The “911” terrorist attacks that took 2,823 lives at the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City one year ago touched us all in some way and changed our lives as well. Remembering it is painful, bringing back, for everyone, many desolate moments, but necessary if the personal growth and lessons learned are to be permanent.
Construction Equipment Guide (CEG) was uniquely challenged as the nation responded, because as an equipment publication, it needed to tell the story of how contractors, dealers, and the rest of its industry acted with confidence, self-sacrifice and compassion throughout those long days and nights.
Covering the story was a unique challenge for me personally because I lost a niece, Johanna, 25, on 911. This retrospective includes some personal remembrances because her loss typifies the pain and anguish of many thousands during the year.
Emergency Response
The construction industry was on the front lines of a war on terror after the 911 attacks, and it responded magnificently, without panic. Recalling those days a year ago, one recalls the clear, determined voices of contractors and dealers describing how they mobilized forces, almost like generals moving armies.
Pat Ahern, president of Edward Ehrbar Inc., Pelham Manor, NY, told of working through the entire first night after the tragedy, dispatching excavators and other equipment, with police escort, for use by excavating contractors.
“All through that first day and night, we were called by other distributors, and by most of the manufacturers, asking what they could do to help,” Ahern told CEG. “The manufacturers said that, if we needed any parts, they would get them to us overnight by truck, which they did.”
Tim Hoffman, president of Hoffman Equipment Inc., Piscataway, NJ, said worries about finding enough tractor-trailers to transport heavy cranes, wheel loaders and other machines to the disaster scene proved groundless because, “We had an enormous positive response from our contractor customers who generously donated their equipment and personnel.”
One also remembers the shocked tones of industry participants as they described Ground Zero. Among the first on the scene, they personally experienced the horror and desolation resulting from the collapse of the buildings and loss of thousands of lives, yet performed their jobs despite the pressure and emotional strain.
Joseph Wesley Sr., president of AmQuip Corp., Bensalem, PA, which supplied 300-ton crawler cranes for lifting debris, described the scene as “hellish and horrible” and “worse than the Korean War, where I served.”
“You get a sinking feeling in your heart when you view the scene with the towers missing,” said George Mazziolo, president of Formula Equipment Co., Rock Tavern, NY. “I never thought I would see a situation where the nation is at war, but we really are. Hopefully, I will never see it again. No matter what we do, it will never be the same.”
The search was painstaking and heartbreaking. First cranes would lift out girders, pieces of columns and other debris. If human remains were found, they were placed in special containers and passed from fireman to fireman.
Finally, excavators fed loaders for about 60 demolition trailers, which were constantly filled and moved away. Battalions of dump trucks carried the debris to barges. Then more equipment unloaded the barges and deposited the rubble at the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, NY.
Squads of firemen, meanwhile, were being lowered into areas that had been cleared, searching for possible life.
Joe Carsky, chief engineer of Tully Construction Co. Inc., Flushing, NY, one the four prime contractors for the initial work at Ground Zero, told CEG:
“I call the footprint [where the towers fell] the Heart of Darkness. We’re looking for a ray of light, a life, within that Heart of Darkness. There is still so much hope out there. The firemen are just relentless in their dedication. Everyone in this area has been touched in some way by this tragedy; my next-door neighbor lost someone.”
One contractor who had been at the scene said a triage unit, established next to Building 7, had been crushed when Building 1 (the North Tower) fell, with some debris imploding sideways, like sand. He said that, in the tumult, no one realized this had happened for some time.
The main debris field, totaling an estimated 1.7 million tons, was about four city blocks square. Two huge piles, about six stories high, including the skeletal outline of some outer framework, marked where the towers had fallen.
An area roughly two blocks around the footprint was two to six feet deep in rubble, with dust extending another four to five blocks on all sides. The towers fell through six stories of basement so a well 60 or 70 feet deep, covering four blocks, also had to be excavated and removed.
Approximately 25 smaller cranes and 35 excavators carefully cleared rubble from the outer areas, where there was uncertainty about supports and possible collapse of an eight-story parking garage and other cavities. Several structural steel support columns were then built at the edges of the 16-acre Ground Zero area, as bases allowing larger and heavier units to work on the huge piles of material.
The coordinated expertise of the entire construction industry focused on the rescue and removal. Grapples were employed extensively, along with backhoe loaders, bulldozers, cherry pickers, and a wide range of other equipment, including approximately 200 utility carts, which moved people and tools around the disaster site.
The effort, coordinated by the New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM), went far beyond large and small machines. Caterpillar dealers set up many light towers and emergency generators, beginning on the night of 911.
These provided most of the standby power for the city’s financial, insurance, and banking districts.
Equipment experts from rental firms and manufacturers were at the smoking ruins beginning the night of 911, providing advice and technical assistance as hundreds of units lined nearby streets and staging areas. People on the scene had little sleep, especially during those first terrible days when rescuers believed that people might still be alive under the debris.
