American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  The group returned to police headquarters after dark and worked through the night, mobilizing columns of equipment and thousands of skilled laborers, considering the rudiments of a disposal program, laying out the role of engineers, planning the first rapid inspections of hundreds of neighboring buildings, and outlining the four-quadrant overlay that would divide the excavation work according to the simplest geometry. The four-quadrant pattern owed as much to the presence of the four companies on that evening’s tour as to a compelling operational logic, but while it endured, during the first urgent months, it functioned reasonably well. There was no time for refined planning anyway. Holden went home, and got two hours of sleep; Burton spent fifteen minutes dozing in his Jeep. Then they returned to the site and continued to work tirelessly. They were bit players at first, and did not pretend otherwise: the mayor’s Office of Emergency Management was supposed to be coordinating things, and the main response was overwhelmingly and appropriately the Fire Department’s. But to a degree that was surprising even to Holden and Burton, over the next few days they were able to bring New York’s enormous construction energies to bear. As individuals, they remained almost invisible, but their influence rapidly grew.

  None of this reflected the normal operation of the U.S. emergency-response system. After natural and man-made disasters in the past—notably the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building, in Oklahoma City—the efforts on the ground had rapidly been nationalized under the direction of FEMA and its operational allies in the Army Corps of Engineers, a branch of the military that calls itself the world’s largest public engineering, design, and construction-management agency. These people in turn dealt primarily with pre-assigned companies that specialized in the disaster-cleanup business (many based in Florida, along the hurricane tracks). The system was intelligently organized and charted—and given the frequency of destructive weather in North America, it was well exercised. It was not, however, quite prepared to operate with a speed and intensity equal to New York’s.

  Ken Holden, for one, didn’t even consider turning to the outside for help. He was vaguely aware of FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, but with no previous experience in national emergencies, he neither knew nor wondered about the protocol. He might have assumed that ultimately the federal government would pay the bill, but afterward he had no memory that such questions crossed his mind. To me he said, “None of us wondered, ‘Should we contact the state? Should we contact the feds? FEMA? The Army Corps?’ It was just ‘We’ve got a disaster here. Let’s fix it.’ It was instinctive. ‘Let’s give the Fire Department access. Let’s let the police see if they can rescue their own. This is not out of our realm.’ ”

  By “realm” he meant professional expertise, but he might as well have been talking about his beloved city. He was a typically proud New Yorker. He said, “As I kept explaining to FEMA later, this is not Oklahoma. We had the equipment. We had the connections. We could handle it. We just went in and did what we had to do. And no one said no.”

  “Did anyone say yes?”

  “No. But then again, we weren’t asking.”

  More than pride was at play: Holden simply did not have the time to seek permissions. The rush to find survivors was hopeful at first, and then less so. Sam Melisi later described for me the wild-eyed urgency of the initial search. Speaking of the lost firemen, who throughout the months to come provided a focus to the recovery efforts, he said, “These were people you had worked with, and they were maybe alive. You knew they were trapped in there, and there was a sense of franticness, and it was personal. I remember crawling through the steel—it would have probably been by the hotel. There were some spaces that let you get below and take a look around. It wasn’t regulated at all. The first couple of days, anything went. It wasn’t like somebody was saying, ‘You can’t go in there, you can’t do this, you can’t do that.’ It was more like ‘Hey, if you think you can get in there, go ahead.’ All bets were off. It was just ‘Go and bring somebody home.’ ”

  At age forty-three, Melisi was a small, wiry man who had a disarming way of suggesting his opinions rather than asserting them. He had a nasal voice and a big moustache. He was obviously somewhat shy. Within the wolf-pack world of the Trade Center site he became known at first simply because his diffidence was unique. Still, he was a fireman through and through, with strong allegiances to the department and a blue-collar history that was fairly standard for the type. He grew up on Staten Island as the son of a diver with a small marine-salvage business, and he excelled in high school before heading to college in Oregon, where, cut off from his roots, he floundered. After dropping out of school, he hired on at a sawmill for six months, and then returned to New York, went to work in heavy construction, and eventually became a licensed equipment and crane operator. At the advanced age of twenty-seven he joined the Fire Department because of the generous time off (“Like being on permanent vacation,” he told me) and only then discovered the job’s power to mold people’s lives, including his own. So far he had put sixteen years into the service—in various ladder and rescue companies, and most recently as an assistant in the engine room of the city’s 1938 fireboat, called the Firefighter. Because of his heavy-equipment experience and additional training, he also served on a specialized collapsed-building team, which had responded to the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center and had been dispatched to the subsequent bombing in Oklahoma City and to a hurricane disaster in the Dominican Republic. He lived with his wife and two young children on Staten Island, in a surprisingly rural setting—a small wooden house from the 1840s with a large back yard bordering on a forest preserve and littered with old construction equipment, including a small crane. (One day at the site he said, “People here keep saying how strange it all looks, but I dunno, it kind of looks like my back yard.”) In a shed at the end of his yard he had built a welding and machine shop. The jobs he did there helped him to supplement his modest salary. Sometimes he moonlighted as an electrician. Sometimes he was a plumber, sometimes a carpenter, too.

