Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  Elizabeth said, “After the first plane hit the first Tower, Karol called her mom. She told her, ‘Mom, I’m okay. We know what happened and I’m all right.’ But then the phone went dead.”

  When Elizabeth told me the phone had cut off, I knew. I just knew she was gone

  That afternoon, my friend Jason called and said that the Red Cross had opened up a Missing Persons Center at Bellevue Hospital on 1st Avenue. I was the closest to Karol out of our group of friends, and maybe I was the most equipped to handle what had to be done. I don’t know. Everybody was pretty much in a state of shock.

  At any rate, I had a bunch of pictures of Karol from this luau party we’d thrown out on the island the summer before. She was gorgeous. Really short, platinum blonde hair. Her huge, megawatt smile. In the picture, she was wearing a sarong and a coconut shell bra and hugging another friend.

  That was the best picture any of us had of her face.

  I took it to Kinko’s, made a bunch of color photocopies, and went down to the Red Cross to wait on line.

  When I got to Bellevue, the line was three blocks long. All these people and everyone was clutching photos. It was very organized. The line was very quiet. Some volunteers were giving out boxes of sandwiches and coffee and cookies and bottled water.

  There was a white guy, about thirty years old, walking up and down the line with a list on a clipboard. He was tall and thin and looked like a Midwestern farm boy with strawberry-blond hair. The list recorded the most recently updated casualties, and he was going person-to-person to see if anyone’s missing person had been found in the hospital.

  He didn’t find anyone.

  As he came closer, I asked if he could check to see if Karol was on his list. Now that we were standing next to one another, I could tell that he was exhausted. By now it was four o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, September 12. He looked completely overwhelmed. I had to give him Karol’s name five times. His hands were shaking.

  I saw an older man with white hair and a chaplain’s collar call out to a little ten-year-old girl who was standing on line with her mother. The chaplain said, “Come here, honey. Come here. What was your daddy’s name again?” The mother burst into tears.

  I was standing next to a group of four or five girls my own age, and I figured out by overhearing their conversation that they were there on behalf of their friend. They were saying things like, “How’s she gonna get through this? She hasn’t even written the thank-you notes or gone through the wedding pictures yet.”

  I thought, Karol was going to get married, too. She’d just gone to Quebec City with her mom a few weeks before to buy her wedding dress.

  When I finally got to the end of the line, they handed me a questionnaire to fill out on Karol’s behalf, but I found I couldn’t answer a lot of the questions. I could do the basic descriptions they asked for, like hair color, skin color, weight, appearance. But the rest? I wanted to make sure, you know? I wanted to make absolutely sure she had, like, blue eyes and not green.

  It’s tough to describe, but suddenly there I was, standing in that line, and I didn’t know anything for sure anymore. Like, I couldn’t remember if Karol had pierced ears or not. I couldn’t remember exactly what her engagement ring looked like. The little things eluded me and made me wonder … had I ever really known her at all?

  I guess that’s when I realized I was in shock. I also realized the importance of the little things you’ve seen a million times but never really register. Questions like: How long were her fingernails? How long were her toenails? Does she have any scars, birthmarks, or tattoos?

  I’d seen Karol practically naked; we spent summers together out at the beach in little bathing suits. I was almost certain she didn’t have any tattoos … or did she? Then there was stuff like: Broken Bones? And what was she wearing that day? I had no idea. I hadn’t seen her that day. Was she right-handed or left-handed?

  I just wanted my friend back.

  I had my cell phone with me, and I had to call a lot of friends to get that form filled out. I asked, “Do you know this about Karol? Would so-and-so know that about Karol? Can you call her mother for me? I need her dentist’s name, does anyone have that information?”

  Then they brought us into an auditorium to get a case number for the person we were going to declare missing. I was sitting in a row next to a woman about my age, and at one point she just broke down and started crying. So I started crying, too. I wasn’t doing it for her, specifically. After all that had happened, I just had to.

  This young woman kept repeating things like, “Well, we checked his answering machine. Employees are calling in to see if he’s okay, but we don’t know. We checked his answering machine …” It was awful.

  But then, something really curious came over me. I don’t want to call it a calm or anything like that, but it’s like something inside me clicked on or clicked off, I can’t decide which. I started looking around, because I felt like I wanted to just … bear witness. I looked directly into people’s faces and saw a lot of people staring into space, shocked, expressionless. People with tears in their eyes who were quietly crying on their own. I made it a point to look at their faces because I wanted to remember that. I didn’t ever want to forget what this was or what any of it meant, although I’m still not sure what that is.

  I got a case number for Karol: 759. I assume that meant that, by that point, they’d registered that many people as missing. It must have been early in the process.85

  Sandler O’Neill and Partners, L.P., is a New York-based investment banking firm that suffered especially horrendous losses on 9/11. Headquartered on the 104th floor of 2 World Trade Center, Sandler O’Neill lost sixty-seven of its eighty-four Manhattanbased employees when the planes struck the Towers. (See the story of Brendan Ryan and Kristin Irvine Ryan on page 432.)

