Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  I want to say, “I did all the things I wanted to do. My life was great. I lived it the best way I could, and I’m happy with all I did.”

  Now I feel I have the right to grieve. After being there—the firefighters, the policemen, and the paramedics all made it clear to me that they not only appreciated me coming, but that I had just as much right to be there as anyone.

  70 The Cross Bobbie-Jo is referring to, one of several found at the disaster site, is a crucifix-shaped hunk of I-beam more than likely recovered from the wreckage of the U.S. Custom house at 6 World Trade Center. It drew the attention of the international media when clergy blessed it in a solemn ceremony held outside the building on October 4, 2001. In October 2006, in accordance with the effort to finally rebuild the World Trade Center site, the now-famous Ground Zero Cross was removed from the pedestal on which it had stood, watching over the site, for approximately five years. It was remounted a few hundred yards away outside St. Peter’s Church, and looms over passersby walking south toward the World Trade Center on the east side of Church Street.

  71 American Airlines Flight 587 crashed shortly after 9:00 a.m. on November 12, 2001, while taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Santo Domingo. All 260 people aboard were killed. While the crash was inevitably attributed to an accident rather than sabotage, the emotional impact on New Yorkers was especially harsh. The city was still reeling from a similarly horrifying wake-up call on a beautiful workday morning not two months before. The public was still justifiably anxious about additional terrorist attacks.

  RICK ZOTTOLA

  The firm of Leslie E. Robertson Associates (LERA) has designed some of the pre-eminent buildings of our time, including the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong; the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey; the International Trade Center in Barcelona, Spain; the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California; and the World Trade Center. LERA also serves as a consultant for many of the world’s current architectural marvels.72

  Rick Zottola has been the LERA partner in charge of the World Trade Center for several years. He rushed to the Towers in 1993 to spearhead damage assessments after a terrorist bomb exploded in the basement. He knows the World Trade Center complex as well as any person alive.

  In his calm, soft-spoken manner, Rick describes the unique role LERA has taken in the Ground Zero clean-up. He also details his firm’s love for an architectural miracle that will never again command the New York skyline.

  AFTER THE DISASTER, we all had great hopes that there would be significant rescues. But it quickly became apparent that wasn’t going to be the case. The collapse, the devastation, was so horrible that very few people survived. So the rescue effort is now over.73 Now we’ve switched over to two different efforts: clean-up and recovery.

  The DDC is responsible for clean-up, but we’ve been retained by them because we know every nuance of the facility.74 It was a magnificent structure and we loved it. So we consult with the DDC and with demolition crews on the structural integrity of the rubble that’s left in the Pit. It’s a very big job, as you can probably imagine.

  The recovery effort, on the other hand, is all about retrieving remains. The fire department and the police department—plus other emergency workers—are responsible for that, and we’re assisting them however we can.

  Some last details were still being implemented, but the Towers were pretty much completed before 1976. LERA designed the Towers’ structures. We had an ongoing contract with the Port Authority to provide maintenance and services over the last thirty years since the original design was implemented, and we were contracted as consultants to the Port Authority and to the architect Minora Yamasaki and Associates. It was a big project.

  A lot of people don’t understand this, but buildings are living organisms; they’re not static things. They age, they wear out, parts need to be replaced. As office tenants change and technologies advance, the buildings’ internals underwent maintenance and a steady stream of capital improvements. For example, a tenant might move into many contiguous floors and want to put in their own interconnecting staircases. This would require a structural cut in the slabs, so we’d have been involved in that sort of work.

  I have to say, the Port Authority really takes care of their property well—much better than private organizations. So our work centered around a continuous structural integrity inspection program. We inspected columns, slabs, and structural things throughout the complex. External and internal—wherever you can physically access and visually see. Some places we used to inspect … well, the layperson can’t see them. For instance, to see some of the columns inside each Towers’ central core, we’d climb on top of an elevator and ride inside the shaft. We could inspect the structure much better from that vantage point.

  We had the same view inside the Towers’ guts as a doctor might have during his patients’ surgery.

  The footprint of each Tower was an acre square, so the two Towers made up just two of the sixteen total acres of the World Trade Center. The sixteen acres comprised six buildings: World Trade 1 and 2, the Towers. There was Marriott Hotel, which is 3 World Trade Center, though no one ever called it that. Then there are WTC 4 and 5, which are low-rise buildings. And 6 World Trade Center, which was the old Customs House.

  Seven World Trade Center was actually across the street. We didn’t do the original design for it; I think we may have worked on some of the early foundations. The Port Authority owned the property, but it was developed, built, and operated by a private developer.

  Six months ago, Silverstein took over a ninety-nine-year lease on World Trade 7 and the entire sixteen-acre World Trade Center complex.75

  Essentially, I’m trying to convey to you how huge the site is. Yes, the Towers came down, but every single square foot of the overall structure wasn’t destroyed.

