American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  He also figured correctly that he’d be able to topple the north skeletal wall, a towering structure that had broken at the base and was leaning heavily against Building Six. This was done with five grapplers arranged side by side, pulling simultaneously on cables bolted to the top. Eventually he was able to rock and topple Building Six, too. But for the most part, such wholesale wrecking techniques were not going to work at the Trade Center site. Griffin said, “I knew there wasn’t but one way to do it.”

  D.H. said, “Yep.”

  “That’s to start cutting and pulling it down.”

  He meant piece by piece, and it was no big deal. He had a way of making things seem simple. He brought in a few of his own people—Southern boys all, who had the hardscrabble background necessary to get the job done. They moved into some vacant apartments nearby. They were the most undaunted workers at the site. Months later Burton expressed surprise over beer one night when he discovered that Griffin had only a high school education. No one had bothered to ask before, and afterward no one thought it mattered.

  The truth is, what Griffin had grown up knowing about risk and safety, others at the site, more formally educated, were now having to learn. Regulation was simply not possible at the start, and even after it began to creep in, its real purpose was to exist officially on the books, playing a rearguard position while the project surged ahead and continued to allow personal responsibility and individual choice to prevail. Peter Rinaldi adapted to the freedom naturally, despite his years spent within the confines of the Port Authority, and he became Griffin’s ally in the ordinarily cautious camp of the engineers. Others had a harder time accepting risk, but even they eventually came around. There was, for instance, an encounter that became well-known at PS 89, between Griffin and a DDC engineer who was nominally responsible for the aboveground structures, but whose penchant for memo-writing made him something of a misfit at the site. For weeks Griffin had been pushing the engineer to let him proceed with the demolition of the Marriott ruins, which rose three stories above the street and extended all six levels down into the foundation hole. There was no safe way to take those ruins on. Access from the sides was impossible because of the proximity of unstable structures and of the vulnerable slurry wall. Griffin’s solution—to put an excavator directly on top and wreck the Marriott from above—was obviously very risky. The DDC engineer kept blocking the action. At last Griffin came as close to losing his temper as he ever did. He said, “We’re not going to talk it down. We gotta do something.”

  The engineer finally gave in. He said, “Okay. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I guess it’s okay.” That formulation quickly went around. It described how the site actually worked—by people turning a blind eye.

  Given the go-ahead, a grappler operator immediately drove his machine to the top of the hotel and, at conscious risk to himself, began to tear it apart nearly underfoot. It was dangerous behavior, but typical on the pile. Griffin himself, who often stood in the thick of the action, once had a narrow escape when the counterweight of a swinging excavator hit him hard in the back, luckily knocking him down a slope rather than against the debris, which would probably have been fatal. He checked with the site doctor, and went back to work. At another time, when a large section of steel unexpectedly fell, a fire chief came rushing up to Griffin yelling, “Where’s the safety zone on this job?” and Griffin calmly responded by naming the site’s outer-perimeter line: “Chambers Street. Do you want to close the whole place down?” The fire chief got the message. Most people eventually did. Risk was the very nature of the Trade Center operation.

  This was sometimes difficult to grasp for people on the outside, where there were flurries of news reports about worrisome safety violations at the site. Outsiders believed that the constant danger—along with the presence of the dead—had to be getting to people. One afternoon when Pablo Lopez stopped by the midtown engineering offices of Thornton-Tomasetti, he was offered a session with a consulting psychologist, a woman whom the company had dutifully retained to assist its Trade Center crew. The psychologist asked Lopez to make himself comfortable. She had a slow, soothing way of talking, which had the immediate effect of irritating him. He told me about it the next day, exaggerating the intervals between her words.

  He said, “She says, ‘Close . . . your . . . eyes.’

  “So I close my eyes. Okay, now what?

  “She says, ‘Imagine . . . a . . . safe . . . place.’

