Updated at 10 a.m. ET on September 11, 2026
On the morning of Friday, November 2, 2001, seven weeks and three days after the Twin Towers collapsed, tribal fighting broke out at the World Trade Center site. The battle was brief and inconclusive. It occurred near the northwest corner of the ruins, when an emotionally charged demonstration turned violent, and firemen attacked the police. Within that intense inner world it came as no surprise. Resentments and jealousies among the various groups had been mounting for weeks, as the initial rush to find survivors had transmuted into a grim search for the dead, and as territoriality and the embrace of tragedy had crept in. The catalyst for the confrontation was a decision made by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to rein in the firemen, who for nearly two months had basked in overwhelming public sympathy and enjoyed unaccustomed influence and unlimited access to the site. In the interest of returning the city to normal life, Giuliani declared that the firemen now would have to participate in a joint command, with the New York and Port Authority police and the civilian heavy-construction managers in the city’s Department of Design and Construction, the DDC. This did not sit well. Moreover, access would be restricted, new procedures would be imposed at the pile, and the number of searchers would be reduced by two thirds.
The reason given publicly for this new arrangement was “safety,” a term so often used to mask other agendas in modern America that it caused an immediate, instinctive reaction of disbelief. Ordinary frontline firemen were the angriest. As many as 250 of their colleagues lay unaccounted for in the ruins, and they intended as a matter of honor to find every one of them. That week alone they had found fourteen. They were convinced that only they could sustain the necessary attention to detail on the pile, and that in his eagerness to “clean up” the site (a term they despised), Giuliani was willing to risk overlooking some of the dead, scooping them up with the steel and concrete and relying on the sorting process at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island to separate their remains from the rubble.
To a degree the firemen’s suspicions may have been well founded. Certainly the unbuilders themselves, operating under the direction of the city’s ambitious Trade Center Czar, Michael Burton, were pursuing the most aggressive possible schedule of demolition and debris removal. Even Sam Melisi, the fireman who, as the site’s diplomat, was trying to mediate between the opposing groups, had doubts about the city’s motivations. To me he said, “If you do a good job, and you do it in record time—who knows what record time is, since nobody’s ever dealt with this before—is there a bonus? Do you get to be a commissioner or something? I don’t know. Burton’s just hard to figure out. Sometimes he’s very personable and human: ‘Oh, geez, you found X amount of people. Oh, that’s great.’ And then other times: ‘You're really taking way too much time to look at this stuff, and we’ve got to keep moving.’ Putting his arm around me and winking. ‘We really have to move on this.' But you know what? We’re going to take as long as it has to take. We’re not going to compromise on that. We just can’t do it. I don’t have an allegiance to any construction company, or even to the City of New York. My only allegiance is to the people who lost their lives—to their families. The best we can do is try to retrieve as many people as we can in the most humane fashion. And then when all this is over. I can just go back to doing what I do.”
Melisi was the reasonable one, and the most broadly involved of any person at the Trade Center site. By comparison, the ordinary firemen were narrowly focused on the rubble underfoot, where the remains of civilians and police officers were regularly discovered, but only the recovery of their own people seemed genuinely to interest them. Though their attitude was sometimes offensive to others working on the pile, it was not difficult to understand: the firemen were straightforward guys, initiates in a closed and fraternal society who lived and ate together at the station houses, and shared the drama of responding to emergencies. Some had lost family when the Trade Center fell, and nearly all had lost friends. Their bereavement was real. Still, for nearly two months they had let their collective emotions run unchecked, and had been indulged and encouraged in this by society at large, the presumption being something like “It helps to cry.” The effect was quite the opposite: rather than serving a cathartic purpose, the emotionalism seemed to have heightened the firemen’s sense of righteousness and loss. Now, with the city ordering cutbacks in their presence on the pile, the agitation among the rank and file was so great that the firefighters’ unions warned the city that they had lost control, and had to organize a protest to avoid a break with their own membership. None of this was conducive to clear, calm thought. Two days before the fighting broke out, a fire captain and union trustee named Matty James presented the situation starkly to the Daily News, as if retrieval of the bodies were an all-or-nothing affair. He said, “The city may be ready to turn this into a construction job, but we’re not. We want our brothers back. By doing this, the city is taking away from these families, these widows, these mothers and fathers, any chance for closure. What are we supposed to do? Go to the Fresh Kills landfill to look for our people?” In a similar style, the mother of a dead fireman whose body had been found said, “Our memorial Mass became a funeral. It gave me an opportunity to hug the casket and to say good-bye. It’s just awful what they are trying to do... to deprive other women of that wonderful feeling.”
