American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  The widows’ meeting turned out to be a watershed in the Trade Center recovery. Burton and Cote were tough guys, accustomed to seeing life as a struggle, and they would not have been unjustified had they responded impatiently to the encounter. This was dangerous to admit out loud, but it was on many people’s minds: the firemen’s widows were victims of victimization itself, and in their agony and myopia they were starting to blunder around; moreover, they clearly did not represent the thousands of others who had lost family on September 11 and were coming to terms with the events more stoically. It would have been understandable, therefore, if Burton and Cote had mentally stiff-armed the widows, privately dismissing their emotions as overblown and rededicating themselves to the efficiency of the excavation. They had it within their power to do this—and had they been officials in many other parts of the world, they probably would have followed such a hard line. It was lucky for the ultimate success of the recovery effort that this was not the way they naturally reacted.

  Instead, over a couple of beers they talked for the first time since September 11 about people’s emotional reactions to the attack, and they questioned why they themselves had felt so little affected by the death and destruction at the site. Burton called Cote a “cold fish.” Cote pointed out that neither of them had family or close friends who had died. It also had to be admitted that the project was going well, and that for both of them it was utterly consuming professionally, offering an emotional advantage that others did not have: they simply did not have time to dwell on the tragedy. Still, each had been moved that night by the suffering of the widows, and had been troubled by the realization that, though they had tried to do the best possible job, there were people who now believed that their actions were wrong, even wicked. It made them question the doggedness of their approach, and reminded them of a simple imperative that in the crush of daily decisions they were tending to forget: that the unbuilding was more than just a problem of deconstruction, and that for the final measure of success they would have to take emotions into account. They finished their beers, drove downtown, and walked through the site.

  In practice the firemen had lost the fight, but the terms of the peace would have to be generous. Burton knew this now, and Giuliani did too. The mayor increased the search teams’ numbers back to seventy-five per shift, though they would have to proceed on a less ambitious basis than before: it was understood that beyond being allowed to search for their dead, they would in fact have little say. The tensions never went away, and indeed escalated toward the very end. But already on the morning after the widows’ night, at the joint meeting at PS 89, one of the fire chiefs unintentionally made a show of his loss of power when his only contribution was to ask for a moment of silence for the dead of the Queens airline crash—a strangely irrelevant request that emphasized the changes under way by signaling that he had little to say about the work at hand. The widows would be heard from again—but increasingly through formal channels created for them. Mike Burton was now unchallenged as the Trade Center Czar. But he seemed to understand that to succeed he would have to keep his ambitions in check, and that America does not function as a dictatorship of rationalists.

  And so the recovery proceeded, not as a united or a heroic exercise but as a set of accommodations worked out among self-centered groups sharing a pragmatic understanding that this was an important job, and that it was primarily a physical one. The only solution was to attack the ruins—to cut and drop the skeletal walls, lift the heavy steel, chew up the rubble mountains, pause to recover the dead, demolish the stump of the Marriott hotel, tear down the burned-through hulks of Buildings Four, Five, and Six, stabilize the neighboring high-rises, shore up the damaged subway, excavate the insanely packed foundation hole, reinforce and protect the slurry wall, and run a fleet of trucks and barges to haul the debris away. About halfway through Ken Holden said to me, “Excavation, remains, recovery, removal—repeat,” because in essence that cycle constituted the work. But of course the complications were considerable.