“I watch guys riding out to holding areas completely exhausted as new guys come in and I ask myself, ’Can this really have happened?’” said Al Cooley, president of Malvese Equipment Co. Inc., Hicksville, NY. “The concern which rescue workers in the country have for human beings, and the coordination between all departments at the site, has really been impressive.”
During the first week, which was mainly careful cutting and lifting, equipment moved more than 60,000 tons of debris in 4,554 truckloads. Only after all hope of finding life was lost did the operation move from rescue into full-scale cleanup late in September, with 50 large hydraulic excavators and about 20 cranes constantly moving debris.
A Memory
As the rescuers and equipment worked with a hopeful urgency, the full horror of the terrorist attack, the collapsed buildings, the thousands of missing, and the anguished families, broke over the nation. Now, in retrospect, it seems like yesterday, not a year ago.
September 11, 2001
9:30 a.m. — I had just returned from a chapel service when the phone rang. My sister Louise. “Turn on the TV. A plane hit the World Trade Center!”
I saw, on the set, the smoking, burning towers and heard the frantic words from a woman reporter near the scene.
9:45 a.m. — “Hi, this is John [my younger brother].” I told him I had the TV on and knew about the trade center. “Johanna worked on the 93rd floor of the first tower,” he said very flatly. “I’m afraid we’ve lost her.”
Johanna was my always smiling, auburn-haired niece. I had forgotten that she worked at the trade center.
“Joe [Johanna’s boyfriend] is down there looking for her,” John, who had called me from his office, continued. “Ruth [John’s wife] is at our house.”
After emerging from a subway exit shortly before 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, Joe had seen the first plane exploding into the North Tower. He had called Johanna on his cell phone, but there was no answer.
10:30 a.m. — I drove to John’s home about four miles away. Ruth met me at the door. She was alone and very calm. “Kathy [Johanna’s roommate at their apartment on East 88th St.] called and said Johanna was feeling sick and didn’t leave for work until 8:25.”
“That’s great news,” I said. “She couldn’t possibly have gotten to work before the plane hit.”
Johanna, who had participated in the New York City Marathon, would probably have run to the Lexington Avenue subway two blocks away from her apartment. If she had caught an express, she might have arrived at the trade center by 8:45. But there was no way she could have reached her office on the 93rd floor by 8:46, when the first plane hit between the 90th and 95th floors.
Ruth went into the living room and sat on the sofa. “I think if Johanna were dead she would send me some sort of sign,” she said.
But Joe, searching and questioning everywhere he could during the chaos, called during the afternoon that he had been unable to find Johanna or anyone who had seen her. She had been wearing a white T-shirt, gray slacks, and a black sweater around her shoulders.
7 p.m. — Still no word as the hours went by. That night, my wife and I joined John and Ruth at a prayer service, at a church near their home, for victims of the attack. John elected not to tell the priest that Johanna was among the missing.
That night, John led a prayer service in his living room. Other brothers and sisters were there, as well as family friends. John and Ruth have a strong faith and kept conversation, and even funny stories, moving.
That’s the way it was — togetherness, prayer, and food — every night for the next seven days as the hours passed without any word of Johanna.
Johanna’s younger brother John, 21, as well as Joe, his parents, and Johanna’s three roommates, joined us.
One evening, one of John’s neighbors, who was Muslim, unexpectedly joined us at the prayer service, chanted a prayer and translated it for us. The prayer asked for peace and brotherhood. Another night, a priest, visiting from Rome, knocked on the door and introduced himself. In the living room that night, he repeated several lines from Horace:
Tears are built into the structure of human existence
And everything that is mortal deeply touches the human heart.
October 2, 2001
As the Ground Zero project moved from rescue to cleanup, hundreds of memorial services were being held for missing victims. Johanna had not been found. On Oct. 2, I accompanied John and Ruth as they visited her apartment for the first time since Sept. 11. They were remarkably calm, though I could see the pain in their eyes. It was a beautiful fall afternoon.
We ate dinner at a restaurant on the Hudson River in Nyack, NY, and then attended a Memorial Mass that evening in Blauvelt, NY, for Sean Fegan, a broker with Fred Alger Management where Johanna worked as a liaison with institutional investors, in an office with a view over most of the city.
One of the photos at the church showed Sean and about eight co-workers, all smiling, at a party aboard one of New York’s sightseeing boats. Sean also had hosted a group at a charity event at a New York Yankees game on Sept. 8.
The Alger office was directly in the path of the first terrorist plane. Now most of the people in the photo had simply disappeared.
Sean’s father, mother, sister and fiancee from Sweden, who had traveled to Ireland with him, talked with us. They often smiled. In one of the eulogies, Sean’s sister, Catherine, said, “Life isn’t only about results, but about our interaction with each other and the time we spend with each other.”
As we left the church, Irish pipes were playing. I noticed a large bell in front of the entrance. Under it were the words of English poet John Donne:
Any man’s death diminishes me
Because I am involved in mankind
And therefore ask not for whom the bell tolls
It tolls for thee.