  “I think, safe place? What’s that? At least she could have said ‘Imagine a steak house.’ I mean, where’ve you been, lady? I live in New York City, and there’s an anthrax scare going on! I go home, and my wife is ironing the mail! And where is it I work? It’s underground in the World Trade Center.”

  I don’t know what Lopez said to the psychologist, but his point to me was that he wasn’t planning to move away. He lived at the center of the world because he liked the action. He worked at the Trade Center because he wanted to. He wasn’t searching for safety. He didn’t need to close his eyes, or to make himself comfortable. He didn’t need the teddy bears that volunteers kept handing out. And he wasn’t afraid of the dead.

  In the end, 1.5 million tons of ruins were extracted from the seventeen acres of the Trade Center site. The vast bulk of the material was barged twenty-six miles to the Fresh Kills landfill for sorting, final inspection, and burial. Despite the negative emotions it evoked in Manhattan, Fresh Kills was an excellent choice for the work—one of the largest open spaces in New York City, a magnificently barren landscape of earth-capped refuse, spreading across 2,200 acres and rising in places about 200 feet above the tidal estuaries of Staten Island. It had been retired from service six months before, in March of 2001, presumably to become a park someday, but had been reactivated for this one final purpose. Now again it was a dump, and one of the largest in the world. But it offered complete privacy and calm, and allowed for surprising dignity during the sad and gritty operation to come.

  For the landfill itself, the prospect of accepting the ruins did not pose a significant challenge. The docks and equipment necessary for offloading the barges remained in place, as did even the little service boat that opened and closed the floating boom that kept flotsam from drifting away. Moreover, no matter how rapidly the Trade Center excavation proceeded, on the scale of New York City garbage its output was not expected to be unusual; in fact, the disaster site’s highest level of daily production, at 13,900 tons, was only a thousand tons more than just the household rubbish that Fresh Kills had dealt with in its last years—a level that itself was merely a third of the city’s solid-waste production, estimated at 14 million tons a year. In strictly material terms, therefore, the Trade Center debris was hardly more than just another curiosity—a variation in the urban detritus that Fresh Kills had accommodated for a half century. But of course in emotional terms the Trade Center was very different stuff.

  On 176 acres across the top of its highest hill, Fresh Kills set aside an area for the operation. The ruins began arriving by truck the very first night. The initial loads were of high-grade structural steel—torn perimeter sections of the Twin Towers, and fractured and twisted beams from the inner cores. At the site they had been inspected for the dead, but a few nonetheless contained the occasional human remains. These pieces of steel arrived in a rush that echoed the urgency of the search for the living, and they accumulated uncontrollably in piles so heavy that they began to crush the hill, damaging the system of subsurface pipes that channeled methane gas from the site. Fresh Kills cried for relief from the weight and soon got it, when for independent reasons an agreement was worked out to sell and send the structural steel from the Trade Center site directly to scrapyards in New Jersey. As much to manage the quantities as to turn a profit, those scrapyards wasted no time in cutting up the steel for further resale and shipment. Fresh Kills was able to unburden itself by shipping its heavy steel to those same yards, but the accumulation was so great (and the pieces so dangerous and difficult to h
andle) that the process took months to complete.

  Meanwhile, the barges had been put in motion, the Trade Center debris was arriving by the thousands of tons daily, and production-line procedures for handling it were proving up to the task. Those procedures remained remarkably stable over the course of the operation, because though the conditions at the Trade Center site frequently changed (resulting in production spikes), once the heavy steel had been redirected to New Jersey, the nature of the output destined for Fresh Kills remained largely the same: bargeloads of rubble consisting of broken and crushed concrete, asbestos, asphalt millings, rebar, and other forms of light steel—all stirred through with a homogenized mixture of details from 50,000 working lives, nearly 3,000 of which had just ended violently. Fresh Kills’ job was to separate the human mixture from the rest—to dehomogenize the debris.