  Indeed, the project defied most attempts to impose order, and it eventually defeated even the crudest organizational plans: the four-quadrant overlay, for instance, which slowly faded away; or the initial assumption that the excavation could proceed more or less uniformly from top to bottom, which because of the variability and interconnectedness of the debris it could not; or Mike Burton’s related hope that the aboveground work might be finished by Giuliani’s last day in office, December 31, 2001, which was far too neat to be even remotely possible. To the very end of the recovery effort and beyond, into the disputes over rebuilding that followed, nothing about the Trade Center site was tidy. Furthermore, as the work proceeded, the site became rougher and more complicated rather than less, a human landscape no longer shaped by its cataclysmic birth so much as by all the initiatives that had followed—histories measured in horsepower and steel, too obscure to remember or write down. To his credit, Mike Burton understood this. When he roamed the pile, as he did twice each day and once again at night, he seemed to accept the disorder there as being in the nature of an energetic response. Rather than hunting out infractions or putting a stop to unauthorized work, as a less confident ruler might have done, he watched for what he called “dead real estate”—unexpectedly quiet ground that resulted from supply-line breakdowns, trucking gridlock, or simple miscommunication between crews that worked the day shift and those that worked the night.

  Sometimes he went without a hardhat, and often without a respirator—flouting the safety rules not just, it seemed, to show his toughness and rank but, more important, and to the exclusion of pettier concerns, to demonstrate his dedication to the real work of the site. This was the attitude he expected from others, and the message got through. Jan Szumanski, a superintendent with Tully Construction, once joked to me that Burton didn’t need the protective equipment, because people like him didn’t have a heart or lungs. In the context of the Trade Center site, Szumanski meant it as a compliment.

  For a man with a comfortable house in Chappaqua, Burton was surprisingly at home on the pile. He could pitch his voice perfectly to make himself heard over the cacophony there—the roar of a hundred diesels, the hiss of cutting torches, the screech, rattle, and bang of extracted steel. He was too focused on the job ever quite to seem relaxed, but he was less skittish than many others, and did not hesitate to wade through the billows of smoke and dust, or to climb the steep slopes of loose debris. He would stand in the thick of the action, sometimes for an hour or more, with his arms folded and a frown of concentration on his face, taking it all in. His presence was crucial, especially in the fall and early winter, when the Trade Center crews were operating largely blind, guided only by common sense and instinct, and encountering dangers that had never been seen before. It was natural if occasionally they equivocated, or shied away from problems. Reliably, however, Burton never did—and instead had the habit of going out and actively looking for trouble. Most of the problems he discovered were so specific to the Trade Center site—and in that sense technical—that they would have been invisible to outside observers. Burton would have been invisible to those observers too: an unexceptional-looking man, moving among the more dramatic crowds, often accompanied by a trusted adviser (Bill Cote, for instance, or Peter Rinaldi), but generally making little effort to display his power. The work that he did on the pile was impossible to photograph, and difficult even to quantify, because it amounted largely to the avoidance of negatives. Nonetheless, it’s certain that without Burton’s frequent excursions there, those negatives would have added up.

  Late one night in the fall we stood together on a debris hill, looking down across a scene that was at once familiar and surreal—the smoke and steam rising under harsh stadium lights, the orange sparks cascading from cutting torches, the teams of firemen standing in clusters with their rakes and shovels, the diesel excavators restlessly in motion, doing their dinosaur dancing in boiling dust and fields of flame. I said, “It’s your kin
gdom, Mike. It’s your empire.” He laughed, and didn’t hide his satisfaction. He seemed to be savoring the moment. Nothing had gone really wrong for a while, at least not to the extent of threatening Burton with failure. The dead were at last known to be dead. The protective slurry wall had been successfully stabilized. And the process of excavation was so well under control that the main thrust now was a pile-improvement project, Burton’s initiative, to build a temporary access road in the Bovis quadrant, from West Street into a deep depression, known as the “valley,” that lay at the center of the ruins between the footprints of the North and South Towers. The road was being built of ground-asphalt millings laid on top of the debris along a route that sloped steeply downward from the street. Over in the southeast corner, in Tully territory, Jan Szumanski was coming on aggressively with a second access road that, after S-turning around and through the steel remnants of the South Tower, would eventually link up with the Bovis road. The imminent arrival of debris-removal trucks at the heart of the ruins signaled a crucial shift in the geometry of the operation. The trucks would be loaded at the center of the pile—an important improvement over the current reliance on long daisy chains, in which the grapplers and excavators passed each piece of steel down the line and into the waiting trucks on the street.

