Within the EOC is seating for sixty-eight agencies to operate during an emergency, with each agency assigned its own workstation. In the event of a major incident, they can rig up another forty workstations. These workstations are set up in groups to facilitate interaction with other agencies in the EOC. The groups are broken down into Health & Medical, Utilities, Public Safety, Infrastructure, Human Services, Transportation, Government, and Administration.
You have to appreciate the planning this all took. But it all proved useless. Later in the day on September 11, 7 World Trade Center collapsed, and OEM suddenly found itself homeless.
Ken: The next day, we heard they were going to use Pier 94 as a morgue. This is where our in-house office was, so we scrambled to get the place ready. We hung a lot of curtains to serve as temporary mortuary chambers. Policemen and firemen started coming in, but we never saw anyone bringing in bodies. As it turns out, there weren’t any to be found right then.
Then Mayor Giuliani showed up. He came in with Judith Nathan and a whole entourage of people whom I assumed were connected to OEM.92 A whole parade of suits came through, debating what to use the Piers for.
The Chelsea Piers are owned by the City of New York. They’re very well-located. Basically, the authorities were able to close down the West Side Highway and have one lane open for emergency traffic on its way down to Ground Zero.93 Pier 94 is easily accessible from that.
Giuliani had never really seen the Piers set up for a trade show: carpeting laid down, booths set up, the works. I think he was impressed. The upshot is that OEM completely took over Pier 92 for operations. Everything that should have been down at 7 World Trade Center moved in here.
I heard later on that they scrambled to find a location as soon as 7 World Trade crumbled on the eleventh. I also heard that they moved into two or three places, trying them on, before they settled into the Pier. What’s not to like about this place? There’s parking, windows all around. And it’s a ship terminal. If worse came to worse, you could pull an aircraft carrier right up the Hudson and dock it outside.
Keep in mind … at that point? No one knew if we were going to war. Or with whom.
Ken: So the Family Assistance Center moved in from the 23rd Street Armory to Pier 94, and OEM moved into Pier 92. We got the word they were coming in to set up on the night of the fifteenth. By that point, we were basically ready to go. Our production schedules tend to run like everything is a last-minute emergency anyway; we’re used to dealing with rush jobs.
Fred: We get calls for big jobs all the time at the last minute. Go into a hotel ballroom; go into a park, into the street; go anywhere. Create an environment, create a production. Work on the fly. That’s what we specialize in.
Ken: So we went ahead and started laying in electrical lines as groups of people started showing up.
Fred: Verizon showed up and set up hundreds and hundreds of phone and T-1 lines for the OEM.
Ken: Trucks pulled in. One of the major telephone companies pulled up and started letting people make free long-distance calls. They needed all sorts of power.
Fred: Fiber optics came in, Time Warner came in to lay cable so every OEM office had their own TV set to watch the breaking news.94 There was no cable at the Pier before this.
Ken: We had to take care of the news teams, the television stations, camera crews, ABC, CBS, everybody making requests all at once. The cafeteria needed power lines for refrigeration. Verizon wanted power. People needed lighting. They wanted sound. On the fly, we designed a sound system that would break the place into three zones, so whoever was at a podium could switch on Zone 1, Zone 2, or Zone 3. We hung fifty speakers, set up hundreds of track lighting instruments. We already had some items at the Pier, and I have a warehouse in the Bronx where I store the rest of my lighting, staging, sound, audiovisual, and video equipment. For this job, we cracked into everything, pulled out all the stops. This was serious business, and it was all about saying, “Yes, we can.”
Ken: We became the de facto power distribution specialists at the Pier, but really, we had no idea what we were doing. There was no blueprint on file for anything like this. So we laid in a very intricate system. I have a supply of multi-cables that drop circuits into quadrants all along the Pier, so we just started dropping circuits all over the place, treating the whole place like a giant theatrical lighting grid.
Power is universal. How it’s distributed is not. There’s a million different connectors—two-wire, three-wire, four-wire. Twist locks with the pin in, twist locks with the … sheesh. Don’t get me started. And every connector is rated by voltage and amperage.
Naturally, every agency had different requirements, but we accommodated everybody.
Fred: We had this huge toy box of everything you could possibly imagine, and from that we pulled equipment to outfit everyone, no matter how weird their request was. Some agencies had color Xerox machines four or five feet wide that worked on “two-away” plugs, a very weird type of plug. We got that problem solved within three hours using a very simple system: locate the part, send someone to get it, install it, done. If they didn’t have it in town, call someone who had it, tell them to ship it immediately, and I’d pay for it. I’m still holding the bills.
Ken: Keep in mind that Pier 94 is huge. It’s a T-shape, about 600 feet wide with a finger that juts out from the top about 900 feet. ConEd ran 16,000 volts into the basement. Then they did substations, which eventually transformed the power down to 480 volts. On Pier 94, I installed 480 to 208-volt transformers; the higher the voltage you transport, the smaller the wire you need. And right at specific locations, I broke it down from 208 to the 110 that was needed.