  Over that sixteen acres are two distinct sections of basement. You may have read in the papers about something called the Bathtub, which is surrounded by something called the slurry wall that’s stabilized by tie-dash anchors that keep the river out. A parcel of property on the eastern edge of the complex incorporates remnant levels of an old railroad station; the Hudson Manhattan Railroad Station was an underground rail forty to fifty feet below street level that was demolished to build the World Trade complex.

  At its lowest part, the basement runs seven levels deep to include parking, mechanical space, storage space, FBI and CIA parking. The vault, which you’ve heard so much about, was in that old H&M basement facility. Built around the turn of the century, it held gold and silver for the Bank of Nova Scotia.

  The World Trade Center came about through the shared vision of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and his brother David. Initial plans, which were made public in 1961, place the WTC site along the East River. The Port Authority later switched the site to the west side of Manhattan by demolishing the old Hudson Terminal for the bankrupt Hudson and Manhattan Railroad.

  Immediately following the attack, the vault became a huge security issue. The bank needed our assistance because they didn’t know how to get their trucks in there. The New York City and Port Authority police were able to extract a lot of precious metals under … well, we’re not talking about the most favorable circumstances. But considering the security risk those metals posed, everyone was happy to get that stuff out, and the sooner, the better.

  Even though so much of the basement structure was damaged, as I say—parts of it weren’t. Just luck, really. These were big buildings, but they fell as they were designed to, more or less straight down. When we were poking around the rubble, we found three different levels of damage, crudely speaking.

  First, you had the parts that weren’t really damaged. Second, you had parts that were damaged, but accessible; slabs, for instance, that broke away from their columns but which you could still move over and around by crawling on your hands [and] knees. The third condition was total collapse—that is, just a big pile of debris. These are cr
ude increments, of course. We find many gradations in-between.

  In total, the Twin Towers cost the Port Authority $900 million. Tenants first moved into 1 World Trade in December 1970; 2 World Trade opened for business in January 1972.

  Right now, we’re still doing condition assessments for the DDC underground. This means we suit up in hard hats, respirators, flashlights, knee pads, elbow pads, and a good pair of waterproof boots, since there’s a lot of water down there. You’ve got to get down on your hands and knees and crawl around.

  Unfortunately, we have significant experience with all this thanks to the 1993 bombing. I’ve got a team working with me to gauge the strength of remaining beams, the slabs. It’s all visual work. There’s no other way to get a sense of how they’re holding together than to eyeball them.

  How do you know if you’re safe? Ah … you don’t, really. Things are a mess down there, horribly wrecked and precarious. The weight of all that damaged stuff is tremendous. A square-foot concrete slab certainly weighs much more than I do, but the good news is that a person walking through the rubble is not adding any significant load. That’s why rescue workers, right after the Towers came down and there was the frantic urge to get survivors out … they were literally able to jump right on top of the Pile.

  But machinery is a different story. Machinery can weigh tons. That’s important to keep in mind because, if you have heavy equipment treading around, you need to know where there are voids below. Areas for potential collapse.

  We know for a fact that early rescue workers who went down to look for survivors were able to get everywhere that you could imagine. As they went in, they would spray-paint the walls fluorescent orange and yellow with their call signs. They would identify their emergency unit, like “ESU Indiana” or “ESU New Jersey,” and they’d log the date. While doing our condition assessments, we couldn’t find a single place that the searchers hadn’t marked. It’s remarkable.

  Going down into the wreckage is very much like walking down into a coal mine. It’s not a straight path; you have to meander down stairs, negotiate over piles of rubble, squeeze through holes that have torn open in walls, maybe go down another set of stairs. And it’s dangerous; it’s not humanly possible to remember how you got in there. The rescuers would paint arrows on the wall showing the way out. There’s an element of spelunking to it. But like I say, those guys are trained. We found their markings going down all six levels, all the way to the bottom. They left no stone unturned. They did a wonderful job.

  Wall Street firms did not occupy the Towers throughout their early years. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the city’s financial state began to boom and an increasing number of private businesses became tenants.

  Our role is different compared to other engineering firms that are down at the Pit right now. No one can get around underground like we can—we know that place so well. It’s a good thing we’re there, too. See, the disaster not only destroyed the buildings, it destroyed the management systems. Those systems, and the people from the Port Authority with the knowledge of how those systems work, just disappeared. Blown to the four winds within seconds. The FDNY contacted us because, essentially, they had no one else to turn to.

  They don’t know where the fire stairs are, for instance. Three hundred and fifty lost firemen were in fire stairs and places of egress, so they want to know where those stairways are. We’re trying to show them the access points. And they’ll say, “Over there? Under that pile of debris? Okay, let’s dig there.”

  Keep in mind that the World Trade Center was one of the most complicated complexes in the world before the disaster. What with the main basement, the shallow basement, the old basement … when the Towers stood, you could imagine the Center as a complete subterranean city with buildings on top that were as big as cities themselves.

