American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  He sat up. He saw blue sky and a world of shattered steel and concrete. He had landed on a slab like a sacrificial altar, perched high among mountains of ruin. He was cut off by a drop of fifteen feet to the debris below him. He saw heavy smoke in the air. Above his head rose a lovely skeletal wall, a lacy gothic thing that looked as if it would topple at any moment. He remembered his fall exactly. He assumed that he was dead. He waited for a while to see if death would be as it is shown in the movies—if an angel would come by, or if he would float up and see himself from the outside. But then he started to cough and to feel pain in his leg, and he realized that he was alive. He was trapped high on the altar, injured, and covered with a slick powdery dust. He shouted for help and called out the names of the people who had accompanied him down the stairs, but heard only silence in response, and saw no movement of a human kind. Where the Twin Towers should have stood he saw only smoke and sky. Somehow an entire huge building had passed him on its way to the ground. Somehow also he had landed just right. Buzzelli was a Catholic, but an engineer, not a theologian. For an hour he sat trapped on the altar trying to reason things through.

  Conditions were still precarious. The altar itself was unstable, threatening to capsize or collapse. Buzzelli was too badly injured to climb down. He worried that if he rolled off his perch—simply allowed himself to drop—he would be impaled on the twisted steel below. Increasingly he had trouble staying calm. He was alone. He was helpless. And when the silence was finally broken, it was not by the sounds of rescue, but the crackle of an approaching fire. The fire came from an area behind him, which from his position he could not see. He worried that the fire would weaken the skeletal wall and cause it to topple onto him—or, worse, that the flames would burn him alive. Judging from the sound, the danger was growing rapidly.

  Then he heard someone call, “Richie!” It was a fireman climbing unseen through the rubble nearby, attempting to locate the fourteen stairwell survivors, one of whom had established radio contact and was guiding in the rescuers.

  Buzzelli did not know this. All he knew was that there was a human presence. He started shouting, “Help, help! I’m up here!”

  Eventually the fireman materialized below the altar. He looked up at Buzzelli and said, “Oh. Do you need a rope to get down?” He seemed to think Buzzelli was a fellow rescuer who somehow had gotten stranded on top of the slab.

  Buzzelli said, “I’ll jump if you want me to, but I can’t climb down alone.”

  Apparently, this was not what the fireman expected to hear. He did a double take and said, “Oh, my God. Guys, we’ve got a civilian up here!”

  Other firemen arrived and began to discuss how to get Buzzelli down. It was not an obvious thing. They were worried about the instability of the debris slopes as well as the precariousness of Buzzelli’s perch. They were also worried about the fire. It was not just a fire, it was an inferno. Indeed, just then the flames flared up, and came on so aggressively that the firemen had to retreat. As they disappeared, one of them yelled, “Hold on! We’ll get back to you!” The promise was of little comfort to Buzzelli, who figured, probably correctly, that they would not have left him if there was any way they could have stayed.

  Buzzelli by now was thoroughly terrified. The fire was roaring, popping, and setting off small explosions just behind the altar. He still could not see the flames, but he could feel the heat. Now he heard a new, more intimate sound, which he took to be the groaning and sizzling of overheating steel. This was the end. Desperate at least to assume control over his fate, he groped around and found a sharp metal scrap with which to slash his wrists. He had it firmly in hand and was about to cut himself open when, strangely, just as suddenly as the fire had grown, it subsided and died. A few minutes later the firemen reappeared. One named Jimmy said, “All right, we’ll get to you somehow.” He circled clockwise around the altar, disappeared for a stretch of dangerous climbing, and pioneered a route to an alcove high in the rubble mountains above and behind Buzzelli. Somehow he clambered down to the altar. Three others followed. The firemen then fashioned a rope cradle, got it around Buzzelli, and lowered him to the debris slope below.

