American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Mendes was in top form. He said, “Maybe I understand ‘just a smidgen,’ I’ll give you that. But this whole operation is bull-shit!”

  Sam Melisi was sitting at the far end of the table observing the argument with his fellow firemen in mind, as always, and by his mere presence reminding the people there of values other than speed and ambition—particularly the importance of allowing sufficient time to find the dead. Melisi had questioned Mendes’s methods at least once, in his apologetic, unassuming way, voicing to Burton the firemen’s complaints that Mendes was running roughshod over the inspection process in the hole. Mendes had immediately backed down; there was something about Melisi’s moral authority that even Mendes could not resist. Jim Tully seemed to want to borrow some of that now. He said, “Plus, yesterday was a very tough day for the firemen. There were a lot of recoveries.”

  Melisi said nothing. He would have called it a good day.

  Mendes refused to get dragged into the conversation. He pointed his finger at Tully and bellowed, “Jim! I want guys pushing trucks! Today! Tonight! Trucks! You got it?”

  “Yes, Lou.”

  “I’m only a city fucking worker. You guys are the experts! So what are you doing about it?” He glared around the room, and repeated himself more quietly: “I’m just a damned civil servant.” Then he paused and said, “Well, maybe I’m not so civil.” People laughed, though it was more a verbal reflex than a joke.

  Charlie Vitchers said, “Okay, Lou. Tonight I’ll read them the riot act. We’ll see what happens.”

  Mendes was spent. He said, “Push them, Charlie. They’re not made out of wax.”

  But the problems of the project generally had more to do with too much motion than with too little: confusion, lack of focus, gridlock, risk-taking, the chaotic, free-for-all nature of the emergency response that was also its genius and strength. After years of struggling with the New York unions, some of the construction managers had a hard time understanding that inside the inner world people’s attitudes had changed, and that the same workers who couldn’t be made to care beyond their paychecks about erecting the next shopping mall or office building cared inordinately about pulling these ruins apart. Not that they worked here for free—or could have afforded to. After the site matured, the only volunteers in that sense were some of the Salvation Army and Red Cross people who served food in a large white tent known as the Taj Mahal, a communal space that, by offering the workers, firemen, and police officers a place to sit down for free meals, did as much to soothe wounds and maintain the peace as any political bargaining or formal compromise. Those volunteers were restricted to the outer zone of the site—the staging area where the debris trucks queued up and, when loaded, were tarped and driven through the washdown stations on their way to the piers, and where a large but conventional effort was under way to clean and reconstruct the variously damaged buildings all around. The pile itself was open only to the elite inner-core crews, and it was strictly union ground—but not as New Yorkers had seen union ground before. The mob shied away from the job. There was little featherbedding, and no strong-arming of the New York kind. With the exception of the firefighters’ action, which was a special case, there were no threatened walkouts or strikes.

  Because of the physical unknowns of the debris, as well as the frequent interruptions for the recovery of the dead, the work was done on the basis of open-ended “time and materials” agreements, as opposed to the standard packaged bids, and though some of the truckers cheated, and certain contractors grossly inflated their costs, on the whole, workers never got the idea to slow down and take advantage of the federal largesse. They were by no means perfect. There was the looting, of course. And Burton threw an entire AMEC crew of twenty-seven ironworkers off the site for spending a shift doing nothing at all. But Peter Rinaldi, who for all his adult life had overseen construction projects for the Port Authority, regularly expressed his amazement to me at the efficiency of the operation. Never before had he seen a time-and-materials job that functioned so well. The overtime helped: the heavy-equipment operators, for example, were earning at a rate of up to $200,000 a year, and some of the firemen and the police, whose pensions were based on their last level of pay, were experiencing such a windfall that financial logic required them to retire after leaving the site. But it would be a mistake to think that people were going around silently counting their blessings. They were in fact responding to the attack with all their might. They were doing the country’s dirty work, and somewhere in the background the money was flowing into the bank.