  The process started intuitively on the barges themselves, where some of the tugboat crews believed they could judge the organic content of the loads from the seagulls overhead, scavengers who were drawn by odor but had little chance to feed, and whose flocks diminished over time. Throughout the fall and into the winter some of the debris was so hot that, fanned by harbor breezes, it smoked and burst into flame. When it arrived at Fresh Kills, it was lifted by giant excavators into specialized dump trucks, which drove it up a curving dirt road to the top of the hill and released it into little mounds, where the sorting began. The hilltop was a wild-looking place, with American flags whipping in cold winds, like the outpost of a government expedition to a toxic planet. It was scattered about with heavy equipment, truck trailers, and prefabricated structures of various kinds, and roamed by hundreds of workers (typically police officers or FBI agents) who were garbed in white protective suits, respirators, gloves, and high rubber boots. For visitors first arriving from the Trade Center site, where people worked largely unprotected, the clothing in particular seemed odd, as if something must have happened to the debris to make it more dangerous on the way over. Otherwise there was plenty of evidence that workers in both places were handling the same materials: all around stood huge piles of Trade Center debris—much of it now sorted, inspected, and awaiting burial—that elicited unexpected feelings of familiarity and later even of fondness, like old acquaintances encountered in a foreign land. The hilltop was of course a part of America, and by geographic measures it was not far removed from Manhattan: on a clear day from there you could even count the monuments of the skyline, minus two. But it was isolated and exotic nonetheless.

  Certainly no one had ever run a dump this way before. After the debris arrived from the piers, the large metal pieces were extracted, most significantly the vicious tangles of rebar “spaghetti,” which by hanging untrimmed off trucks had threatened workers at the Trade Center site with decapitation and now in due justice were to be sliced, sold, and melted down. Once the metal was extracted, the rest of the debris was scooped up and poured into giant shakers, of which there were as many as four. Debris that was larger than six inches across was removed, spread over a field, and raked through by hand. The remaining materials were fed into equally giant mechanical sifters, which shook and spun the loads into three separate debris streams according to size. The first stream contained material less than a quarter inch across, and (with the exception of the occasional fingernail, as an FBI agent mentioned to me) it consisted almost entirely of asphalt millings and dirt, and was discarded without being inspected. The second and third streams contained the larger debris. These materials were carefully scrutinized. They were fed onto variable-speed conveyor belts that ran through plastic-walled structures where white-clad workers sat on stools along what amounted to disassembly lines, watching ninety minutes at a time for anything that might be assigned to a victim—badges, guns, and Palm Pilots, for instance—or that might be material evidence bearing on the acts that brought the buildings down.

  Peter Rinaldi’s long-expired Port Authority identity card was found there, on one of the lines: he had discarded it in his desk on the seventy-second floor, and it was returned to him ceremoniously by two Port Authority policemen, who called him with the news and then escorted the card to his office. Most of the personal effects that were found at Fresh Kills were equally unimportant, for the happy reason that 95 percent of the people who had worked in the buildings were still alive. Nonetheless, the searching had to be done. The cockpit voice recorders from the hijacked airplanes were never found. But the inspection process did turn up an average of five body parts a day, most of them very small—which by the time Fresh Kills closed again, in the summer of 2002, had led to the positive identification of an additional seventy-eight missing people. Equally helpful in the emotional climate of the time, the process ensured that none of those particular body parts (and obviously very few others) had been treated disrespectfully or “thrown out at the dump.”

  The other effect of the inspections, of course, was to free the debris for burial. The interments began right away, in a patchwork pattern across the hilltop, and consisted not of digging graves but of spreading the Trade Center remains and covering them over with a thick blanket of earth. In that most unexpected way the hilltop slowly grew, with the World Trade Center adding rolls and variations to the ground where someday people would come to relax. In fact nothing was just “thrown out at the dump”—not a single piece of those buildings. The work of sorting through the debris was enormous. But it was accomplished, and then at last the job was all over.