  When the first airplane hit, Melisi put down his reading in the Firefighter’s engine room and prepared to get under way. When the second airplane hit, he understood it meant war, and he had the strange impression of feeling every possible emotion all at once. When the South Tower fell, the boat was plowing at full speed across New York Harbor, and the twin diesels were roaring. When the North Tower fell, the boat was pulling up to shore, and the diesels were still so loud that Melisi did not hear the thunder. The boat docked just north of the North Cove, along a riverfront promenade. Melisi emerged from the engine room and helped the deck crew drag hose to the fire-suppression teams on the northwest corner of the site. He returned to the boat and helped to engage its pumps, which delivered enormous quantities of harbor water to the ruins over the following two weeks. Aware of Melisi’s training in collapsed buildings and rescue operations, his supervisor then cut him loose. He said, “Just go. See what you can do.” This turned out to be more than a little thing. Melisi’s maritime career had come suddenly to a halt.

  He joined the scramble through the smoke and debris, searching for cavities in which people might have survived. This was a collapse unlike any he had seen before, and not only in size. Though the top layer of the pile was jagged, it was also fantastically dense, and it offered little in the way of natural shelters, or of access to the underground. Melisi circled to the north side, where fires raged and Building Seven threatened to fall, but the devastation was less severe. Handicapped by the lack of a flash-light, he joined a rescue team that descended through a crater in Building Six and made multiple attempts on the North Tower basements, but was blocked each time by smoke and heavy debris. Back on the surface again, he moved down West Street, squeezed under the ruins of the north pedestrian bridge between the hulks of crushed fire trucks, and spent the afternoon with a shovel, digging for survivors and uncovering only the dead. He arrived in the site’s southwest corner that evening at about the same time that Ken Holden, Mike Bur
ton, and the unbuilding crew first came walking through. Melisi neither knew nor noticed them then, but he shared some of their construction expertise, and he had drawn conclusions similar to theirs—that the bucket brigades he saw operating on the pile were ineffectual, and that if victims were to be found alive, it was essential to bring in large cranes and grapplers that could lift the fallen steel columns and expose cavities below the surface. Typically, Melisi did something practical about it right away. He worked to clear an access route from the south, directing front-end loaders to shove cars and toppled lampposts aside, opening a path that detoured around the heaviest obstacles. A perverse pattern then prevailed: the fast-moving small equipment was the first to arrive, and time and again it had to be dismantled or laboriously moved out of the way in order to allow the larger and more effective pieces in; because of the quantities of debris, space was simply not available for both. The delays were frustrating for Melisi, who through his actions and expertise was unintentionally already involved in the management of the site. The greater frustration came later, however, and it was the near total lack of survivors.

  The lack was partly definitional, since it excluded the 15,000 people who were able to walk away, in some cases even after the buildings fell. Their survival, however, did not diminish the reality that thousands remained unaccounted for, or the terrible feeling in those first confused hours and days that time was running out. It went without saying that the survivors who mattered were the ones who might now be lying trapped in the debris. They turned out to be rare: over the subsequent months of retrieval it became obvious from the condition of the bodies that few if any of the victims had perished while awaiting rescue. By the final count, in a place where nearly 3,000 had died, only eighteen people were recovered alive. Two of them were injured policemen discovered on the first day in the underground concourse, a shopping area east of the South Tower that had been speared and pummeled by falling columns but not completely crushed. The remaining sixteen were all found among the ruins of the North Tower. Fourteen of them—twelve firemen, one policeman, and one civilian office worker—came through largely unscathed in an intact stairwell section between the second and fourth floors, sandwiched between collapses. When they were rescued, also on the first day, they emerged from the ground as if from the bowels of hell, and cheering broke out across the site.

  But only two other people were ever found alive. Both were Port Authority employees caught at relatively high elevations in the North Tower. They did not “surf ” the collapse, as a couple of Port Authority cops were falsely rumored to have done in the South Tower, but they lived through falls that should have killed them. The first of them was a thirty-two-year-old staff engineer named Pasquale Buzzelli whose job involved overseeing work on the George Washington Bridge—including Rinaldi’s project of decorating the span with lights. Buzzelli was riding an intermediate-stage elevator to his office, on the sixty-fourth floor, when the 767 slammed into the North Tower far above. The elevator shook violently and briefly dropped before catching itself and returning slowly to its starting point, the “sky lobby” on the forty-fourth floor. When the doors opened, Buzzelli was confronted by a confusion of shouts and thick black smoke (presumably from burning jet fuel that had poured down other shafts). He retreated into the elevator and, with no way to go but up, instinctively pushed the button for his familiar sixty-fourth floor. It was a slow ride. When he got there, the floor looked well lit and calm, and it was almost smoke-free. Most of the workers had already left, but more than a dozen remained, and were dutifully awaiting instructions from the authorities below, as apparently they had been asked to do by Port Authority and Fire Department officials on the phone. Because the group included Buzzelli’s supervisor, a man named Pat Hoey, Buzzelli decided to stay too. He said, “What happened, Pat?”

