle the job. Burton acted contrite, and may truly have appreciated Holden’s warning. He was not just a runner with stamina to spare. He was a mountain climber with a route in sight.

  Holden was something very different, and much harder to categorize. He was a generalist, a reader, the product of a liberal life. He grew up in a big house in Connecticut with several brothers and sisters, and a father who was a doctor and a mother who was a nurse. They were relatively religious, and regularly invited the needy from their synagogue to share their meals. They contributed to charities. They contributed to the Democratic Party. They had a lot of books, some philosophical, many about the Holocaust. Upstairs in the house the children were allowed to scribble graffiti on the walls. Holden’s father preferred almost any activity to watching TV. He called Star Trek “Star Drek,” and limited the kids to one hour of TV a week. He liked to play with words. He could finish the New York Times crossword puzzle in five minutes flat. He had a weakness for sayings like “Blackberries are red when they’re green.” When Holden was six, he had no idea what this was supposed to mean. When he was eight, his father began to make him do fractions in his head. When he was ten, his father started giving him essay assignments on such subjects as “Jams, Jellies, and Preserves” “Pirates, Privateers, and Buccaneers,” and “Cornwallis’s Surrender at Yorktown.” These punishments fell on Holden through no fault of his own. When his parents vacationed in the Caribbean, he had to brief them with “Jamaica.” When the neighbor’s house burned down, he penned the classic “Spontaneous Combustion.”

  Holden escaped to a Jewish summer camp, which he enjoyed, and where as a teenager, at the end of his final year, he was caught in bed with a girl. To avoid expulsion he had to write yet another essay, this one on self-reform, which of course he did not take seriously. His father for once was openly proud. Holden went off to Israel for a year, came back, graduated from high school, went to Columbia, floundered, worked as a bike messenger, went back to Israel, where he farmed and carried a gun, and finally returned to Columbia, ready to study. He earned a degree in history, and for several years afterward lived the bohemian life in New York, briefly working for Columbia’s alumni association and controller’s office and then going deeper into the city, as the manager of a SoHo print shop. He was anti-establishment. He despised the military-industrial complex. He became a quasi-punk, and by the mid-eighties wore six earrings and had styled his hair into a modified Mohawk, dyed black. For additional effect he paid a tattoo artist on Long Island to engrave an image from the first Sex Pistols single onto his back. It was of two buses, one going to “Nowhere,” the other to “Boredom.” Years later, when his son would ask what the tattoo was about, it was hard to explain: this was from Daddy’s nihilistic period, in the pre-dawn of history, not long ago.

  In 1986 Holden was fired from the print shop, unfairly of course, and he spent six rough months on unemployment, doing a lot of reading. When the payments ran out, he snagged a low-level administrative position with the city’s Parks Department. Then something unexpected happened. He began to put in long hours and apply the considerable power of his mind, learning such esoterica as the budgeting process, and producing top-quality work. Within the city’s defiantly lethargic bureaucracy he soon stood out. Holden’s co-workers demanded that he slack off, and he refused. After a year, the brilliant and eccentric parks commissioner, Henry Stern, sent word that he wanted Holden to clean up his image: the message was, he wanted Holden’s hair “in a box.” Meanwhile, Holden had gotten involved temporarily with an alluring secretary, a woman from the wild side of life, who wore red boots and ended up working in a topless bar, and whose most recent husband, a biker, began threatening Holden with violence. At last Holden decided he was ready for a change in direction. He did not send Henry Stern his hair, but he cut it off, and dropped his earrings, and began his rapid rise. Such was the unlikely but necessary formation of the man who emerged from the Trade Center chaos to guide the recovery effort through wildly emotional times, and to keep the equally necessary ambitions of Mike Burton in line.

  The two men could never have been friends, but at PS 89 it didn’t much matter: they had a job to get done. Holden did not attend the twice-daily meetings but stayed in the background, across the hall in the headquarters room, where he worked the cell phones incessantly. The goal was narrowly defined at first—to bring in equipment and move out debris in order to help with the search. There was no golden moment in which Holden and Burton were placed definitively in charge. Rather, there was a shift of power in their direction that was never quite formalized and, indeed, was unjustified by bureaucratic logic or political considerations. The city’s official and secret emergency plans, written before the attack,
called for the Department of Sanitation to clean up after a building collapse. A woman involved in writing the latest versions—a mid-level official in the OEM—mentioned to one of the contractors a week after the Trade Center collapse that she still did not quite know what the DDC was. This may explain her attitude when she found her way to the headquarters room on the second floor of PS 89, where Holden and Burton were talking one afternoon during the first week. She came up to them and said, “Who told you to get involved?” Holden looked at her in disbelief. He was exhausted. He said, “We’re kind of busy now. Why don’t you come back in six months and ask that question.” Holden and Burton were having a particularly difficult time because of the growing suspicion that the ruins now contained only the dead. That possibility in no sense eased the urgency. The pile out there remained so vast and wild that no one could quite yet give up hope that in some undiscovered pocket people might still be trapped alive.