  Henceforth the excavation would proceed with increasing efficiency from the center outward, following a pattern similar to that of open-pit mining—albeit complicated here by variations in the ruins, by the need to preserve the slurry wall, and, of course, by the presence of the human dead. Those dead constituted an argument against excessive road building, because of the certainty that some of them were being buried under the millings, that their discovery would be delayed, and that for months to come, while their remains continued to decay, heavy trucks would roll across their graves. Burton had learned his lesson from the firemen’s widows, and he was determined to keep the emotional factors in mind. Nonetheless, when he looked ahead to what would soon be a deep hole in the Manhattan ground (increasingly defined by the sheer faces of the slurry wall), he saw no alternative to the roads for the removal of the debris. It was understandable, therefore, if that night when I stood beside him he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction with the progress being made.

  But he was not a man to luxuriate for long, and with much of the debris-removal operation awaiting the completion of the Bovis road, he remained sensitive to signs of trouble. For instance, he turned now to a problem he had already encountered in the afternoon by the ruins of the Marriott hotel, where three diesel grapplers had been picking at the debris in a loose daisy chain, without contributing to the more important work in the valley. Burton had spoken about it to a Bovis field supervisor, and the grapplers had joined the main effort, but word had clearly not been passed to the night shift, because the machines were once again squatting in the corner on a mound near the hotel. To make matters worse, two of the three had just broken down. One of them was a giant “750” with a long-arm attachment that had been pulling at the top of the ruins when a steel beam had snapped, cutting one of its hydraulic lines. Bleeding badly, the 750 began an awkward retreat, until, having lost 120 gallons of its vital fluids, it died. Burton was extremely annoyed. He clambered through the ruins until he found another supervisor, and with a smile that left no doubt about his anger, he calmly suggested that the company pay better attention.

  But stronger words were often required—work for which Burton was not well suited, and which he gladly left to the site’s principal “pusher,” Lou Mendes, the DDC’s assistant commissioner for special projects. He was a blunt bulldog of a man, of Portuguese origins, whose technique for keeping things moving was to stand toe-to-toe with the other big guys on the pile and systematically lose his temper. Mendes in action was a phenomenon to behold. He had a large, jowly face, a low forehead, and small eyes, which gave him a glowering look even when he was feeling relaxed. When he was angry, his face darkened and became at times mocking, facetious, outraged, pained, or openly disbelieving. He would take on self-respecting men and ridicule and scold them as if they were delinquent children. At the most extreme, during a middle period when AMEC’s operation was stumbling, he grew so aggressive that he seemed to risk a complete breakdown in communications, if not outright physical assault. At PS 89 one day, after another slow night in the AMEC quadrant, Mendes called in the various vice-presidents and managers from the four prime contractors, sat them down in an abandoned classroom, and proceeded for nearly an hour to humiliate AMEC about its lack of performance. He said, “This is going to be a twenty-four-hour operation with or without AMEC. I go around, I look at Tully, I look at Bovis, and they’re productive all night. I want the same out of you.” The problem, as usual, seemed to result from a lack of communication between the shifts. “I want to know what’s the matter with you guys. Don’t you talk to each other at all? You keep this up, and I’ll shut down your whole operation. You watch me. I’ll throw you off the job.”

  The AMEC people tried to explain: certain equipment had broken down, a supplier had delivered late, there were unexpected complications with the steel, the Fire Department had not shown up with a fire-suppression team for the scheduled cutting of the steel spears from the wounded American Express building. Mendes would have none of it, and repeated the excuses loudly and incredulously, as if to allow others in the room to savor the incompetence on display here. He said, “If you need equipment, we’ll lend it to you. You need a backhoe? Between Tully and Bovis, I’ll get you what you need.” He seemed to be implying that AMEC would have had trouble acquiring even a lawn tractor. The AMEC people listened with long-suffering expressions. They were of course seething at the treatment (and they later complained, to no avail), but they knew that any attempt to expel them from the job, even if unsuccessful, would seriously damage the reputation of the firm—an unexpected wrinkle in the otherwise proud claim of involvement in the World Trade Center recovery. Mendes in that sense had extraordinary power, and they had little choice but to accept his verbal lashings. He said, “I don’t care if your night guys are late or not. I don’t care about your dinner plans. You stay on and talk to the night shift before you leave. You make sure they understand the plan. And then talk to me. You call me before you leave.” He pointed at himself. “Lou Mendes,” he said, and rattled off his cell-phone number. “Did you write that down?”

