American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Across the East River, in an industrial section of Queens, in a converted Chiclets factory now used as the headquarters of the DDC, Ken Holden had been delayed by the usual round of morning telephone calls. Holden was an observant, quick-eyed man of medium height, with close-cropped curly hair and a body gone wide after fifteen years of government service. As a registered (if ambivalent) Democrat in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s Republican administration, he was not a political operative in the conventional sense but a professional bureaucrat selected for command because of his willingness to stay in the shadows and accomplish routine but essential work; he was also known to be very smart. His intelligence gave him a presence, but not always to his benefit. He had an acerbic wit that he tried to restrain when around duller minds. The restraint required effort on his part. He was by nature amazingly verbose. He had a way of cutting short his sentences by saying “and whatnot,” only to go on immediately to the next thought. Among his subordinates he had a reputation as a decisive and impatient manager with a strong instinct for self-preservation. Often he reveled in his job, and sometimes he did not. He had a badge and an official car with a driver. He could be arrogant at times, especially with people like low-ranking cops who got in his way or slowed him down. But with his inner circle he was unpretentious. He made a comfortable middle-class living, near the top of the city’s pay scale, but as an appointee in an administration nearing its end, he worried openly about what would come next. He was not a construction man, and had few ties to the industry. He lived in a modest house in Queens with his wife, Frances McGuire, an artist, and their young son, Teddy, named after the first Roosevelt. Holden loved his family. He liked to read. He drove a Subaru station wagon. He liked to hike and cross-country ski. He liked his weekends off.

  The agency he ran, the DDC, had been created in 1996 by the Giuliani administration to oversee the generally thankless work of building and repairing the municipal infrastructure. Typically the DDC had about 800 projects under way, most of them very small. With its 1,300 employees and a $3.7 billion design and construction budget, it was a sizable organization, but it lacked the natural political clout of the uniformed services—fire and police—or the prestige of the city’s small but highly visible Office of Emergency Management. Giuliani was widely thought to favor all the law-and-order types, because of his background as a prosecutor. This may also simply have been a trait of his personality. He had a reputation for being dictatorial and vindictive. His detractors called him a terror. His admirers said he ran a tight ship. Either way, Holden had learned not to expect friendship from him, and to fear his attention rather than to court it. He had also learned to be on time. The mayor was not expected to attend this morning’s 9:15 meeting at City Hall, but his loyalist deputy Tony Coles was standing in for him, and Holden did not want to be late.

  Holden tended to sweat when he moved fast. He was heading down the stairs in the atrium of the DDC headquarters when one of his staff members came up to him and reported that an airplane had just hit the World Trade Center. Holden hurried outside to where his official car waited, and in the distance he saw the North Tower burning. One rush then turned into another, and endured.

  Were it not for the scheduled meeting downtown, neither Holden nor Mike Burton would have had any reason to get involved in the recovery from the disaster. The DDC was not meant to respond to emergencies. But despite the morning’s confusion, the discipline of the schedule prevailed, and without giving much thought to why, each man headed independently toward City Hall—indeed, more intently than before. Actually, Burton was already almost there. He had been coming down the FDR Drive in his Jeep at the time of the first airplane’s impact, had noticed the ambulances going by, and had turned on the radio to find out why. After getting stuck in traffic by the Brooklyn Bridge, he pulled to the side, and proceeded through the city on foot. Holden had farther to go, but in a fast sedan with rights to the emergency lanes—a police-package Ford Crown Victoria with a special permit in the front window and a siren and flashing lights. The driver was a short, muscular Dominican named Apollo Hernandez, a bodybuilder who flew small airplanes in his spare time and had a penchant for speed. He was completely dedicated to Holden, whom he referred to as “the Commissioner.”

  Despite that formality, in the car they had established some of the patterns of a couple. Holden liked to sit in front and give Hernandez driving advice. Today, for once, it did not involve slowing down. As they raced through Queens, they listened to the news radio station WINS, whose tag line was “You give us twenty-two minutes, and we’ll give you the world.” They lost reception briefly while passing under the East River in the Midtown Tunnel. When the station returned, in Manhattan, the world it gave them was news that a second airplane had come in, and that it had hit the South Tower. The implications were huge. Hernandez launched into an earnest explanation of the fuel capacity of small airplanes. Holden for once was almost silent. Though he had been raised in an observant Jewish family, and as a young man had given faith a serious try for a few months while living in Israel, he had become a thoroughly unreligious person—and also enthusiastically profane. True to himself now, he did not invoke the name of God, as so many others did on both sides that day, but reacted to the magnitude of the event by thinking Holy shit! as the car sped downtown.