  The group still had 400 yards of difficult terrain to go. Despite the severe pain in his leg, Buzzelli managed to walk about halfway before beginning to lose consciousness. The firemen put him onto a plastic stretcher known as a Stokes basket, and they passed him down the pile in the manner of the bucket brigades. In the ambulance a kindly attendant lent him a cell phone to call his wife. She was at home, surrounded by friends and family. It was late in the afternoon. She said, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe . . .” He heard an uproar in the background. He said, “Yeah, I’m alive.” He was taken to Saint Vincent’s Hospital, where the other patients were firemen or cops—rescuers who had been lightly injured in the debris. The staff assumed that Buzzelli was just another one of them. He had some cuts and bruises, and a broken right foot—that was all. They told him to go home or sleep in the cafeteria if he liked, because they were still thinking triage then, and standing by for the rush that never occurred.

  Also with Buzzelli in that stairwell was Genelle Guzman, a thirty-one-year-old Port Authority clerk of Trinidadian origin, who had delayed with the others on the sixty-fourth floor, but had gotten ahead in the descent, and was on the thirteenth floor when the building boomed and broke apart around her. She was with a friend named Rosa, and had stopped to adjust her shoe. She had put her hand on Rosa’s shoulder. As the building crumbled, she felt the shoulder pull away, as if Rosa were running up the staircase. She was hit, and felt the acceleration of the collapse around her. All was darkness. When the roar stopped, she heard a couple of calls from a man who then grew silent. Her head was jammed under a load of debris, but eventually she worked it loose. She was in a dark cavity in the inner world of rubble. Her legs were pinned and crushed. She felt a dead man beside her. It turned out that he was a fireman, and that there was another one, also dead, lying nearby. For twenty-seven hours Guzman lay trapped and seriously injured. She spent some of that time bargaining for her life, pleading with God to show her a miracle. Early the next afternoon she heard a search party, and when she yelled out, a voice answered. The voice said, “Do you see the light?” She did not. She took a piece of concrete and banged it against a broken stairway overhead—presumably the same structure that had saved her life. The searchers homed in on the noise. Guzman wedged her hand through a crack in the wall, and felt someone take it. A voice said, “I’ve got you,” and Guzman said, “Thank God.” She spent the next five weeks at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, undergoing reconstructive surgery on her right leg. She was the last person to emerge alive from the ruins.

  Of course, that was not at all obvious on September 12—and probably even less so at the site than elsewhere. Experience with earthquakes and earlier bombings suggested that a signifi-cant percentage of people caught in the collapses would still be alive. This had been true even in the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sam Melisi said, “All we knew was that time was of the essence. It was just really important that we get to people as soon as possible, because the longer we delayed, the less the chance of survival was. We knew that from other collapses we’d gone into.”

  I asked him an academic, almost nonsensical question. “What’s the rule on that? Is there a known interval?”

  Melisi gave me a typically practical answer. He said, “Sometimes people write about the ‘Golden Hour,’ and this and that. But it depends on their injuries.” Are they crushed? Can they breathe? By any chance do they have water? Victims have been known to last a week trapped in rubble. Victims have been known to last longer. Melisi said, “It was hard to be sure of anything. We knew we were looking for people, and we knew they were there somewhere.”

  It was a grim sort of hope, therefore, rather than specific knowledge, that inspired the early rush at the site. Having lost its headquarters bunker with the collapse of Building Seven, the city’s Office of Emergency Management was
showing surprising flexibility—a mature recognition by some of its senior staff members that their plans and procedures had been overtaken by events, and that their organization lacked the capability to direct the response at the site. They knew that their most useful role now would be to help with some of the peripheral logistics—office space, food sources, press briefings, and so forth—and to coordinate between the myriad governmental agencies that were starting to crowd forward and jump into the fray. With those finite goals in mind, the OEM moved fast. By the second day it had set up an emergency command center in the ground-floor cafeteria of PS 89.

