American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Lopez said, “This is nothing. What we’re looking for is Niagara Falls.” He used a variety of terms for the leaks, mostly dismissive. Some he called “drips,” some “pissers,” and some, with just the beginning of admiration, “real criers.” On that trip he found only one leak worthy of a compliment. It arced from the wall about forty feet below river level, at a rate that Lopez estimated to be 100 gallons a minute. He called it “a genuine gusher.” It did not, however, qualify as an indication of real trouble on the west wall. When later that day he got a worried radio call about a new leak on the exposed south wall, he diagnosed it as just another pisser, and didn’t even bother to go see it. He radioed, “Here, take an aspirin, and call me in the morning if it still hurts.” Judging from the silence on the other end, the message was clear.

  Lopez just naturally thought big. At one point, as he supervised the punching of a “mouse hole” through a ruined slab, I mentioned that his “mouse” was about the size of a truck. He said, “Bro! This is New York! So it’s a rat hole!” He was thirty-eight years old. Sometimes he wore a moustache, sometimes the scrub of a beard. He’d had two wives and two children, and he lived where he had grown up, in a tough part of Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. His father had been a teamster, his mother a test-tube cleaner in a lab. He attended Catholic schools, and was an altar boy, but lost interest in religion. When he was in high school, he wanted to get a part-time job. His mother, who was the strong one in the family, said, “You stick to your studies. The minute you get a taste of money, you’re going to want to buy a car. After that there is no end.” Lopez eventually learned to drive, but he never did see the need to buy a car. He was such a city boy that when he rode the subway to college in the Bronx, he thought it was like taking a train to the country. The destination was Manhattan College, the same institution attended by Peter Rinaldi, Mike Burton, Bill Cote, Richard Tomasetti, George Tamaro, and, for that matter, Rudolph Giuliani. There were so many Manhattan College graduates at the Trade Center site that people referred to the work there as a school project, and someone posted an alumni sign-in sheet outside one of the kindergarten rooms at PS 89, which rapidly filled up. Pablo Lopez studied at Manhattan College on a full scholarship. He told me he was given the scholarship because he had applied to study engineering and the admissions people figured they wouldn’t have to pay out much money, because no Ecuadorian from Washington Heights would be able to maintain the required grades. If so, they were wrong. Lopez eventually earned a master’s degree from Manhattan College, and taught there, too. He liked to joke that he had played the system for a fool. He was proud of his humble background, and his connection to the streets.

  One day at the Trade Center site he went for dinner at the Red Cross feeding station, and he had salmon for the first time in his life. I asked him later if he had liked it, and he said sure, it was fine. He was not a fussy eater. The next day he returned to the feeding station, and for lack of choice had salmon again. He wolfed the fish down without giving it much thought. On the third day, after emerging from the underground, he and I went to the feeding station together—and again the offering was salmon, only stuffed. Lopez decided to speak up. The woman behind the counter was a Red Cross volunteer. Lopez said to her, “Hey, don’t you guys have anything like hamburgers?” His tone was affable.

  She smiled at him. “Don’t you know salmon is good for you?”

  “Yeah, but I’m a poor guy. I’m used to ground beef.”

  He was unshaven. He had a hardhat and a respirator. His hands were washed (a requirement for getting in), but otherwise he was streaked with the Trade Center’s stains—its mud and ever present dust.

  She kept smiling, and said, “I’ll put in a special order.”

  Lopez half believed her. The Red Cross volunteers were unusually gentle with people in the food lines—presumably because they had been told that conditions on the pile were traumatic, and they believed that the workers required comfort. But when Lopez went back on the fourth day, the choice again was salmon. He’d had enough. On the fifth day he left the Trade Center and strolled down Chambers Street to eat dinner at McDonald’s. He said it was the best meal he’d had in ages. He did not mean to exaggerate. We had been three weeks at the site, but it felt much longer.

  And then, early one morning before dawn, under the harsh white illumination of emergency lighting, an ominous crack spread through the ground along Liberty Street, because the south slurry wall had begun to fail. During the days that followed, the Trade Center site teetered on the edge of a second great disaster. Peter Rinaldi was the first to report the trouble to Mike Burton. The crack lay thirty feet south of the wall, and was two inches wide. Though it didn’t look like much yet, Rinaldi believed it meant the worst. He was extremely calm about this, in the style of a grown man talking about problems with his car. Burton, too, was calm—though obviously very concerned. At the morning meeting he said, “It may not mean anything, but the something it could mean would not be a good thing.” People laughed. There was other business to take care of too. For instance: there had been a near fatality the night before on the pile, when a cable snapped and dropped a sixteen-ton beam into a hole that a fireman had just climbed out of—so people needed to be more careful about suspended loads. There had been a fire in Bankers Trust, ignited by the sparks of a cutting torch—so firemen would have to accompany the cutters there now. A piece of landing gear had been found on the roof of 90 West Street, and the owner wanted it off—but the FBI had not released it yet, so there was no point in trying to retrieve it. There was dangerous mold in the ruins of the Borders bookstore—so people needed to wear their respirators if they went inside. The EPA was insisting that workers had to use the new boot wash-down stations before leaving the site—so this would have to be done. The FBI, on the other hand, was insisting that the loads on the departing trucks could not be washed down, because they might contain “evidence”—but this seemed so out of touch that certainly for now the directive could be ignored. And finally, the Department of Health was demanding an effort to fight the growing population of rodents at the site—so who here had always wanted to be a rat king? Again, people laughed. The slurry wall was failing, and Burton was exhibiting the appropriate Trade Center aplomb.