Such was the rhetoric during the days leading up to that Friday morning, when hundreds of firemen began to assemble at the corner of Chambers and West Streets, by the red-brick walls of Public School 89. In the second-floor kindergarten room that served as the emergency command center, most of the site-management team from the Department of Design and Construction made plans to stay inside and out of sight. Mike Burton looked worriedly down at the scene outside—at the slowly growing crowd, the opposing lines of blue-uniformed police officers, the television crews that were just then arriving. As if to himself he said, “These guys are not happy … not happy at all."
Earlier that morning Burton had led the first “combined” site-management meeting, at which the Fire Department, the police, and the DDC had been required to share the stage. It had taken place down the hallway, in the school auditorium. The various tribes had eyed one another with frank distrust, but had spoken in veiled terms to keep conflicts from breaking out into the open. Burton had said, “The DDC will have oversight [meaning: control] over all recovery efforts on the pile,” in a tone that somehow implied that this was a decision imposed on him from far above. He had also said, “We’re making a push for increased safety. There may be some negative consequences. The police will not let anyone in or out of this building after ten A.M.” (Meaning: The firemen are being hysterical.) A fire chief in a white uniform shirt seemed not to have heard a word. He said, “We're trying to hammer out a plan for the removal of victims and uniformed personnel. We’ve just located fourteen Fire Department members near the South Tower.” (Meaning: We’re not going to make this easy.) In the kindergarten room the DDC’s commissioner, Kenneth Holden, decided that he needed to go to the pile to keep a close watch on the situation himself. Peter Rinaldi, the Port Authority engineer with lifelong ties to the Trade Center, expressed concern for Holden’s safety. Holden said, “I’m just going to wear a sign saying, ‘I don’t know Mike Burton.’” Burton smiled humorlessly. His relationship with Holden was increasingly strained. There was another Port Authority man in the room, a strapping ex-Marine named Tom O’Connor, whose wife had worked in a neighboring building and had survived, but who had lost many of his friends in the attack. He said, “We are now viewed as monsters.” His manner was matter-of-fact.
Becky Clough, a pugnacious DDC manager and one of the few women active on the ground at the heart of the site, said, “What are we afraid of? We’re doing the right thing.”
Burton said, “It had to happen sometime anyway. Maybe there are some positive sides.”
O’Connor said, "So when are you losing your job?”
I slipped outside before the building was locked down, and walked through the demonstration. The crowd by then had grown to perhaps five hundred off-duty firemen, and it was continuing to expand as others streamed in front the subways and parking lots. Some were dressed in civilian clothes, but most wore the standard protective “turnout coats,” black with yellow reflector strips and FDNY written in block letters across the back. Most were bareheaded. As protesters, they seemed awkward and self-conscious at first, and unsure of how to proceed, but they were also genuinely angry. Encouraged by a union official with a bullhorn, they raised their fists and chanted, “Bring our brothers home!” They waved a union banner and American flags. The TV crews moved in tightly, and found firemen for one-on-one interviews. A retired fire captain said, “My son Tommy is still in that building, and we haven’t gotten to him yet.” The firemen began shouting, “Bring Tommy home! Bring Tommy home!” The unions had promised City Hall that the demonstration would be orderly, and that it would remain outside the site's perimeter—that it would amount to little more than a show for the cameras. But the firemen proved difficult to control. As the crowd swelled to nearly a thousand, it grew louder and more confident, and suddenly surged south through the first police barricades toward the Trade Center ruins.