  They parked beside City Hall, about four blocks from the burning towers. Holden jumped out and said, “Wait here. Don’t move. Wait here. I’ll come back.” Those words haunted him later, after the buildings fell. In the uncertainty of the moment he couldn’t help but worry that Hernandez might have followed his orders too faithfully and died. Meanwhile, City Hall was locked tight. Holden gave up on the idea of a meeting, and stood idly outside. Burton had given up on it too, and had boarded a mobile command post—a bus belonging to the Office of Emergency Management—that was creeping west toward the Trade Center fires. Then the South Tower fell. Holden heard it as a growl, Burton as a roar. Both men were caught in the debris cloud, and each moved north among the crowds. When the North Tower fell, Burton was caught in that cloud, too, and Holden was not. Because neither of them was injured, it amounted to a minor difference. Essentially they experienced the same dreamy confusions that were shared by a hundred thousand others in downtown Manhattan.

  After a few hours Holden found a functioning phone and first called DDC headquarters, and then called his wife. Later I asked him how she had been. He said, “Upset.”

  I said, “Crying?”

  “No. Very concerned about loss of innocence. ‘We’ve lost our innocence!’ she kept saying. I said, ‘Try to relax.’ I told her I didn’t think I’d be home for dinner.”

  “And when she said, ‘We’ve lost our innocence,’ did she mean America?”

  “Yeah. Obviously she was watching TV.”

  He was finally able to contact Hernandez, who, as Holden had feared, had remained loyally parked at City Hall through both collapses, but was unscathed. He had watched the towers fall from close by, had been hit by the successive debris storms, and had lost family in the attack, but he later described the experience to me in the most pragmatic terms, without bewilderment or self-pity. He said, “You go into that alert, that automatic alert. You’re just waiting to do the right thing. To me the right thing was to turn on all the flashing lights on the car. In case somebody needed help, they could come to the car. But I wasn’t going to move out of there until I heard from the Commissioner.”

  Hernandez was thirty-nine years old. He had immigrated to New York from the Dominican Republic at age thirteen, in December of 1975, and despite the cold weather had immediately felt at home. He had become a citizen in 1994. He had led exercise classes at a Jack LaLanne gym, and had met his wife there. He had taken a job with the city for the security it offered. He was a good worker. He was willing and uncomplaining. He was very clean-cut. He did not drink or smoke. He had three little children, and was a good father. Now he was the perfect soldier, an American ideal. While hundreds of panic
ked people went running by, some in the wrong direction, he stayed at his post by his Ford Crown Victoria, and without fear.

  Two women rushed up to him in terror, hugging each other and sobbing. “Oh, my God, the towers fell!” Hernandez calmed them down. They walked away. He spotted a couple of wounded policemen on their hands and knees, one of them bleeding from the head. He got them into the back of the car, and gave them a blanket with which to wipe their faces. They called him their guardian angel. The dust cleared. Attracted by the flashing lights, a woman approached who was shaking all over and could not speak. Hernandez found help for her and returned to the car. He noticed that his cell phone and radio links had been disrupted. After ninety minutes in position, he realized that Holden would no longer be looking for him here. He drove the policemen to the vicinity of a first-aid station, and then headed slowly uptown. Eventually the cell phone began to function, and Holden got through to him. They had a short, happy reunion on Carmine Street, in Greenwich Village. By early afternoon Hernandez had parked downtown again, and like a good soldier was waiting close to where he had waited before. Holden and Burton had met up in the police headquarters nearby, where a temporary command center had been established, and they were trying to marshal the DDC’s resources to help. Hernandez wanted to help too. He was not tired or bored. He was patient and proud. He felt love for his adopted country. He had never been in combat, but understood waiting as the experience of war. The streets were mostly quiet. Heavy smoke was rising into the sky.