  Afterward Burton donned a hardhat and went with Rinaldi directly to the south wall. The crack was lengthening and widening; it seemed to be deep, too, because with a flashlight you could not see to the bottom. Rinaldi ventured that the crack represented a “classic shear failure,” the back of a wedge of soil that was dropping and filling the space created as the top of the wall crept inward. The movement was confirmed by survey points—and it amounted so far to about four inches. At the first sign of trouble earlier that morning Rinaldi had briefly stopped the backfill operation in the crater, worried that it might be inflicting rotational forces, inducing the failure by pushing the base of the wall outward; but after rethinking the problem he had decided this was unlikely and had asked that the operation continue. He had also considered the possibility that the drilling under way for the dewatering wells, which paradoxically required the use of water around the drill bit, might actually have recharged the groundwater in the area, increasing the pressure on the wall. Burton himself did not bother to theorize. He immediately ordered all equipment, including the drilling rigs, away from the wall, and asked the dewatering contractor to activate the five wells already in place, despite the lack of a permit. Then he ordered an all-out acceleration of the backfill operation.

  The days passed in a blur of roaring machinery and impromptu meetings in the smoke and dust of the pile. Tully rushed in truckload after truckload of fresh dirt, and bulldozed it hurriedly against the wall. But the wall continued its glacial advance. It was inexorable. Again suspicion arose that the backfill itself was causing the trouble—not by inducing rotation, but more simply by burdening the wall’s attached ledges and slowly dragging the structure down. George Tamaro visited frequently to ponder the scene. On
the third day of the crisis, with no improvement in sight, the key figures assembled once again on the ruins below the wall. Burton said, “George, what assurance do you have that the fill is not causing the collapse?”

  Tamaro said, “Why don’t you ask me when I’m going to die?”

  Rinaldi said, “The problem is, the wall shouldn’t even be standing.”

  Tomasetti was there too, well dressed as usual in a suit and good shoes. He said, “The question is, why is the collapse happening so slowly? The fill does seem to be having some positive effects.” But he didn’t seem at all sure of that.

  By this time the top of the wall had moved six inches and was continuing to drift. In New Jersey the Port Authority had just completed the PATH tube plugs and now had the option, if necessary, of closing the Trade Center’s drain. Tamaro thought it might have to be done. He said, “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but . . .”

  Burton said, “We know from the PA there’s no increase in the outflow.” This meant there was no increase in the inflow, either.

  Tamaro said, “Yet.”

  Indeed, the pumping was accelerating in New Jersey, and the water was turning more brackish, as it would if the slurry wall were failing, allowing in the tidal waters—but word of this took a while to arrive.

  Tomasetti said, “Can’t we anchor the wall?”

  Tamaro answered, “No. How? Struts? Tied off to what?”

  Rinaldi said, “There’s no clean, easy solution.” His acceptance of this was a measure of the progress he had made.

  The earth shuddered underfoot, as structures collapsed far below. Burton did not allow it to distract him. He assumed a position that became familiar through the worst of the crisis, standing by the drifting wall with his arms folded across his narrow chest and a frown of concentration on his face. His reputation was on the line: if the wall collapsed and later it turned out that the backfill operation itself was the culprit, he would be pilloried for years to come. Word arrived that people at City Hall were requiring the sort of assurances that no one could give them. Holden was running defense, trying to steady their nerves. Privately Holden was pessimistic. His reputation, too, was on the line. To me he said, “We’re caught with our finger in a dike.” But he was too shrewd a manager to second-guess Burton now. Here was a case in which Burton’s faith in his own decisions might work to everyone’s favor. He did not waffle as others did. He just said, “Keep the backfill going.” He was very tough. People thought he was secure with himself, but that was not quite it. He had a climber’s need to prevail. And this time, once again, he turned out to be right. There was no great skill involved. The dirt kept piling higher. On the fourth day the movement of the slurry wall began to slow, and on the fifth, having drifted an incredible twelve inches without failing, the wall finally stopped. That evening, Burton allowed himself a beer.

  By then a month had gone by since the attack, and twenty-eight days had passed without a single victim’s being found alive. The sense of urgency remained strong, but people knew what they began privately to express—that the effort now would amount only to a search for the dead. It was going to be sad, frustrating work, and all the more disheartening because it was obvious that many of the victims had been obliterated without a trace, atomized by the collapses or cremated in the infernos that ensued. Indeed, by the end of the unbuilding and recovery effort, in summer 2002, fewer than half of the people presumed killed had been found and identified—and many of those only through the most ambitious program of DNA matching ever attempted in the United States.