The TV crews followed eagerly. To the police the demonstrators shouted, “Walk with us!” and “Shut ’em down!” But the police were on duty, and after weeks of growing resentments on the pile they were not inclined to sympathize. As the demonstrators shoved through a second line of defense, the police shoved back, and some of the firemen started to swing. I saw one policeman go down with a roundhouse punch to the face; others responded, tackling and cuffing the offender. The crowd kept pushing through, with fights breaking out where the two groups met. These were big, physical guys on both sides, and they grappled in ungainly dances, straining hard, cursing each other, and toppling to the ground in aggressive embraces. Five policemen were injured. On the periphery the protesters who were arrested—twelve in all—were hustled into police vans. One was a tough-looking old man in a fireman’s uniform, who kept bellowing, “My son's in there! My son’s in there!” Firefighters shouted, “Let him go!” But like the others who had been arrested, the old man was hauled away.
The protesters gathered on West Street beside the ruins, where they were joined by a scattering of die-hard union sympathizers from the site—primarily a group of ironworkers who sauntered over out of curiosity, and got into the spirit of things. One in particular seemed to delight in showing the crowd how to go about making a TV appearance. He was the very image of a beefy construction worker, dressed in a hardhat and a soil-stained thermal undershirt. He climbed onto a diesel excavator and for several minutes mugged for the cameras, waving an American flag and pumping his fist in the air. It was not clear that he knew or cared what this argument was about.
The same was obviously not true of the union official, whose problem here was to stay out in front of the membership or risk being left behind. He climbed onto the excavator and used his bullhorn again, repeating his cry of “Bring our brothers home!” and threatening to find reinforcements by the thousands, including “brothers” from other cities, if Giuliani did not back down. Exhibiting more bravado than political sensitivity, he called on the police to release the men who had been arrested, and to march with the demonstrators on City Hall. But of course the police were angry at having been attacked—all the more so because they, too, had tribal allegiances, and had lost twenty-three colleagues in the Trade Center collapse. The firemen marched to City Hall, where they chanted, “Rudy must go!” This was somewhat gratuitous, since Giuliani was only two months from the end of his tenure. They also chanted for the ouster of their fire commissioner, Thomas Von Essen, who for years had been a well-liked New York fireman and union leader, but who now was going around quietly making the point that by far the greatest loss of life had been civilian, and that the Trade Center tragedy was larger than just a firefighters’ or even a New Yorkers’ affair.
Giuliani was infuriated by what he viewed as an assault on the city’s all-important process of recovery, and he lashed out with the vindictiveness for which he was known. With the demonstration still going on, he called Holden on Holden’s cell phone and demanded that he identify the ironworkers and fire them. This was only the second time in eight years that Holden had received a call from the mayor, and he was aghast at what he was hearing. Very few ironworkers had joined with the firemen, but the ones who had were likely to be union activists, and therefore just the sort of people who could rally sympathy across the pile. Any attempt to discipline them could easily backfire and lead to a full-scale rebellion. Moreover, for all he knew, the ironworkers were on their break (or could claim to be), and since they were not disrupting the work, they had every right to protest. This was the inner world of the Trade Center site, an emergency zone, yes, but not subject to martial law; if it was a turbulent and quarrelsome place, it was also courageous and creative, an authentic piece of American ground. But Holden knew better than to argue with Giuliani, and he did not try. After ending the call, he dutifully had a DDC staffer at the scene take pictures of the ironworkers. It was a particularly unpleasant moment: the workers had no idea what the snapshots were about, and some posed for them festively, as if they were on a weekend outing. Holden looked disgusted by the whole affair. He was irritable in a way I had not seen before. As the demonstration drifted away from the pile, he came upon a New York tabloid-TV crew that was setting up to interview a man in an FDNY T-shirt—presumably about the depths of his sorrow. Holden told me he was tired of all the exploitation. He walked up to the reporter and demanded that he take his cameraman and leave. The reporter said, “We just want to … ”
“Out!” Holden snapped, pointing north.
The reporter gave Holden a look of pure hatred. He said, “The man’s got no heart.”
“Out!”
By late afternoon Holden was sitting again in the kindergarten room of PS 89, thumbing glumly through pictures of the protesting ironworkers. He had no intention of following through with Giuliani’s orders, but he knew that if he flaunted his disobedience, the repercussions would be swift and severe. He himself had told me earlier that the first lesson of "commissioner school” was "Don’t contradict the mayor.” The only alternative now was to procrastinate, and to hope that the idea would somehow go away. This was not the style of the Giuliani administration, in which the mayor’s whims were treated as dictates. Indeed, during several phone calls that followed, one of Giuliani’s deputy mayors, Tony Coles, continued to demand punishment for the iron workers long after it could conceivably have served a useful purpose. But Holden held the line, in this case for inaction, and with defensive skills unheralded even within PS 89, he managed to protect Giuliani from himself and the nation from Giuliani, and to keep the recovery effort on track.