We returned and made plans for a memorial service for Johanna. But first there was a service in front of Independence Hall on Oct. 8 for the lost from around the Philadelphia area. On a rainy morning, families stood under umbrellas in front of the birthplace of freedom as city and state officials spoke words of comfort. As he talked with relatives after the ceremony, a teary-eyed Pennsylvania Gov. Mark Schweiker kept repeating, “It [coping] will take time, time, time.”
October 20, 2001
More than 1,000 people attended Johanna’s Memorial Mass on Oct. 20th. In his eulogy, Joe Bonavita said that Johanna “is with me now and always will be with me.”
The next evening, my nephew Stephen, who was working on Mark Green’s mayoral campaign in New York, called John. Johanna’s body had been identified. She had suffered severe concussion and had apparently been struck by debris outside the North Tower.
We had a small intimate graveside service on Oct. 26.
In November, members of our family carried Johanna’s running shoes, and her picture, at the Philadelphia Marathon, where Johanna had planned to compete.
Looking for Answers
I had been previously assigned by CEG to cover the national conference in Washington, D.C., of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), on Oct. 23 to 24. The conference theme had been changed to “Designing and Managing Vulnerability.” Ironically, one of the engineers being honored was the designer of the World Trade Center.
ASCE said initial findings of its investigation, which was to be completed in six months, indicated that the collapses of the Twin Towers could have been caused by any of three factors:
The impact of the aircraft with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel in each plane, the resulting fire, which far exceeded the burning time of jet fuel, or damage to the non-redundant connections between the lateral floor beams and the exterior vertical columns which supported the beams.
During intensive discussions, engineers discussed such remedies as more fire-resistant structures and skybridges for faster escape.
A Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) official told CEG that future bridges and highways need to be equipped with sensors, including ones that can read (and check) license plates, and that some future rights-of-way may be routed farther from vulnerable facilities like power plants.
A speaker advocated strengthening ties between the country’s three power grid systems, avoiding common corridors and shortening the distance between substations.
A New York design engineer confirmed to CEG that a triage unit, along with a bridge, had indeed been buried in the collapse of the towers.
“People were dying all over the place,” he added. “However, the city has kept track of the exact location where each body was found.”
May 20, 2002
W. Gene Corley, who headed the ASCE team investigating engineering aspects of the 911 disaster, told CEG that the most important finding was that Building 5 in the WTC complex had collapsed only because of fire and failure of floor connections. He said future standards for connections are expected to include fire requirements.
Corley said that the North Tower and South Tower collapsed due to the severe damage from the terrorist aircraft, which were fully loaded with fuel, and the fact that the impact knocked off fireproofing from both lateral trusses supporting floors and from vertical columns
Future fireproofing for steel, he said, is expected to be required to stick on despite impact, and redundant pins are needed between trusses and columns.
May 25, 2002
Our family attended graduation ceremonies for John Jr., Johanna’s younger brother, at Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY, on May 25.
A photography major, John had completed, as his senior project, a memorial to 911 victims. It was part of a special exhibit at the college.
First, John took chunks of concrete from a demolished building. He placed a photo image on each by liquid emulsion. Johanna’s showed shoes in her closet, a running shoe, a white rose from her apartment in New York “because she loved New York,” and a small heart pillow which she had made as a child.
John also placed images on concrete illustrating the life and interests of two other victims from the Philadelphia suburbs: Timothy Betterly and Robert McIlvaine.
Visiting a scrap steel yard in Ithaca, John found that the supervisor had worked in an office at the trade center and had spent some time as a volunteer at Ground Zero during the rescue efforts.
The supervisor gave him some steel I-beams, which John integrated into his display. Finally, John covered everything with a thin layer of concrete dust.
May 30, 2002
At first, there was a hushed silence as thousands of people, including relatives of victims, attended Memorial Day ceremonies concluding the unprecedented round-the-clock cleanup of the WTC site.
10:29 a.m., the minute when the second 110-story tower cascaded to earth on Sept. 11, the clang of firebells — five rings repeated four times, the 5-5-5-5 code signaling the death of a firefighter in New York City — broke the solemn quiet.
Then 15 representatives of families, police and fire departments, agencies and others who had lost loved ones, and of equipment operators who had performed the herculean cleanup, slowly bore a stretcher, on which rested a folded American flag, up a 500-foot ramp, past a line of hundreds of saluting police and firemen.
Next a flatbed truck bearing a 58-ton I-beam, draped in a black cover on which a large flag rested, proceeded up the platform, to the trilling of a kilted bagpipe band and the roll of drums.
The beam was the last vertical steel column that had been in place at Ground Zero, and the last large piece of steel to leave the excavation site. It was sprayed with the number of fire, police and port authority personnel who had been lost.
Taps sounded when the truck reached the top of the platform and the pipers played “America the Beautiful.” Only then, said The New York Times, was there “a sustained almost defiant applause that sought to fill a rare silence that had lasted nearly half an hour.”
The ceremonies officially closed a monumental effort that was unique in the history of the construction industry. The images of people and equipment reclaiming the site, which was like a huge wound in the country’s soul, will be permanently engraved in the American consciousness.
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