  The stars of the show were the machines themselves, and particularly the big diesel excavators, marvels of hydraulics and steel, which roamed through the smoke and debris on caterpillar tracks and in the hands of their operators became living things, the insatiable king dinosaurs in a world of ruin. They came in various sizes, from the “small” 320s (which could pull apart an ordinary house in minutes) to the oversized 1200s, monstrous mining machines rarely seen in New York, which proved to be too awkward for many uses on the pile. Most of the work was done by the 750s—sufficiently big, sufficiently lean, enormously persistent beasts that battled the debris without rest. Each 750 weighed in at 180,000 pounds (as compared with 140,000 pounds for the heaviest trucks, fully loaded), and was equipped with an articulating arm and one of three hydraulically powered attachments—steel-cutting “shears” (often attached to an extra-long arm, for reaching high or wreaking havoc deep inside the standing ruins); conventional “buckets,” useful at the lower levels of the pile in areas of pulverized debris; or, most often, “grapplers,” gap-toothed claws that could open eight feet wide, but could also close into an overbite so tight that it could snap twigs. The grappler-equipped excavators (known simply as grapplers themselves) dominated the battle until it moved well below ground. Working fast and in tandem, the machines picked the ruins apart one piece at a time. The steel they took on included the heaviest ever used in a building—box columns weighing 3,100 pounds per foot, so that a merely man-size length would amount to almost 19,000 pounds, and a fifty-foot section would come in at nearly the weight of the grappler itself. Some of the loose steel could be “flown” out by the enormous cranes that ringed the pile—but the process was so tedious that it was reserved for special cases: for instance, for lifting beams during the search for survivors among ruins too rough to allow the grapplers access, or for the dismantling of the skeletal walls, most of which were torched apart one section at a time by ironworkers in suspended baskets, and then lowered gently to the ground. This left the bulk of the fight to the grapplers, which were just tough enough to take it on.

  Actually, of course, it was the operators who accepted the fight. They were said to be the best in the business, and this was easy to believe. At the start of a shift they didn’t just climb aboard and sit down but seemed, rather, to strap on the equipment much as good pilots strap on their wings. Like those pilots, too, they were artists of motion—fluid, expressive, and intuitively at one with their machines. The cabs that they sat in were enclosed in wire mesh and sound-dampening, shatterproof glass; they had single comfortable seats, filtered and cooled or heated air, automotive stereos, and a combination of pedals and tightly coupled, variable-rate joysticks that allowed the operators nearly bionic control. It was the control especially that gave the grapplers their beauty. The operators might drive to work like ordinary commuters, frustrated by traffic, by parking regulations, by lines at Starbucks for insipid coffee; but after they settled into their machines, they could put all that aside, and go rumbling off into the faraway land of ruin; and if they came to terrain too wild to cross, often they could build a way through; and when they came to the field of battle, typically among other grapplers straining there, they could reach their own arms out twenty feet, clamp their own steel claws around multi-ton splinters, and with fire and smoke erupting, while shuddering and rocking forward onto the toes of their tracks, they could wrestle those splinters clear. They could also then stretch their
claws wide and angle them up to use just the bottom fingers to gently stir loosened debris for the firemen to see. The operators had all that power and grace at their command, and they possessed more imagination than ordinary construction jobs had let them exercise before. Now they had been given a high purpose, and been told roughly what Sam Melisi had been told: just go and see what you can do. It was a liberation, because they knew they could do a lot. They were resourceful. They were like pioneers.