It was a troubled time anyway, that first half of November, the low point in New York’s response to the Trade Center attack. The Yankees had lost the World Series—and to Arizona, of all teams. The various groups at the Trade Center site were turning into warring camps. To make matters worse, Giuliani seemed to have lost control of his emotions. After the demonstration (soon known as “the firemen’s riot”) he continued for several days to rage about the protesters’ distortions, and what he saw as their betrayal of the city’s well-being. He did not seek conciliation—for instance, by forgiving those who were involved in the demonstration. Rather, the police hunted down another six firemen identified as culprits, and booked them on charges of criminal trespassing. Among these men were the presidents of both firefighters’ unions: Captain Peter L. Gorman, of the 2,500member Uniformed Fire Officers Association, and Kevin E. Gallagher, the protester with the bullhorn, who headed the 9,000-member Uniformed Firefighters Association.
These were honest union officials, expressing the legitimate if misguided dissent of their membership, and their arrest was unusual, to say the least. It was also, of course, counterproductive. The firemen were outraged. Captain Gorman, who had worn the uniform for twenty-eight years, said, “They’re putting me through the system like I’m a thug.”
The tribalism that grew up on the pile had origins so primitive that they can only be understood as instinctual. At the core was an us-versus-them mentality brought on by the mere act of donning a uniform. The hostility was historical, and it had proved impossible to root out.
He called the fire and police commissioners “Giuliani’s goons,” and Giuliani himself a “fascist.” The unions threatened privately to hold a news conference and accuse the mayor of being “anti-American,” but apparently thought better of going public with such a foolish claim. Instead, more accurately, a union spokesman said to The New York Times, "The mayor fails to realize that New York City is not a dictatorship, where if you don’t like what a union is doing you can just go and lock up a union’s president. The message being sent from City Hall is that if you don’t agree with this administration, we will get you.” Outside the Trade Center site America bloomed with bumper stickers proclaiming UNITED WE STAND, a strangely forlorn slogan in a country that so obviously draws strength from disagreement. Drawing strength from disagreement is a trick that the attacking terrorists must certainly have discounted. But of course there are also limits to the creative power of disunity—and the Trade Center response seemed to be veering toward just the sort of social implosion that the terrorists may have had in mind.
The tribalism that grew up on the pile had origins so primitive that they can only be understood as instinctual. At the core was an us-versus-them mentality brought on by the mere act of donning a uniform. Whether as firefighters or as the two sorts of police (city and Port Authority), the uniformed personnel at the site were generally drawn from the same white “ethnic” outer-borough neighborhoods and families, but as members of their respective organizations they had learned to distrust and resent the others. The hostility was historical, and because it was strongest on the lowest levels, among the rank and file, it had proved impossible to root out. People at the site referred to it alliteratively as the Battle of the Badges. Across the years it had led to frequent arguments over turf and occasional bouts of outright obstructionism at emergency scenes. At the Trade Center it had been a factor from the first moments after the attack, when the Police and Fire Departments had set up separate command posts several blocks apart, and without communication between them. There were consequences to this: after the South Tower fell, police helicopter pilots took a close-up look at the fire in the North Tower, and twenty-one minutes before the final collapse they urged their own command to evacuate the building. The warning was radioed to the policemen inside the North Tower, most of whom escaped, but it was not relayed to the fire commands, or to the firemen in the building, only some of whom were able to hear independently radioed orders to evacuate, and more than 120 of whom subsequently died. The lack of communication was certainly no more the fault of one side than of the other, but it aggravated the divisions between them. Even during the initial desperate search for survivors the police and firemen quarreled over turf, and asserted their differences. By the end of the first day the bucket brigades had separated according to uniform. Throughout the months that followed. individual friendships and family ties cut across the lines. Nonetheless, the tribalism festered and soon infected the construction crews, too, who did not quarrel much among themselves but generally distrusted the police as ordinary citizens do, and who probably hadn’t given firemen much thought before but came now to resent their claims to special privilege on the pile.