  Holden and Burton responded tactically, with no grand strategy in mind. At the police headquarters they discovered a telephone in a room off the temporary command center—a chaotic hall filled with officials struggling to get organized—and they began making calls. No one asked them to do this, or told them to stop. One of the deputy mayors there had formally been given the task of coordinating the construction response, but with little idea of how to proceed, he had so far done nothing at all. Holden and Burton themselves were operating blind, groping forward through the afternoon with only the vaguest concept of the realities on the ground. The DDC’s previous experience with emergencies had been limited to a sinking EMS station in Brooklyn, caused by a water-main break, and a structural failure at Yankee Stadium, one week before baseball’s opening day. Without yet having visited the site, Burton could not now bring himself to believe that the Trade Center towers had completely collapsed. Imagining the need to protect people from falling glass, he phoned a scaffolding company and requested that they prepare to load a half mile of sidewalk bridging onto their trucks. Holden later told me this seemed to him like taking a Band-Aid to a gunshot wound—but at the time there were more important things to do than quibble. It seemed likely that hundreds of people lay trapped in the ruins, suffering and slowly dying. Holden arranged for a police escort to bring in twenty-five light towers from Queens for the coming night. Burton established an expanding “phone tree,” alerting the city’s heavy-construction industry to ready itself for emergency requests later in the day.

  As might be expected, the industry was something of an intimate circle, in which many of the top people had known each other for years. Burton himself was one of them, though he was currently engaged in a foray through government service. Faced with the urgent need to get crews and heavy equipment onto the job, he bypassed ordinary bidding procedures and made some immediate choices on the basis of personal and corporate reputations, asking AMEC, Bovis, and Turner to send representatives to an initial meeting that afternoon at police headquarters. Holden brought in Tully as well. As it turned out, these were the four companies that ultimately would share the lucrative job of cleaning up, earning profits in the millions, though at considerable exposure to potential claims and lawsuits, because neither the companies nor the city were ever able to obtain adequate insurance for the Trade Center project. Cynics who later implied that the choice of these companies was in some way an insiders’ deal were only superficially right. The four companies were simply the first that came to mind—and on the day of the collapse they responded altruistically in the face of enormous confusion, thinking at the most a few days ahead, without even the possibility of calculating gain. Holden and Burton also brought in the renowned engineering firm of Thornton-Tomasetti. Soon afterward the firm’s habitually well-dressed president, Richard Tomasetti, met up with some of the other chosen representatives, and rode in an escorted van to police headquarters downtown.

  The first meeting didn’t amount to much, in part because police officials refused to give the group access to the site, forcing the construction men to begin planning their response on the strength of television images and secondhand news. It was understandable if the police were perhaps overly rigid, or were operating on the basis of suddenly obsolete concepts of public safety: they had seen thousands of citizens killed just a few hours before, and had lost twenty-three of their own people, and for the very reasons they had chosen the profession, many of them must have had great difficulty with America’s apparent loss of control. Nonetheless, Holden and Burton urgently believed that their group had important capabilities to offer the search-and-rescue effort, and they felt increasingly frustrated as the day dragged toward night and they continued to be blocked. They also felt emotions that Holden could not admit to then but later described to me as only human—an urge to get to the center of the action, and a powerful curiosity about conditions there. The two men kept demanding to go in, and despite a short setback when World Trade Center Seven collapsed, they finally wore the police down. At 5:30 that afternoon they got permission for their nascent team of unbuilders to explore the ruins firsthand.

  The walk they took became famous at the site because of the forces it unleashed. About fifteen people went along, including Holden and Burton, Richard Tomasetti, and a collection of tough construction guys. Though every one of these men was accustomed to grappling with problems on a very large scale, none was prepared for a disaster so vast and severe. Wading through paper litter and pulverized concrete, they tried to approach from the north, but were blocked by heavy smoke. Few of them had respirators. They moved upwind to the Hudson and flanked southward again, cutting through the peripheral public areas of the heavily damaged World Financial Center, a high-rise complex that stood between the Trade Center and the river. Conditions there were so strange that Holden afterward had trouble knowing where they had been, though he did remember one surreal passage through a ruined atrium restaurant where all the fire alarms were blaring, wah, wah, wah.