  The firemen began their struggle with no information whatsoever, no drawings. That’s when we stepped in. One of the services we provide [is] we appraise dangerous areas and hanging debris. We advise whether it’s safe or not to go in, how far to go in, how much digging they should do, what tools they should use, whether it’s safe for machinery. We’ll say things like, “There should be a stairwell over here. There’s a corridor down there, straight down about ten feet.”

  There’s a lot of camaraderie that makes it all work. It wasn’t a mandated activity. We just saw the need and began to assist the Port Authority employees on an ad hoc basis. For us, it’s been important, therapeutic work.

  On the morning of September 11, I was sitting with another engineer, hunched over some drawings and talking in our offices eight blocks from the Trade Center. All of a sudden this blizzard of paper—snow-flake-sized particles—flew by our window. We’re only eight blocks away from the Towers, like I said, but we didn’t hear anything—I don’t know why. The first thing I thought of was a ticker-tape parade, but it was coming from too high up.

  I got up and looked out the window. We have this wonderful view from immediately southeast of the complex. We saw smoke coming out of the North Tower, but we didn’t know what it was. We thought someone’s floor had caught fire.

  Within five minutes, I got a call from Frank DeMartini, one of our colleagues at the Port Authority who helped us with reconstruction after the 1993 bombing. A very good friend. He said, “Rick! There’s been a massive explosion in Tower 1. Grab a few engineers and some drawings. Come right over.”

  He didn’t know what had happened. His office was on the 88th floor, the plane hit his building on 92. His wife, an employee of ours, was with him. Normally, she was stationed at a small LERA office in Tower 2, but that morning she was over having coffee with Frank. She’d been getting up to leave when the plane hit.

  We were all thinking of the 1993—a terrorist bomb. We thought, here we go again.

  We got our gear and left.

  People were running down the street in the opposite direction as we hustled over there. We heard them say that a plane had hit; we figured it was a commuter plane. We had no idea how big that hole was.

  We were just two minutes away from [the] South Tower and about to go up to our office when we heard this roar overhead; we looked up and there it was, flying low over the city.

  The second plane impacted the South Tower while we watched, and the explosion spat fire out into the air. We watched the whole thing, completely dumbfounded.

  I don’t know how to explain it, that feeling you get just before you go into shock. Everything drains out of your consciousness; everything unique about you is drained out. I’m convinced that everyone standing in the street looking up at the Towers at that moment was the same. It didn’t matter who you were or what your life experience was. At that moment, all of that stuff that was you drained right out, and you were just another human being looking up into the sky, afraid.

  Our first inclination was to keep going, but then our senses came back to us. We realized that the North and South Towers had just been attacked. Therefore, we needed to turn around. There’s nothing a structural engineer can do in an attack situation, and who knew what else was going to happen? We returned to our office eight blocks away, where our goal became about attending to the safety of our employees.

  We stayed here the whole time and encouraged people not to leave. We didn’t know if more planes were going to come. Fortunately or unfortunately, the people here had to witness the South Tower falling. After that, we couldn’t see anything. The wind was blowing in our direction, and Lower Manhattan was engulfed in a cloud of dust like nuclear winter.

  “… when the Towers stood, you could imagine the Center as a complete subterranean city with buildings on top that were as big as cities themselves.”

  Everyone who normally reported to our office in the South Tower survived. Nicole DeMartini, Frank’s wife, got out safely. By happenstance, the other engineers from that office reported to our central office that day. One of them had been scheduled for outside scans of the building that day; he was supposed to ride the
window-washing maintenance platforms from top to bottom. Obviously, he was very, very fortunate to have not been out there when everything happened.

  Frank DeMartini didn’t make it out. He stayed with a few colleagues from the Port Authority, assisting and ushering people out. We can piece this together from calls made by fire marshals.

  It was a very bad situation up there. People were trapped in elevators. Firemen came rushing up, trying to find those elevator cars. No one had any clue as to what was about to happen.76

  I miss Frank very much. He loved the facility, and he knew it like no one else. From all reports, he had his walkie-talkie glued to his ear and was talking to people trapped in elevators. The last anyone heard from him, he was in one of the elevator rooms saying that the equipment was ready to collapse.

  “Send some engineers up right away. We’ve got to get these people out of here.” That’s the last thing he was reported to have said.

  Before the World Trade Center was built, that side of Lower Manhattan was a bunch of low-rise, three-to-twenty-story brick buildings. Even though it was private development, the Trade Center was an urban renewal project. It cleared out a lot of those old buildings, including the old H&M train station. And when it was built, quite frankly, it looked stupid. These huge Towers with nothing else around them.

  As you move toward central downtown and the Wall Street basin, you can still find pre-war buildings, but the West Side of Lower Manhattan essentially grew up around the Towers. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that this entire city grew up around the Trade Center. And now they’re gone. You’ll never see that panoramic view again.