I set the system up on a temporary basis, so it could move and accommodate different situations. A certain amount of it was permanent, but there’s a whole secondary distribution phase which moved around as needed per show. We had that same situation on Pier 88, 90, and 92.
Fred: To make sure the light distribution was right, I marked out a row of klieg lights on the ceiling. At any one time, six were being used. But if any went out, I had it rigged so that six more were ready to go. I had a backup system, and a backup backup system. If Number 3 went down? No problem. Boom! I’d cut to Number 4. It was absolutely seamless.
Ken: They set up the war room on the mezzanine of Pier 92. That was Giuliani’s private conference room. We went in and set up a sound system, cable mikes, the works. Video monitors outside the room.
The top tier of the mayor’s office sat in the war room, bigwigs from every possible area you could imagine—traffic control, sanitation, fire, police, Amtrak, Metro North, bridge and tunnel.
Fred: The heads of all the departments would receive their updates, figure out who’s problem it was, then work together to solve it.
Ken: And that jives with the way we operate. We don’t take no for an answer. Nothing is impossible for us. When somebody came to us saying they needed some obscure, cockamamie electrical connector? It wasn’t like you could call your super and allow it to go undone for three months. We got it done, man. Period.
It was inspiring to see the city government functioning that way. No politics. No dickering. Just boom! Get it done. In fact, I was struck by how amazingly fast the OEM could put a plan in motion. If there was a hole between the walls? They got on the phone and the hole’s filled in an hour. In front of Pier 94, if there was a fire hydrant that wasn’t working? They got the fire hydrant fixed in two hours. This is unheard of for the way the city normally operates. Amazing.
Fred: And then the Comfort arrived.95 It shipped out from North Carolina or Delaware, I think it was.
Ken: We’re saying that overnight, the facility we’d worked at for eighteen years, staging events and trade shows, was turned into a military facility. Overnight! The whole complex, the whole environment changed. For instance, the Comfort has its own hospital, operating rooms, emergency rooms, and water desalinizing plant. When she pulled up, this place became like a fortified city, eve
rything all ready to go.
Fred: You could opt to stay on the ship. They had rooms prepared for you. They had mess halls you could eat in and people on duty to do whatever you wanted. You could get your laundry done if that’s what you wanted. That ship was of great service to the people working at the Pier.
Fred: The thing I’ll take away from all this? You couldn’t do anything without somebody asking if they could help. I’m talking about people from different departments. Whether they were walking by with a press folder, in a group, solving some problem … a guy from the phone company grabbing a cup of coffee or a janitor passing by with a mop. If you looked like you had a problem putting a ladder up, there were two other guys there helping in the blink of an eye. “Can I hold that ladder for you?” They’d do it, and then off they went. You had time to say thank you, and that was about it. The camaraderie was absolute.
The Pier became a very intense environment to work in. Suddenly, the Red Cross was coming by every hour with fresh coffee and stuff to eat, saying, “Is there anything special you guys want?”
Ken: Everyone wanted to take part; everyone wanted to do something. From our point of view, we felt, hey, this is what we do best. We’re our own emergency management for theatrical and trade shows, and here we were, a perfect fit. We were able to move into action for the cause. We had our hands full.
If there was a downside at all, it might be that we kind of felt isolated. The whole world was down at Ground Zero, but we were up at the Pier. And when you work day and night, day and night, day and night … eventually, you’re working in a fog. It begins to take on its own sense of reality.
It really hit home when we lit that Memorial Wall outside the Pier. I think that was a focal point. That became our connection.
Fred: They never had one technical problem here. I’ve done a lot of trade shows in my time and I used to be an equipment rep. I traveled up and down my area, Florida to Maine, hitting every freakin’ trade show east of the Mississippi. In a trade show, you set up your electrical, and sometimes it works. The thing that really blew me away about what we got done at the Pier—there was never a problem with the electrical.
The true test? The OEM, FEMA, the Red Cross run the Piers now 24/7, and they haven’t had one problem. The stuff that we built is still working 100 percent.
Ken: Nothing’s done half-assed. Not in my business, not in any business. There’s no learning curve anymore when you’ve been on a job eighteen years. Not even for something like 9/11. You just put your nose down and get that job done. The rest works itself out. We were truly proud and happy to make a contribution.
91 OEM is the New York City mayor’s Office of Emergency Management.
92 Judith Nathan was Mayor Giuliani’s girlfriend at the time, and now his ex-wife.
93 The West Side Highway is the thruway that runs along the westernmost side of Manhattan, alongside the Hudson River.
94 Time Warner City Cable of NYC, a cable TV and high-speed online service provider.
95 USNS Comfort III, hull number T-AH-20, commissioned in 1987. The crew that arrived in New York included some 300 navy medical personnel and 61 civilian mariners. The Comfort actually departed Naval Weapons Station Earle, New Jersey, at 3:00 p.m. on September 14, under orders from the commander in chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. She sailed under Captain Ed Nanartowich.