The claims were based on an unspoken tribal conceit: that the deaths of their own people were worthier than the deaths of others—and that they themselves, through association, were worthier too. This was difficult for the police and civilian workers at the site to accept. The collapse of the towers had been anything but certain. The firemen who had gone inside had been normally brave—as people are who are not cowards. They were not soldiers crossing the lip of a trench or assaulting a machine-gun nest in battle; they were men with a job that demanded mental willingness and hard physical labor, and on that day they were climbing endless stairwells one flight at a time in the company of friends, and with little clear purpose in mind beyond perhaps finding the civilians who must have been injured by the twin attacks. The firemen in the South Tower were killed without warning. They were unintentional martyrs, non-combatants, typical casualties of war. Those in the North Tower felt the rumble of the South Tower’s collapse, but as best as is known, most did not understand what had happened or conclude that their own building soon would come down. Later on, as the precariousness of the North Tower became clearer, there were firemen who committed acts of extraordinary heroism—for instance, by lingering to help civilians, or remaining in the lower lobbies, desperately working the radios and calling for an emergency retreat. But the Fire Department had no monopoly on altruism that day, and terrible though its casualties were, with 343 dead, it did not suffer the greatest losses. As the workers on the pile knew all too well, that sad distinction went to the brokerage firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, where 658 people had died—some of them no doubt as altruists too. But what did such categories mean anyway? Nearly 3,000 people had been slaughtered here, nearly all of them on the job, and each of them at the last instant equally alone. Those who had not been vaporized lay scattered in the rubble’s democratic embrace. The dead were dead now and didn’t care. And it was absurd for the living to group and rank them.
Were it not for all the hype, this would hardly need saying. It’s true that the United States was shaken, and that people in their insecurity felt the need for heroes. The dead firemen certainly fit the bill. They were seen as brawny, square-jawed men, with young wives and children—perfectly tragic figures, unreliant on microchips or machines, who seemed to have sprung from the American earth like valiant heroes from a simpler time. They had answered the call of history, rushed to the defense of the homeland, and unhesitatingly given their lives. They had died at the hands of barbarians, leaving behind widows who were helpless, or who were said to be. All this presented opportunities for image-making that neither the media nor the political system could resist. Progressives may have been shocked by the ease with which America slipped into patterns of the past—with women at the hearth, men as their protectors, and swarthy strangers at the gate. Rationalists may have worried about the wallowing in victimization, and the financial precedents being set by promises of payouts to the victims’ families. As usual in America, there was reason for everyone to deplore the cynicism and crassness of the press. However, there would be time for refinements later. As an initial reaction to the first shock of war, the hero worship was probably a healthy thing, as long as it was confined to the dead.
But when it spilled over indiscriminately to the living, problems arose, and particularly at the center of attention, on the Trade Center pile. The firemen now on the scene were by definition those who either had escaped from the Twin Towers before the collapses or, more likely, had not been inside them to start with—in most cases because they had been somewhere else in the city at the time. They were not lesser men for this. But if the loss of the others was to mean anything beyond the waste of war, it had to be admitted that people on the pile since then, though ferociously dedicated to a grim and dangerous task, were simply not involved in heroics. Of course the situation was presented differently on the outside, where the public was led to believe that conditions on the pile were so difficult that merely by working there people were sacrificing themselves, and that the firemen in particular—anonymous figures who wore the same widebrimmed helmets as their fallen brethren—deserved the nation’s adoration. For many of the firemen, who tended to have led quiet lives until then, the sudden popularity became a disorienting thing. Even those with the strength to resist the publicity—who stayed off TV, and did not strut in public—seemed nonetheless to be influenced by this new external idea of themselves as tragic characters on a national stage. The image of “heroes” seeped through their ranks like a low-grade narcotic. It did not intoxicate them, but it skewed their view.