  Then, through an opening between buildings, they came suddenly upon the Trade Center ruins themselves—the skeletal walls and smoking hills of rubble where the towers had been, the boxy shell of the Marriott hotel, the heavy steel spears protruding from neighboring buildings, the collapsed north pedestrian bridge, the massive external column sections thrown every which way across the streets, and everywhere the fires. For Holden it looked like a scene from Apocalypse Now. He told me, “It was hallucinogenic—quasi-druggy, with flares shooting up and death in the air. There was a sense of crazed panic, people fighting to save lives, fire hoses cascading all over the place.” For the next ninety minutes they moved through a smoky twilight among the ruins. The ground was littered with hundreds of shoes, presumably from victims, but characteristically for this unusually imploded killing zone, not a single corpse lay in sight. Afterward Holden was nearly at a loss for words to describe what went on in his mind. He said, “Cars. I remember everywhere you’d walk there were crushed cars. Some that had burned. Sparks flying. Flames shooting. Smoke all over the place. People desperately trying to move the debris. The light was dim. It was just this really odd, frantic atmosphere. We were walking through twisted debris. It was completely startling—like a ‘Holy shit!’ experience. Every corner you turned was ‘Holy shit!’ ”

  Mike Burton and Richard Tomasetti stayed together, each struggling to maintain an analytical frame of mind. It helped to confer with each other. Their focus was on lifting the steel to
uncover survivors. It was obvious that large numbers of skilled workers were necessary, along with more heavy equipment than the two men could have imagined before. They needed not just the largest diesel excavators and cranes to pick up the pieces but, for lack of stockpiling space, a fleet of trucks to haul off the debris—and they needed it all right away. The first problem was access: a major effort would be required to clear a path down West Street just to get equipment to the ruins of the north pedestrian bridge. That bridge by chance was a Tomasetti design, and it was stout, but it had been hit with impossible force when the North Tower fell. Now it was blocking the best route to the pile.

  The group moved south under the crackling flames of a burning building, a 1907 landmark at 90 West Street, and they skirted a severed 767 wheel before heading back toward the center of the site by the severely wounded Bankers Trust building. Suddenly a fireman rushed up to Burton and Tomasetti and said, “Listen, there’s a water-main break, and there’s no pressure to fight the fires. What we want to do is tap into the water tower at the top of this building.” He pointed to Bankers Trust. “I want to know if it’s safe.”

  Was it because of their office clothes? The fireman did not know Burton or Tomasetti, but had read them correctly as engineers. Burton looked at Tomasetti, who peered at the building through the smoke, and hesitated. The structure had been speared and torn open. The fireman mentioned that his people had already been in the basement, searching for victims. Tomasetti said, “Well, it’s kind of dark out, but the building seems to be missing only one column . . .”

  As the second-in-command of an obscure city agency in Queens, Burton had not the slightest authority here at the Trade Center site, but he was willing to assume it anyway. This was typical of him. Burton’s brashness was well known within the DDC, where people tended to be cautious of him for his disdain of procedure, and for what many saw as his arrogance. Holden himself was wary of Burton, and said he felt the need to “cage” him regularly, but he recognized Burton’s effectiveness nonetheless. Burton was the DDC’s doer. And Burton had an agile mind. He was a right-wing conservative but also surprisingly supple, and he understood now that conventional standards of safety simply did not apply to these ruins. To the fireman he said, “Listen. You’ve already been in the building. You’ve already risked your life once. It would take us a week in daylight to tell whether the building is safe or not. If you climb the stairs on the far side, it’s probably okay. That’s a guess. But it won’t be any riskier than where you’ve already been.” With that the fireman murmured into a walkie-talkie and disappeared. Burton exchanged glances with Tomasetti. He saw a group of firemen go running toward the building, and wondered about the wisdom of his advice. He did not waffle publicly, however, and it later turned out that he was right. Bankers Trust did not fall—and indeed, not a single person was killed during the nine months of the recovery effort that ensued. Burton had just made the first of his many quick decisions at the Trade Center site. He knew already what others soon discovered—that he had a particular talent for making up his mind.