  Taking risks was a necessary part of the deal. That was true for others there too: even when they were not breathing in the smoke and dust, or climbing across treacherous slopes, the workers worked on top of weakened, partially collapsed structures, which bounced and shook underfoot, and sometimes gave way. But the grappler operators were particularly exposed, not only because they led the effort, often balanced precariously and pulling on unstable debris, but also because they seemed to feel protected by the mass of their machines. This was an error. The grapplers were like dinosaurs, but with thin skins. On two occasions when they ventured into areas from which Peter Rinaldi had excluded them, the pile suddenly collapsed, dropping them into voids. The two machines were badly damaged. It was a matter purely of luck that neither of the operators was injured. Rinaldi told me he would be very surprised if no one got killed at the site. On another occasion I was with him when he noticed to his alarm that one of Tully’s 750s had nosed into a corner of the partially collapsed Building Five, and was reaching up and pulling heavy debris down from overhead. Even if the building itself did not let loose, the pieces that were falling could have sliced right through the cab. Rinaldi got on the radio, which didn’t work. We walked across the pile to find Jan Szumanski. After a period of anxiety and confusion the grappler retreated.

  With us at the time was an affable, boyish-looking man named David Griffin, age thirty-four, who was the project’s chief demolition consultant and its token Southerner. Demolition in this context meant the unbuilding not of all the ruins but of the standing structures, of which there were plenty—Buildings Four, Five, and Six; the stump of the Marriott hotel; and all of the intact and partially intact basement levels of the foundation hole. Griffin, as usual, was wearing immaculate golfing clothes. His site ID tag dangled from a neck strap embroidered with “I Love Jesus.” He was less concerned than Rinaldi about the errant grappler, having seen much worse in his professional life, but he had gentlemanly manners, and said nothing about that now. Instead he reflected on the Trade Center work in general. He said, “It’s like playing Jenga—who’s gonna pick out the last piece? Only thing is, instead of falling down on your kitchen table, the pile falls five levels down—and you’re in it.” I asked Griffin if he was good at playing Jenga. He grinned and said, “Yeah, I reckon I am.” It was typical Griffin. He was a personable guy. He came from faraway Greensboro, North Carolina, and was the butt of a lot of NASCAR jokes. Indeed, his uncle was a NASCAR official. Griffin thought it was a pretty big deal. But he was not a complete rube. He knew all about the stereotypes, even found them funny. Once at a morning meeting at PS 89, when Griffin asked about the value of the bullion that was soon to be removed from the vault under the ruins, Burton said, “It’s enough to buy all of North Carolina—and they’ll throw in South Carolina for free.” Griffin laughed along with the rest.

  But the bullion was worth only about a quarter billion dollars, and Griffin’s own daddy, as he called him, was probably worth that much or more. His daddy’s name was David too, though people called him “D.H.” He was a tobacco farmer’s boy, a ninth-grade dropout who in 1958, when he was nineteen, went to work on a cigarette production line, where he met his wife, and where he thought he’d spend his life. In his spare time he sold parts off a dozen junked cars in his front yard. In 1959, he tore down an old church to salvage the lumber and nails, and did it so well that the city inspector (who stopped by because D.H. lacked a demolition permit) asked him to handle a small apartment building next. D.H. soon realized that the value of demolition lay as much in the resale of salvaged materials as in the service rendered, and, as he liked to explain, he just kept going from there. By the time of the Trade Center collapse he had become one of the three largest demolition contractors in the United States, one of the largest scrap-metal dealers in the South, a construction magnate, and the master of more businesses and real estate in North Carolina than even he could remember.

  New York was not his kind of town, and he had opposed David’s impulse to get involved, but after the Griffin name became attached to the Trade Center project, D.H. arrived twice at the site to see the work, of which, of course, he was proud. He was a burly, gray-haired man of sixty-two, with a bad knee, a strong Carolina accent, and unusually quick eyes. David took him around on an all-terrain “Gator.” D.H. was friendly, but didn’t have much to say to the New Yorkers who passed by. He wanted to talk to David about family, and a little business. He told me about his weekend relaxation, which he called “riding around,” and which amounted to an activity rather close to his work—a Sunday-drive form of looking for trades, in which the size of the deal didn’t matter so much as its quality. David laughed and said that just last week his daddy, having come into 20,000 T-shirts (D.H.: “Class One T-shirts. Orange ones, white ones, blue ones”) at 25 cents apiece, had taken a few boxes of them to the parking lots of local shopping centers, and for a dollar each had sold dozens out of the trunk of his car. His customers must have figured he was an old man down on his luck. Even D.H. could now chuckle about it. But later that afternoon, as we talked, I got the distinct impression that he was feeling out my interest in acquiring, say, an antique shotgun, or maybe a knife.