  Nothing about that search was easy. Even when they were whole and fresh, the corpses did not wait tidily on the surface to be collected. They lay crumpled and deeply intertwined with the rubble. Near the top of the pile, where the compaction was less severe, intact bodies were uncovered by diesel grapplers lifting heavy beams, only to prove difficult to extricate from the tangled debris. Firemen formed most of the recovery teams, and they directed the procedures. Affected no doubt by the isolation of the site as much as by their grief, they treated their own dead with a reverence not afforded others. Because they controlled the emotion-laden retrieval process for the entire site, their attitude bred factionalism on the pile, and in October led to an argument over the body of a Port Authority policeman that foreshadowed more serious confrontations to come. The policeman was discovered in the ruins of the Trade Center’s plaza, and although his body was intact, one leg was pinned under a chaos of heavy steel that would obviously take hours to excavate. Because of the instability of the ruins, the excavation would also require shutting down other recovery operations in a wide area at the center of the site. The firemen gathering around had a better idea: they would free the body instead by cutting off the leg. Amputation may actually have been the right decision to make, but it was seen by the Port Authority police officers who were arriving on the scene as a solution based on the firemen’s relative disregard for non-firemen, and their desire at all costs to keep searching for their own. This was probably unfair. But even when the police maintained that no dead fireman would have had his leg cut off, the firemen were unwilling to back down. The dispute never got physical, but it took a while to resolve, and it was not forgotten. In the end the Port Authority police won, and the center of the site was shut down for eight hours while they extracted their man. The shutdown became an act of tribute in itself. Because it was imposed, it also became an exercise in power. Increasingly within the inner world of the Trade Center site the dead were seen as members of different tribes.

  The nature of the search for human remains necessarily underwent changes as the geography of the pile itself did. But a basic template for the process was established early. Normally there were seventy-five firemen on recovery duty at a time, supplemented by equal numbers of police officers from both the city and the Port Authority. They came in on one-month tours, and worked twelve-hour shifts according to a schedule that gave them every third day off, resulting in a pattern by which each searcher worked a total of twenty days. Though a few firemen signed on for multiple tours, most did not. This created a visible cycle at the site, between the overeager and incautious searching by teams at the start of their tours and the calmer, more efficient work that was performed later. Sam Melisi was one of the few who were present the entire time, on a relentless schedule of fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and in his self-effacing way he helped to steady the newcomers and teach them the necessary skills.

  It was not complicated work, but it was tedious and grim, and because of the heavy equipment and unstable conditions on the pile, it was unsafe. For the most part what it required was patience. The searchers stood hour after hour in small groups by each of the diesel excavators that, one bite at a time, were tearing apart the ruins. They carried rakes and shovels, which they used to stir and probe the loose debris. As the operation matured, it settled into a two-stage inspection process, by which the searchers carefully examined each fresh load on the pile itself, and then took a second look at a debris-transfer point that was established at the southeast corner. The goal was to intercept remains at the earliest possible moment, on the pile in order to keep from scattering them and hindering the already difficult problem of identification, and at the debris-transfer point to spare the dead from what was seen as the indignity of being trucked and barged to the landfill at Fresh Kills—where, however, a third and particularly painstaking inspection was carried out.

  The search imposed a reversal of normal sentiments about the dead, so the toughest days were those in which none were found. The firemen concentrated their efforts first on the debris where their colleagues were likely to lie, and as expected, they found pockets in the ruins of the stairwells in which some of the dead were stacked on top of one another. But the site never yielded the large concentration of victims—“the mother lode,” Sam Melisi called it—that everyone was hoping for. Most of the dead were instead found “in dribs and drabs,” as a discouraged fireman told me—meaning in ones a
nd twos, and distributed all over the place. The best predictor turned out to be the nature of the materials being excavated—at one extreme, the intensely compacted and burned-through ruins that hardly merited a glance, and at the other, the relatively loose jumbles of heavy steel, where intact bodies continued to be found until nearly the end. I remember a startling moment late in December in the “donut hole” crater of Building Six, when a grappler lifted a beam and uncovered a man in a suit and tie who had fallen from the brokerage firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, in the North Tower, and was sitting upright, now somewhat shriveled but whole, with his wallet in his pocket. His condition was surprising particularly because he had been sitting almost in the open for a few months, and had not been entombed in the pumicelike Trade Center powder that helped to preserve others. Generally, the bodies that endured best were those of firemen, because they were wrapped in equipment and heavy clothing, whereas the most devastated were those of women, whose stockings and blouses offered poor protection during the collapses and after death. But, of course, decay began to set in for all of them from the first day, and the unseasonably warm winter weather sped the process along. By January the intact bodies being found were falling apart, with heads in particular becoming detached. At one of the morning meetings an official from the Medical Examiner’s Office of the City of New York made a private plea to take greater care with the exhumations, because of the obvious undesirability of having to identify the same victim multiple times.