JEAN KNEE and MICHAEL CARROLL
Jean Knee has been a social worker for a private school in New Jersey for nine years. She categorizes her school as a “challenging, nurturing, caring atmosphere.”
Jean’s cousin, Michael Carroll, was thirty-nine years old and a New York City fireman for sixteen years. He was killed in action on September 11.
Jean tells how her family was affected by the passing of their kinsman.
MY DAUGHTER Elizabeth’s wedding was planned for September 15, 2001. On September 11, we heard that Michael was one of the first firemen on the scene at the Towers. Soon after that—in the midst of this very confusing day—we understood that he was missing.
My son works in the city. He was on 18th Street and had to evacuate his building. He knew his cousins lived up on 86th Street, so he took off for Michael’s mother’s apartment. When he got there, the family was trying to get news about Michael, who came from a family of firemen. This situation was their worst nightmare come true.
For the longest time, incoming reports kept repeating the same thing: “He’s missing.” I don’t know if you remember but they kept listing people as “missing” instead of declaring them dead outright, so everyone was tremendously hopeful that they’d find survivors. Gradually and gradually, though, that hope slipped away.
In my own mind, I kept saying, “Michael is safe.” I told my daughter that over and over again: “I know Michael’s safe. He’s somewhere right now and we just don’t know where he is.”
They closed my school on September 12, but I met with people from the upper campus to decide what we were going to do. We brought the faculty in early and talked to them about what types of behavior they could expect from children who’d experienced trauma. “Let the children talk about whatever they want,” we told them. “Don’t censor anyone. Let them have their experience.” Many of the children had parents who’d worked either in the city or at the World Trade Center.
When a child is in pain, there’s a tendency among adults to say, “It’s going to be all right. Don’t worry.” But the adults just want children to be quiet. In this case, it was more important to let the children talk about how they felt.
You know the video clips of the planes hitting the Towers, the ones they played over and over and over again? We found that the young kids, kindergarteners and first-graders, couldn’t distinguish that it was one event played over and over again on television. They thought it was happening anew each time. So some of them thought that all of Manhattan had been destroyed.
Their perceptions of the experience came out in their outside play; they reproduced what they’d seen, smashing into blocks, knocking down towers. Some of the children finished their milk and made planes out of the cartons.
This is all normal. Children express how they’re feeling in play. They don’t necessarily talk about it. Parents kept asking us, “What are they saying? Are they talking about it?” No. They weren’t. They hadn’t formulated it in their heads, and there was nothing about it they could relate it to, nothing at all.
But my real concern is for the people who survived. They went through horrendous things to get out of those buildings. They walked over dead bodies. They thought they were going to die. It must have been a terrible experience, and many of them aren’t getting help. They aren’t talking because they don’t feel they have any right to, since they’re still alive. And if this sort of emotional trauma is allowed to go untreated, there’s a very real danger there, not just to the individual but to society as a whole.
On September 14, we heard from Michael’s family. They’d canceled their hotel reservations and wouldn’t be able to come to Elizabeth’s wedding. They were waiting to hear about Michael’s condition. Perfectly understandable.
My daughter asked, “Am I really going through with this wedding? Is that right? What should I do?” After a lot of deliberation, we decided to go ahead.
The wedding was on the beach in Provincetown, Cape Cod. Since it was a destination wedding, many people couldn’t fly there; the airlines weren’t operating yet. Flights were still grounded. A lot of people from the Washington, D.C., area drove up instead. It was actually incredible how some people got there.
I almost didn’t go myself. I felt that, in my ten years at the school, this was the time I was needed most. The principal finally had to tell me, “Go to the wedding. Nothing’s going to fall apart while you’re gone for the weekend.” So I drove from New Jersey to Massachusetts on Friday night, the fourteenth.
All the way up to Massachusetts, every overpass had flags and signs up that said, “God Bless America.” It was a six-hour ride, a
nd I cried the whole way up.
When we got to Provincetown, candles were lit as a memorial in the center of town. People knew people who had died on the planes. This tragedy reached everywhere, you know?
On October 20, the family decided to hold a memorial Mass for Michael. The wake was held the day before at Campbell Funeral Home on Madison and 81st. The entire fourth floor was reserved for Michael’s wake. The rooms and hallways were filled with firemen, family, and friends.
When the firemen entered the building, they took the stairs—that’s what firemen do. They don’t take elevators. Stairways are the safest part of the building, and I always imagined that Michael was in a stairway at the World Trade Center when he perished.
Mayor Giuliani came to the wake. I think he attended all the services for the uniformed men that died at the World Trade Center, though how he was able to schedule that, I don’t know.
Elizabeth was at the wake, and her family kept asking about her wedding. She was touched. They’d all sent flowers to her wedding with a note saying, “Thinking of you on this day. From your family in New York.” She was so overwhelmed that, in the midst of this difficult time in their lives, they had been thinking of her.
Tower Stories Page 43