  For the first several days the scene in the cafeteria was frenzied. A marine-construction manager named Marty Corcoran told me early on about his attempts to make sense of the chaos. Corcoran was a tall, powerfully built man who looked as if he might enjoy crumbling concrete with his bare hands, but who turned out to be a sensitive observer of the Trade Center scene. He had arrived the day after the attack on behalf of his employer, Weeks Marine, a New Jersey–based concern that, having rallied in heartfelt reaction to the disaster, had also quite rationally understood the need to set up a big barging operation. In the long run the company’s motivations were probably about typical for the Trade Center site—neither as altruistic as they had been over the first few days, nor as mercenary as cynics later implied. After three hours of wandering the site in astonishment and confusion, Corcoran found his way into the headquarters at PS 89, where he assumed he would discover a traditional chain of command. He said, “It was unbelievable. There are ten thousand meetings going on. Equipment is being mobilized to different places. The OEM has lost everything—it’s like all their preparations were thrown out the window. Now you have OEM, you have the Fire Department, you have EMS, you have Salvation Army, you have all these billions of people involved, and you’re sitting at a cafeteria table trying to discuss something with all these distractions going on around your head. It was insane.”

  Corcoran heard that the site had been divided into quadrants, and that they had been assigned to four companies—every one of which struck him as an unexpected choice. To me he said, “Who’s AMEC? Who’s Bovis? Oh, we knew Turner, but they’re construction managers—they don’t even do the work themselves. The only company here with equipment was Tully, and Tully is well connected with the city, I guess. That’s how they . . .” He hesitated, worried possibly that I would interpret this as an allegation of impropriety, which in context it certainly was not. He said, “I never quite understood how it happened, but it was kind of moot at that point. If these were the rules of the game, you just had to figure out how you were going to play by them.” It turned out that the only rules that mattered were those related to speed and physical progress, and Corcoran was good at them. He heard about an obscure city agency called the DDC that for unknown reasons was emerging in an unscripted leading role. A couple of guys there were said to be making decisions. Apparently the one to see was a man with a moustache and narrow shoulders, named Mike Burton.

  Corcoran found Burton under full assault on the far side of the cafeteria. Later he said, “He was just being bombarded by people. I tried to explain to him what we do and don’t do. I can remember the look on his face. It was like . . .” Corcoran pondered the memory. “Like he was a deer caught in headlights. Like ‘Where’s the next shot coming from?’ And I felt embarrassed, because it was like I was speaking another language to him. The last thing he wanted to hear was some marine contractor coming in with ideas and schemes.”

  But the scheme Corcoran had in mind was important. Already by that second day huge volumes of steel and debris were emerging from the site as AMEC fought its way down West Street toward the north pedestrian bridge, and Bovis came in from the south, both companies working furiously to clear room for the cranes and heavy equipment that might help in the search for survivors. Tully was cranking up too, over in the southeast corner. Something had to be done with the resulting material, and right away, or it would start to clog the rescue operation. But this was not Oklahoma City, where cattle still graze close to downtown, and empty space is everywhere. In New York there was neither the space to pile the stuff nearby nor the time to go looking for suburban pastures. Confronted with the need for an immediate solution, the Giuliani administration decided to reopen the city’s recently retired Staten Island landfill—a famously unpopular dump more than twice the size of Central Park, which rises along a saltwater channel and is known (from the Dutch) as Fresh Kills. City trucks began rolling there the very first night, each carrying its dusty little load along a congested route through much of New York—by tunnel to Brooklyn and expressways across the borough, then over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and down the length of Staten Island. One way alone, that trip could take two hours or more. What Corcoran proposed instead was using barges—equipment that Fresh Kills was already set up to accommodate. The use of barges would keep the Trade Center ruins off the roads, and limit the spread of noxious dust. More important, each barge was capable of carrying fifty to a hundred truckloads of debris, and the barges could be lashed into rafts of four before being pushed across the harbor and up the channels, twenty-six miles to Fresh Kills. The capacity of the barges was so large that with merely two loading points in Lower Manhattan, Corcoran believed he could keep the transportation of the debris from ever bottlenecking the efforts at the site. The loading points would have to be dredged to give the barges sufficient depth at low tide—and because of environmental regulations, this would require permits. But Corcoran had tugs and dredges standing by, and he could set up the operation fast.