  That hope remained, if only as a glimmer, when, three weeks into the effort, the south face of the foundation hole’s huge and protective “slurry wall” began to bow inward under soil and groundwater pressure from the outside. The wall was a reinforced concrete shell—eighty feet deep from street level to the bottom of its bedrock socket, and 3,500 feet around—that enclosed the Trade Center’s ten-acre foundation hole and for thirty years had kept it from being inundated by the tidal waters that permeated the surrounding ground. It had been built by an injection technique, in which a slushy bentonite slurry was used to stabilize a deep trench (essentially a mold) before a steel lattice was lowered into it and the bentonite was displaced by a heavier mixture of concrete. The result was a buried wall whose inner face was exposed one level at a time, and then drilled through and stabilized with steel tentacles, known as “tiebacks,” that were anchored into bedrock under the nearby streets and buildings. The tiebacks were temporary devices, subject to corrosion and designed to keep the slurry wall in place only during the years of construction. After the foundation hole was completely dug, the six levels of basement structure that rose within it served to brace the slurry wall from the inside, and, as planned, the tiebacks were cut and abandoned. All this elaboration was necessary because of the unnatural permeability of the Trade Center site: although the surface looked as solid as the rest of Manhattan, the land there consisted mostly of loose Colonial-era fill (garbage, shipwrecks, rubble, and so forth) through which New York Harbor and the Hudson River continued to seep, rising at high tide to within five feet of West Street. In essence the Twin Towers had been built inside a rectangular cofferdam—and now that dam was in danger of breaking.

  The consequences of a break were disturbing to contemplate. In the worst case tidal waters would flood into the foundation hole so fast that even the largest emergency pumps would be overwhelmed, and any survivors still trapped on the lowest levels would be drowned. Moreover, the waters would gush uncontrollably through the entrances to the twin PATH commuter-rail tubes—cast-iron tunnels that penetrated the slurry wall near the lowest (B-6) level, and sloped under the Hudson to a slightly lower station in New Jersey, at Exchange Place. Such a flood would perhaps not be as destructive as the cataclysmic surge that had been feared on September 11, from a rupture below the Hudson of the tubes themselves, but it would likely have the same sequential effect, spreading through the New Jersey rail connections and back into New York around Greenwich Village, pouring into the West Side subways and causing unimaginable havoc with the functioning of the city. Spurred into action by this very real possibility, the Port Authority was hurrying to seal the tubes with concrete plugs. The plugs were to be built with man-sized portals, giving access to the tubes but designed to be slammed shut in the case of inundation. When the slurry wall began to move, however, the work was still days from completion. For the Trade Center site itself there were other concerns as well. If the Port Authority did manage to plug the PATH tubes, and the slurry wall subsequently failed, the water would have nowhere to drain, and the foundation hole would fill up nearly to the level of the street—an immense and debris-choked bathtub seventy feet deep. Because of the chaos and instability of the pile, the effects of such an inundation were impossible to predict, but they would certainly include enormous new complications and risks, and would mean at the least that the recovery effort would end up being measured in years instead of months. Three weeks after the collapses, therefore, the sudden movement of the south slurry wall posed an urgent new concern.

  It was not, however, a surprise. Indeed, Richard Tomasetti had begun to worry about the slurry wall immediately on the evening of September 11, during the first walk-through with Burton and Holden, and that night he had enlisted the help of another renowned engineer, an underground specialist (known proudly as a “mole”) named George Tamaro, who decades before had helped to oversee the construction of the slurry wall for the Port Authority. Tamaro was thought to understand the technology better than anyone else alive. He had prospered, and by now was the senior partner of the New York foundation firm Mueser Rutledge. At age sixty-four, he was a balding, avuncular man, urbane and charming, and as rumpled and self-deprecating as Tomasetti was dapper and proud. The two engineers entered the site together on September 12, and Tamaro, after surveying the ruins, quickly sketched a cartoonish map of the Trade Center’s underground vulnerabilities for immediate distribution to the rescue operation—an outline of the slurry wall and also the location of four six-foot-diameter cooling intakes to the chiller plant, through which the Hudson would surge at high tide until the valves could be found and closed.