  A friend who lives in Stuyve-sant Town, on Avenue A below 14th Street, mentioned to me that she’d been walking home on Tuesday evening and seen something amazing. Somebody had painted a huge mural on the side of a building. They must have done it fast, in the space of time between the planes hitting the buildings and that same evening.

  The mural showed the New York City skyline with the Towers on fire. And the artist had written: IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR FAMILIES AND FRIENDS. Then the date, and an inscription: REST IN PEACE. People had already begun to embrace the place. Candles and flowers and offerings had been left at the foot of the mural, as if it were some kind of shrine.

  I decided to pass by there on my way back from Bellevue. I brought some flowers for Karol, pink star lilies because those were her favorite. When we used to go out to the beach for the weekend, she always brought star lilies, and before she even put her bags in her room, she’d have them cut and arranged in a vase on the kitchen table.

  The mural was overwhelming. Whoever painted it had made the sky orange. The buildings—the Towers—were gray. I put the star lilies down along with all the others’ offerings, a vast sea of bright-colored flowers, and just stood there. I thought of Karol. And I guess I stood there a really long time.

  It’s early October now, and we’ve already had a memorial service for Karol. Michael, her fiancé, flew in from Moscow. At first her family was fixated on things like going to the morgue. But then they just made a decision that she was gone based on the information they heard, which seemed pretty clear.

  For instance, a guy who worked on the same floor as Karol apparently called his wife after the second plane hit Karol’s Tower. Nobody knows how his call got through, but it did. And that wife eventually got in touch with Karol’s mom and relayed her husband’s last words.

  Apparently, the man had said, “There’s smoke. The heat is really bad. I’m not going to make it out. People are dying all around me of smoke inhalation. It’s bad.”

  And another person who was running to evacuate after the first plane hit said she’d seen Karol. She’d asked Karol, “Aren’t you coming? Why don’t you come? We’ve got to get out of here
.” But Karol told her, “No. I’m staying right where I am.”

  That’s about all we know. Just those two things. But I guess it’s enough.

  There’s dust all over the city now. In the past two weeks, I’ve breathed it in. I catch myself thinking that Karol was incinerated and therefore I’m breathing her in when I breathe in the dust. It seems a little weird, but it’s also oddly comforting. Karol loved New York, and right now she’s a part of it—not just in one place, but everywhere.

  I’ve been numb, pretty much … that feeling you get when you’ve slept on your arm all night. But when you wake up, all the blood comes rushing back in. It’s a sudden rush of sensation, so sudden that it’s painful. The feeling’s coming back to me now, and I wish it wouldn’t.

  I’ve accepted that she’s gone. Now I just want to believe that she didn’t die in vain. I can’t feel hate for anybody, I just want her death to have meant something.

  I’m still waiting to see what this meant.

  85 It soon became apparent that approximately 3,000 people were missing from all four 9/11 attacks. Later, 2,973 would be accounted for, with 24 still missing. This number does not include the 19 hijackers of the four jetliners.

  KEVIN KILLIAN

  Kevin Killian, forty-three, is the chief information officer for Verizon. He’s in charge of support and direction for all the systems, needs, and strategies for the Enterprise Solutions Group, which supports large business customers: commercial, city, and federal.

  Kevin recounts how he and Verizon labored to resurrect one of America’s greatest institutions—the New York Stock Exchange—as quickly as possible in the wake of the attack.

  ON THE MORNING of the eleventh, I had a meeting at our headquarters at 1095 Avenue of the Americas. I arrived at around nine o’clock, and they had a large-screen TV mounted on the wall as you came off the elevator. The picture showed smoke pouring from one of the Towers of the World Trade Center. Beneath the picture, a caption said that officials believed a plane had hit the building. At that point, the media was still thinking that the aircraft had been a small twin-engine plane or something of that nature.

  But then, as I watched, the second plane flew in. It was definitely not small. From the TV camera’s view, you couldn’t see the 767 hit the building, but you could sure see the fire coming out the other side.

  We were on the 23rd floor of our building, so we moved quickly to the windows to see if we could catch a glimpse of what was happening downtown. Then we started to hold our meeting, but news that the Pentagon was also under attack arrived and we realized the situation was getting bigger and worse. A bunch of us went to the windows again and witnessed the Towers’ collapse.

  I used to work in the brokerage industry for nine years. In that time I was downtown every day, so the situation hit close to home. That night, I couldn’t get out of the city. Part of me wanted to leave, sure, so I could see to my family. But another part wanted to stay and see what I could do to help. It turns out I was about to have my hands full.

  People who tried using their phones in New York on September 11 may have gotten what’s called a “fast busy” signal. This may have continued for the next few days. The lack of service was due to the sheer volume of calls we experienced all at once. We had to reroute so many of them. And people whose service would normally ride over cables that were severed by the Towers’ collapse didn’t have service at all until we installed the temporary—what we call “bypass”—cables. Highspeed internet was affected, too. It runs on those central office cables, same as the phone lines.