  Hoey said, “I don’t know, but I was just about thrown out of my chair.”

  “Really? I thought it was some kind of elevator thing.”

  Hoey kept calling downstairs to the Port Authority communications center and was unable to get clear information. He seemed edgy, but more from frustration than fear.

  Buzzelli got on another phone and called his wife, who was seven months pregnant with their first child. He said, “Don’t be alarmed or anything like that. I’m okay. Just put on the TV. Tell me if something has happened.”

  He waited. After a while she came back and said, “Oh, my God, Pasquale! There’s a plane in your building!”

  Buzzelli lived up to the reputation of engineers as unflappable. He said, “All right, all right. Don’t get excited.” (When he recounted the conversation later, he explained, “She was getting all worried and stuff.”) He said, “Just can you please tell me where it is? Did it hit high, middle, or low?” (“Because she doesn’t really know the floors and stuff.”)

  She said, “Well, it looks pretty high up in the building.”

  This was of course good news. Buzzelli had been through the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and was not overly concerned. He said, “Okay. Well, just so you know, I’m okay, and we’re here, and we’re going to figure out what to do.”

  It took them a while. They learned that the South Tower, too, had been hit by an airplane—but they neither heard nor saw the impact. Their offices occupied the northwest corner of the North Tower, as far from the South Tower as could be. They were surprisingly isolated, and were unaware that their upstairs neighbors were jumping from windows and falling by outside. They stuffed wet coats under the doors against the faint smoke that was drifting through the elevator lobby. Apparently their reactions were slowed by a sort of collective inertia: believing they had been told to stay, they worked the phones looking for someone who could give them a schedule for the evacuation. They delayed for more than an hour, during which Frank Lombardi, who would have told them immediately to go, climbed down the stairs from his office overhead, but of course without checking in on every floor. At 9:59 they heard muted thunder and felt the building vibrate. It was the South Tower collapsing, an unseen and unimaginable event. They attributed the commotion to something less, maybe a piece of airplane breaking free and sliding down the outside. They did not go to that side of the building and look through the windows. However, they did notice that the smoke in the elevator lobby was growing thicker. Buzzelli and another man unblocked the doors and went out to check the nearest stairwell, which they found clear and well lit. They returned to the office and reported the news. The time had come to leave, with or without permission. At last the group started walking down from the sixty-fourth floor.

  There were sixteen of them. They moved at different speeds and eventually spread out over at least nine floors. The stairway descended with left turns, in a counterclockwise direction, and it was of course windowless and completely cut off from the outside. About a third of the way down (in the forties) Buzzelli began to encounter exhausted firemen, some of whom were sitting on the steps and resting. They knew no better than he that the South Tower had fallen or that their forces had been ordered to retreat. They were calm, and said, “Just keep going down, clear run. Keep going down, clear run.”

  Buzzelli had just passed the twenty-second floor when the North Tower gave way. It was 10:28 in the morning, an hour and forty-two minutes after the attack. Buzzelli felt the building rumble, and immediately afterward heard a tremendous pounding coming at him from above, as one after another the upper floors collapsed in sequence. Buzzelli’s memory of it afterward was distinct. The pounding was rhythmic, and it intensified fast, as if a monstrous boulder were bounding down the stairwell toward his head. He reacted viscerally by diving halfway down a flight of stairs and curling into the corner of a landing. He knew that the building was failing. Buzzelli was Catholic. He closed his eyes and prayed for his wife and unborn child. He prayed for a quick death. Because his eyes were closed, he felt rather than saw the walls crack open around him. For an instant the walls folded onto his head and arms and he felt pressure, but then the structur
e disintegrated beneath him, and he thought, “I’m going,” and began to fall. He kept his eyes closed. He felt the weightlessness of acceleration. The sensation reminded him of thrill rides he had enjoyed at Great Adventure, in New Jersey. He did not enjoy it now, but did not actively dislike it either. He did not actively do anything at all. He felt the wind on his face, and a sandblasting effect against his skin as he tumbled through the clouds of debris. He saw four flashes from small blows to the head, and then another really bright flash when he landed. Right after that he opened his eyes, and it was three hours later.