  When the Twin Towers collapsed, D.H. Griffin, like most Americans, was so wrapped up in his affairs that he was unable to respond beyond the standard feelings of anger and surprise. David Griffin was a rich and busy man in his own right, president of the demolition company, with a wife and young children, but not quite so established as his father. He was drawn to the Trade Center site much as Ken Holden and Mike Burton were—because he had knowledge to offer, and could not stay away. He had a business justification, too: on Thursday, September 13, he called his father and said, “Daddy, I’m going to New York. Because this is the kind of job, if it breaks—when it does break—they’re not gonna pick up the phone book and look under ‘Demolition Contractors’ to see who could help them. I’m gonna leave, and if I don’t have anything by Monday, all I’ll feel is I wasted a weekend in New York. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  His wife, who had been to New York only once before (for a day), insisted on accompanying him, and on bringing their children. They loaded up their Suburban, drove nine hours north, and in the middle of the night checked into the Palace Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. Griffin got a few hours’ sleep, and early Friday morning, in a pouring rain, he drove downtown as far as he could, grabbed a raincoat and a hardhat out of the back of his vehicle, hung a respirator around his neck, and started walking. When he came to a police barricade at Canal Street, he did not hesitate, and he passed through unchallenged. His heart pounded. He thought, I’m in! I’m in! But four blocks from the site he was stopped at another barricade—this one manned by the New York National Guard. A soldier said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m going to work.”

  “Well, lemme see your pass.”

  “I don’t have a pass.”

  “If you don’t have a pass, you’re not going in. Who are you working for?”

  “Well . . . Bovis.” Griffin had contacts there, some names to look up.

  The soldier said, “What, you don’t have a pass or anything?”

  Griffin said, “I come from North Carolina.”

  That fixed it. The soldier said, “No pass—you can’t go in.”

  Griffin stood around, unsure of what to do. The rain came down. People with passes went through. After a while a group of Red Cross volunteers showed up with drinks for the soldiers. The soldiers began talking to th
em. Griffin drifted inside the barricade. The soldiers didn’t seem to notice. He walked toward the pile, and the next thing he knew, six months had gone by.

  His Bovis contacts knew him by reputation: this was D.H.’s boy, a kid who’d grown up at wrecking sites from the age of two, sleeping in concrete culverts at night, with laborers standing guard. The Bovis people understood the value of the homegrown experience that Griffin could provide. They hired him for their quadrant, and introduced him around. For the first several weeks he had competition from a more flamboyant demolition man, who ultimately flamed out in the eyes of the site managers at PS 89 and was asked by Ken Holden to leave the job. People had trust in Griffin by then, as much for his lack of grandstanding as for his obvious technical competence. At Burton’s request he took on the role of demolition consultant for the whole site, planning and managing the dismantling of all the standing structures. It was a crucial position, central to the entire project.

  Toward the end, over a sandwich with his father and me, Griffin described his early thoughts. He had considered some selective blasting at first, to drop the skeletal walls and bring down the ruined buildings. He called it “shooting” them. Holden and Burton vetoed the idea, primarily because of the jitteriness of the neighbors. As much to his father as to me, Griffin said, “These New Yorkers just flip out. You know, this ain’t South Pittsburgh.”

  D.H. said, “Nope.”

  Griffin figured he would have the space to use a wrecking ball on Buildings Four and Five, and indeed that is what he did, after pre-cutting the internal structure of the buildings, a dangerous process he called “juicing them up.” It was an unusual procedure for New York, but faster and cheaper than the city’s standard labor-intensive technique of incremental deconstruction.