  But like a lot of telecommunications networks, Verizon’s web is built with a lot of automatic, diverse routing points. Essentially, the network is designed to provide alternate ways to go. If, for instance, a cable gets cut—if a backhoe digs up a cable during some street construction—the network will automatically reroute traffic to different facilities.

  So, the upshot was that a lot of the call service throughout Manhattan was instantly rerouted. For example, we never lost 911 emergency services in New York. It automatically rerouted to alternate facilities and networks, despite all the damage our web had sustained.

  The next morning, Wednesday the twelfth, I reported back to 1095 headquarters to get together with my group and see what we could do. I met with some of the senior executives in the crisis center and listened to all the things they told me needed to be done. Basically, we had to reconstruct 2 million circuits and reroute 1.5 million lines. Even more circuits—a tremendous amount, in fact—would have to be rerouted through some of our different switching offices in order to bypass the ones that were down. We had to rebuild eighteen sonic networks. And then there was the big problem of the network management platform that supports the New York Stock Exchange and all the member brokerage firms.

  It was at that meeting that I learned we had to totally rebuild the network within five days in preparation for the Stock Exchange’s proposed opening on Monday, September 17.

  A brief item on how the Stock Exchange is set up, from our perspective:

  Each of the brokerage firms in the Exchange has dedicated facilities on the network and gives Verizon the ability to manage the system. Let’s suppose that a brokerage firm wants a private line, or a voice ring-down line to call their representatives on the Stock Exchange floor. Or maybe they want a line between one member firm and another—we already have the facilities set up for that. Through our network management platform, we just connect a circuit in one location to a circuit in another. Normally, we can set it all up in a matter of hours.

  But a lot of damage was sustained by the Towers’ collapse. A whole lot of damage. The main systems supporting the Stock Exchange platform were located on the 23rd floor of 140 West Street. That facility was one of our center-most circuit hubs in all of New York City. But after the eleventh, we weren’t able to get inside.

  140 West Street stood directly adjacent to the Trade Center. By Wednesday morning, our next-door neighbor, 7 World Trade, had collapsed. The steel structure of 7 World Trade was about forty-nine floors high; when it collapsed, it literally slid into our building, peeling it open like a can opener. The bottom six or eight floors of 140 West were completely exposed to the elements. Plus, a steel beam had shot out from one of the Towers and pierced the left side of 140 West Street around the 15th floor, completely destroying two floors.

  Personnel had been evacuated and the power had been shut down. Despite the trauma it had sustained, the building was still standing; that in itself was promising. But we had no idea what condition our equipment was in after being exposed to the dust and the smoke. Obviously, the building had internal damage. The question was: how much?

  And there were other considerations. The fires that raged around 7 World Trade were in the process of being suppressed by the fire department, so there was a tremendous amount of water pouring into all the buildings in that area. Water had flooded out the cable vaults of 140 West Street—these are the basement vaults where all the cables that run underground in all the manholes of New York City connect. And now it was underwater.

  As I said, 140 West constituted one of the largest central offices for switching equipment we had in the city. All the cables from the surrounding buildings connected there, as well as all the facilities connected to other central offices in downtown. Basically, 140 West was a hub for the whole Manhattan area. We had reports that the first ten floors were saturated, totally compromised from the water. Every circuit had shorted out. Our cables offered no conductivity.

  This was going to be a very big job.

  On Wednesday, we started scrambling to rebuild the network management platform from scratch. We got vendors like Cisco Systems involved and contacted different groups within Verizon, like corporate IT, to whom we gave a very long grocery list. We needed routers, we needed servers, we needed all sorts of equipment, and we needed it fast.

  We started plans to locate all this equipment on Wednesday. We sent people down to the D.C. area
to locate servers we could use. Alcatel was helping us out—they’re a vendor with parts that support the network management platform. Basically, by late afternoon on the twelfth, we had parts coming in from everywhere, down from the New England area and Canada, up from D.C. By midnight on the twelfth, we had people all over the country shutting down equipment that wasn’t classified as vital to their operation and putting it on trucks that drove through the night. We wanted to receive everything by Thursday so we could check where we stood. Our deliveries were complicated by all the restricted access in and around Ground Zero, so we had to work very closely with the police and the Office of Emergency Management people. We had to make sure those trucks carrying equipment got through to us.

  Through it all, we kept lines of communication open to four or five different command centers who were each working round the clock on a different piece of the network: the facilities, the systems, the connectivity within the cables. One center was verifying each of the two million circuits, one by one. Try to imagine the blizzard of conference calls we had with all these command centers: “Okay. Where are you on this? Where are you on that?”

  On Thursday, we started rebuilding the platform at our Pearl Street location, where many people who supported the network are based. But as we started reassembling the network, we realized we’d forgotten something vital. We needed the hardware to rebuild, yes, but we also needed the databases, which had resided on the old platform. And those databases resided at 140 West Street.

  The databases were invaluable. To manually rebuild all that data—populating the field tables, entering the information, plotting connections to all these circuits—well, we could do it. It would have to be done manually; it would be a tremendous exertion of effort, and the entire process would take about ten days, minimum. But we didn’t have that long. The stock market had to be back up and running for Monday morning, September 17.