  The destruction was of course impressive to Tamaro, who commented with his usual verve that Dante himself would have been unable to describe such a place. Miraculously, however, the slurry wall seemed to have held. The evidence for this was indirect, because conditions on the pile precluded inspections, but it was persuasive. One day after the terrorist attack the PATH tubes were serving as massive drains for the foundation hole, with New Jersey (as usual) on the receiving end. The north tube had completely flooded at the mid-river low point, and both tubes were flowing heavily with brackish water. The Port Authority had set up powerful emergency pumps at Exchange Place and was extracting up to 6,000 gallons a minute to keep the station from flooding. Nonetheless, on the scale of possibilities this was still pretty small stuff—a flow easily accounted for by the surges through the cooling intakes, minor leaks in the slurry wall, water-main breaks, and the multiple streams of river water (much of it pumped by Sam Melisi’s boat) that were being directed against the fires. In relative terms, therefore, the slurry wall remained watertight.

  Tamaro did not celebrate, in part because he realized that the wall’s survival was by no means assured. Indeed, it seemed intuitively obvious that the reserves of luck had already been used up. The Twin Towers happened to have fallen with incredibly tight vertical focus, each floor on top of the one below, a pattern that had lessened the direct hits against the wall. More important, while demolishing the basement structures that normally braced the wall against the outside water pressure, the catastrophe had crammed the foundation hole with two times 110 floors of debris—a chaos of steel and concrete that coincidentally also now worked to brace the wall. But that was the extent of the good news. As a bracing system, the rubble was frighteningly arbitrary, and judging from the constant collapses within the pile, it was also unstable. Now heavy equipment was heading toward the site, including huge self-propelled cranes (some, at 1,000 tons, the biggest ever seen in New York) that even without a shift in the debris could trigger a failure of the slurry wall, merely by burdening the soil nearby.

  Tamaro was worried for another reason, too. For all the unexpected support provided by the debris pile, there was an exception on the south side of the foundation hole, and it was huge—a yawning crater sixty feet deep that had been blown through the basement structures by the collapsing South Tower, leaving ledges of broken concrete slabs hanging from the slurry wall, which for most of its length along Liberty St
reet now stood completely unbraced. Every calculation of the pressures that were acting on the south wall indicated that it should have fallen inward soon after the South Tower’s collapse—and it will forever be a mystery why it did not. Convinced that the wall sooner or later simply had to fail, Tamaro waited impatiently for nearly two weeks while access was cleared, until finally he was able to start into a two-sided plan of salvation. First, a string of “dewatering” wells would be drilled through the ruins of Liberty Street parallel to the slurry wall to reduce pressure from the outside. Second, the hard-driving crew from Tully would attack along the wall’s front face with hundreds of truckloads of dirt, which they would dump and bulldoze into the crater in an emergency “back-fill” operation to buttress the wall from the inside. Tamaro knew he was involved in a race against time, and he was not at all confident that it could be won.

  Nearly as great a concern was the west wall, which, though better braced by the ruins inside the foundation hole, was considered to be especially critical because of its proximity to the open waters of the Hudson River. A major failure there (whether spontaneous or triggered by a break of the vulnerable south wall) could produce the sort of immediate deluge that would threaten the workers on the pile. Once the backfill operation was under way, Tamaro decided to send an engineering team through an unexplored area of the underground in the ruins below the Marriott hotel, and along the west wall just north of the crater. Its purpose was to check the integrity of the structure, and particularly to look for heavy leaks, the existence of which could serve as an early warning of collapse. The team included, among others, the laconic fireman John O’Connell, as usual with cigar, and also Tamaro’s duo of front-line engineers—the trim Andrew Pontecorvo and his giant partner, Pablo Lopez. I went along too, following Lopez through the tight spots. We climbed down through a hole in the surface of the pile, descended a ruined stairway beneath the hotel, and for several hours worked carefully through a dim and broken labyrinth, retreating occasionally to the filtered daylight along the jagged inner edges of the crater before returning into the darkness and continuing to probe through collapsed passageways toward the west wall. Lopez was the man who finally got through, half a floor up from the black floodwaters at the bottom of the foundation hole. He found the slurry wall on the far side of a twisted steel fire door, in a long, narrow space full of the sound of falling water. We edged along it, playing flashlight beams into the streams that were cascading down from overhead and squirting under pressure through the rusting old tieback connections.