  For a deer caught in headlights, Burton was impressively decisive. It turned out that he had heard and considered everything Corcoran had said. He asked him to start setting up the barge operation right away, and to get back to him as soon as possible on the permit process. Nonetheless, Corcoran’s memory of Burton’s condition over those first few days was about right. Burton was functioning almost entirely without sleep, and reeling at the increasingly evident size and complexity of the project that he and Ken Holden seemed somehow to have taken on. With several thousand people missing inside the rubble, and volunteers still swarming across the burning pile, the pressure was relentless—and there was no end of it in sight. For reasons of personality, Holden and Burton had not had an easy relationship over the previous few years, but in the cafeteria now they forgot their differences and stood back-to-back, inventing solutions to problems as they arose, and sharing the simultaneous feelings of urgency and fatigue that characterize the battlefield experience. They were not the only ones. After a few days at PS 89, Corcoran, too, was walking around with a thousand-yard stare.

  There was a significant change after three days when Holden and Burton left the cafeteria crowds, and moved their operation one floor up to the kindergarten space—the incongruously childish classrooms, with their alphabet posters and diminutive chairs, from which the two men would direct the operation for months to come. The mood there remained as urgent as before, but because the clamor was reduced, a raw form of organization was able to take hold. It happened almost spontaneously. Holden and Burton assembled a small team from DDC headquarters in Queens, and supplemented it with a few outsiders—notably Peter Rinaldi, the Port Authority engineer, and a hard-nosed construction executive named Bill Cote, who had been Burton’s roommate in college, and arrived now to serve as his right-hand man.

  No one had time to ponder options and write plans. It was action, pure action, that was called for. Because of the need for clear communication, Burton instituted large twice-daily meetings in one of the kindergarten rooms—a simple, low-tech management system that proved to be particularly well suited to the apocalypse outside. Burton’s reasoning was lucid as usual. To me he said, “The only way we can get control of the situation is by having everyone here. There’s no time for distributing memos or waiting for the chain of command. Everybody has to hear what the problems are. The decisions have to be made, and everybody
has to hear those decisions. We have to keep everybody moving in the same direction.”

  The men and women who crowded in every morning and every night were the envoys of their respective organizations. They came to the meetings in groups of two or three. At least twenty government agencies were represented (in an alphabet soup of acronyms), but primarily the participants were construction men, a few wearing suits and ties, but most in the industry standard of jeans or brown canvas coveralls, and steel-toed lace-upboots. They had helmets and hardhats and yellow Rite in the Rain all-weather field books, and by the second week they were carrying astonishing quantities of cell phones, beepers, and twoway radios—some of which, inevitably, had not been muted.

  “Hey, Vinnie, where ya at?”

  The participants sat on the windowsills and kindergarten desks, and crowded around the cluster of folding tables at the center of the room. The meetings were informal, and unusually frank. To encourage honest expression, electronic recording devices were banned, and the only minutes kept were of a sketchy, checklist variety—essentially just a schedule of problems to be solved. People were expected to propose solutions even at the risk of seeming foolish, and to swallow their pride when their ideas were dismissed or their performance was bluntly criticized. This happened often. Some of the participants were accomplished people with impressive résumés, but within the inner world of the Trade Center site it hardly mattered what they had done before. However temporarily, there was a new social contract here, which everyone seemed to understand. All that counted about anyone was what that person could provide now.

  Mike Burton usually arrived at the meetings last of all, accompanied by the DDC team from the kindergarten room across the hall. He presided over the room by perching on the seatback of a folding chair, giving him a slight advantage of height over people who were seated at the tables. He kept his yellow field book stuck into his waistband against the small of his back. He was efficient and to the point, and became known for making decisions fast and keeping the discussion on track; in one hour he could cover a lot of ground. Moreover, rather than getting worn down by the responsibilities, he seemed to be thriving on the stress, like a runner gaining confidence as he progressed. Part of that no doubt was purely physiological. Burton had found quarters nearby, and he was getting some sleep now, and growing accustomed to the rhythms of working eighteen hours a day. More significant, however, was the luck of suddenly finding himself in a starring role.