  On Thursday, May 30, 2002, the closing ceremony was held at the Trade Center site, and was televised to the world. A 460-foot inclined steel bridge had been built from Liberty Street to the bottom of the foundation hole, which, with the exception of the intact basement structures along the north side, now appeared to be barren and almost clean. The occasion of the closing ceremony was the removal of the last load, a steel column from the South Tower. All the players were there, as usual in separate groups and distinguishable by their clothes: the firemen, the New York City and Port Authority cops, the construction workers, the families of the dead, and, of course, the politicians. Giuliani’s Republican successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was five months into his term, had the sense to keep the ceremony short. The idea, it seemed, was to get this over with, and let people proceed with their lives. There were no speeches of any kind. Among the workers who had been there from the start the mood was a little sweet, like that of a graduation night, when people know but don’t admit that they may not see one another again. The steel column lay on a flatbed truck at the bottom of the hole. Peter Rinaldi was down there with it, in a line of others who had been selected for the honor guard. Over the previous months he had continued to gain in reputation and influence, and now, as control of the ground was being returned by the city to the Port Authority, and the subway and PATH commuter-rail restorations were getting under way, he had been asked to stay on and manage the site. It was a strange turn for someone who had built his life inside the Twin Towers, to measure his success by the cavity they had left behind. But he was brimming with self-confidence these days.

  Bagpipes played. The truck rolled at the speed of a slow walk. Rinaldi and the rest of the honor guard accompanied the last load as it was carried up the bridge and north along West Street. And that was it, the end—or almost. Actually, several additional weeks of cleanup lay ahead, during which debris continued to arrive at the landfill and to go through the process of sorting and inspection. The final disposal proceeded at the normal pace. The steel was absent. But otherwise, by midsummer, less than a year after the attack, the World Trade Center and its burned and pulverized contents lay under bare earth, absorbed, like so much else of New York’s past, into the man-made hills of Fresh Kills.

  But for the residents of the inner world the end had essentially come months sooner, by early March, merely a half-year after the collapse. It was a time when few problems remained to be solved, and the future of the unbuilding had become entirely clear. The bridge had just been completed, and soon t
he excavations would start on the last major area of compacted debris, under the Tully access road. David Griffin had packed up and gone home to North Carolina. Safety restrictions were increasing by the day. Ken Holden was philosophical about it, and, as his father might have years before, he played a little word game—something like metaphor-cramming. He said, “When the smoke clears, the nitpickers come out of the closet.” And it was true: the regulators and auditors had arrived in force. Those from the federal safety agency called OSHA were most in evidence; they had been present from the start, and had been largely ignored, but were suddenly multiplying now and gaining the upper hand. They wore bright safety vests and had helmets equipped with red flashing lights. One afternoon, with about a dozen of them in sight, their lights blinking in the hole, Pablo Lopez said to me, “Look! The Martians have landed and they’re communicating!” A few days later one of them asked me to don safety glasses or leave the excavation site, and I remember my surprise when I realized that he was serious. It felt sort of silly, like being required to wear sunblock in a combat zone, but the truth was that the battle was over, and the hole had become a tame place. Lopez’s partner Andrew Pontecorvo explained it to me as a fact of life that he had observed before. He said, “The safer things get, the greater the restrictions.” He was a realist. He shrugged.

  It was a tough time for some of the victims’ families, to whom it was increasingly clear that their missing would never be found. The firemen also were feeling that same frustration, and with less to do inside the hole, rather than reducing their forces they were concentrating with increasing zeal on raking through the debris that was laid out for secondary inspections in the southeast corner of the site. Relations between the tribes remained fractious. Among themselves, construction people accused the firemen of dragging things out for overtime pay, and the firemen, in turn, accused the construction men of profiteering. A gang of Port Authority cops attacked and severely beat a construction worker and a DDC fieldman who tried to come to his rescue, sending both men to the hospital. Once in early spring, when some New York City policemen refused to break off the recovery of one of their own dead to honor the remains of a fireman being carried up the bridge, a brawl broke out in the hole. The uniformed groups especially seemed sometimes to be clinging to their tragedies.