  “Yes, Lou.”

  “And I want you to bring in lights. Tonight. You have a twenty-four-hour operation. I want to see lights. I want to see a twenty-four-hour operation. Assholes and elbows. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, Lou.”

  Burton and Holden stayed away from such messy scenes, but each of them quietly insisted to me that Mendes was a good and necessary man. It turned out that he was a sentimentalist, too (of course), and not quite the bully that at first he had appeared to be. Even those on the receiving end of his attacks, which were by no means limited to AMEC, eventually came to recognize the legitimacy of his complaints, if never quite his methods of delivery. After a while a sort of fondness characterized the exchanges.

  AMEC solved its problems and began to make rapid progress on the pile, but then at the center of the action—the former valley that by midwinter had been deepened almost to bedrock and was known as “the hole”—Bovis started having trouble. The problem this time was with restricted maneuvering space in the loading zone, as a result of which near gridlock had set in, and the output of steel and debris (known as “production”) had dropped from a high of 12,000 tons a day to merely 2,000. On the final inspection line at Fresh Kills, where hundreds of law-enforcement officers were being retained to handle a larger flow, the people in charge were complaining about the lack of predictability, and demanding to know if they should plan on such low numbers in the future.

  Mendes was outraged at Bovis. He called for a meeting with a dozen men he considered to be the key players on the pile—Peter Rinaldi, Sam Melisi, Pablo Lopez, and managers from the most impor
tant contractors. Once they were all gathered, sitting around a small table or perched on the windowsills, Mendes said, “Shut the door.” Dispensing with the niceties, he immediately went on the attack. He called the work in the hole a “circus.” The field superintendent from Bovis, a ruddy man named Charlie Vitchers, who had a reputation for practicality and competence, tried to explain that the problem was due partly to the lack of clear command: someone needed to draw up a chart to show how authority was supposed to flow. Mendes grew apoplectic. “A chart? A goddamned chart? We’ve got charts coming out the ass. We’ve got charts of charts! We’ve got charts to make charts!”

  “Maybe we should . . . ”

  “It’s all maybes! I don’t want maybes. I want to know what you guys think you’re doing out there! What, digging holes and filling them in? Building Six is on hold! The donut is on hold! Greenwich is on hold! The whole goddamned hole’s on hold! My job is to get this job done! You may not like me. You may think I’m a pain in the ass. But my job is to do the job! I want to know what the hell you think your job is!”

  Charlie Vitchers’s face was getting ruddier. He worked visibly to maintain his calm. He said, “We got ourselves into a cluster fuck. We knew it. We saw it coming. We knew we’d be in it for a week. But it’s getting better now.”

  One of the Tully heirs, Jim Tully, was in the room. He was a lean, quiet man with hooded eyes and a pockmarked face, the very image of a New York street tough. Of the siblings who were running the company, with the hands-on approach for which the family was known, he was the field man, the one most at home on the pile. Currently he was managing the trucking and heavy-equipment operation as a subcontractor under Bovis, in one of the numerous shifting arrangements that had blurred the original quadrants. Incongruously, he now tried to placate Mendes. He folded his hands on the table as if to show that he was unarmed. He said, “Look. Lou. I’m a production maniac too. I mean, you’re not the only guy, Lou. It’s been burning holes in my gut all week. So maybe you can understand—just a smidgen?”