Strangely enough, it was this patriotic imagery that ultimately drove the disunity on the pile, and that by early November nearly caused the recovery effort to fall apart. The mechanisms were complex. On the one hand, there were some among the construction workers and the police who grew unreasonably impatient with the firemen, and became overeager to repeat the obvious—in polite terms, that these so-called heroes were just ordinary men. On the other hand, the firemen seemed to become steadily more self-absorbed and isolated from the larger cleanup efforts under way. The resentments rarely erupted into fistfights (though fistfights did occur) but increasingly were expressed in private conversations on the pile—often on the subject of the looting that for the first few months tarnished the Trade Center response.
The looting was shadowy, widespread, and unsurprising. The Trade Center was known to have been hit before by errant policemen and firemen, after the terrorist bombing of 1993. This time the thievery was less intense but longer lived. it involved small numbers of construction workers and men from the same uniformed groups as before, and it was shallow and opportunistic rather than deeply criminal in intent. It started in the shopping complex, with the innocuous filching of cigarettes and soda pop, and expanded into more ambitious acquisitions. As rumor had it, the tribalism at the site extended even to the choice of goods. Firemen were said to prefer watches from the Tourneau store, policemen to opt for kitchen appliances, and construction workers (who were at a disadvantage here) to enjoy picking through whatever leftovers they came upon—for instance, wine under the ruins of the Marriott hotel, and cases of contraband cigarettes that spilled from U.S. Customs vaults in the Building Six debris. No one, as far as I know, stole women's clothes, which hung on racks for months, or lifted books from the Borders book store, which were said to be contaminated with dangerous mold. After a few arrests were made, the filching shifted to the peripheral buildings, which were gradually thinned of computers until authorities wised up and posted guards. It’s important to realize that these transgressions occurred not in a normal pan of the city but in a war zone, where standards had changed, food and supplies were provided free of charge, and a flood of donated goods (flashlights, gloves, Timberland boots) was believed to be backwashing onto the streets. It was also a place where the entire nation had been attacked and was responding as a collective, and where therefore, surprisingly for modern America, the meaning of individual property had been diminished. In context the looting simply did not seem important.
Knowledge of it, however, cast a shadow on the use of the word “hero,” and at least once became a source of searing embarrassment and bitter mockery. One autumn afternoon, at the base of the South Tower ruins, diesel excavators were digging into unexplored reaches of the Trade Center’s foundation hole. Fifty feet below the level of the street they began to uncover the hulk of a fire truck that had been driven deep by the collapse. The work that afternoon was being directed by the field superintendent for one of the major construction companies, a muscular and charismatic man who was widely admired (and to some extent feared) for his unabashed physicality and his manner of plunging unhesitatingly into battle with the debris. If for no other reason than his confidence in the enormous mechanical power at his disposal, the superintendent believed in acting first and worrying about the consequences later. Early on he made it clear to me that were he in charge, he would clean up the site in no time flat, and that his first step would be to throw the firemen off the pile. He might even have included Sam Melisi in the toss, hard as that was to imagine. He assured me that he hadn’t disliked firemen before (he shrugged and said, "Why would I?”), but he just couldn’t stand this hero stuff anymore. He didn’t like the moralistic airs these guys were putting on. He didn’t like the way they treated the civilian dead. And he especially didn’t like the fact that they kept forcing his operation to shut down—once for an entire day—while they worked by hand and poked through the rubble for their colleagues’ remains.
Imagine his delight, then, after the hulk of the fire truck appeared, that rather than containing bodies (which would have required decorum), its crew cab was filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from a Trade Center store. When a grappler pulled off the roof, the jeans were revealed for all to see. It was exactly the sort of evidence the field superintendent had been waiting for. While a crowd of initially bewildered firemen looked on, the construction workers went wild. “Jeans! Look at these … Fucking guys! Jeans!” In their eyes, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the looting had begun even before the first tower fell, and that while hundreds of doomed firemen had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely, without the slightest suspicion that the South Tower was about to hammer down. Of course this was not what the firemen wanted to hear. An angry fire chief tried to shut the construction workers up. He offered an explanation—that the jeans (tagged, folded, stacked by size) had been blown into the crew cab by the force of the collapse. The field superintendent, seeming not to hear, asked the fire chief to repeat what he had said. When he did, the construction workers only jeered louder.
Scattered jeans lay on the pile for several days. The story got around. For Ken Holden and Mike Burton, this and other incidents amounted to important lessons in their war's early months: the site would never stand united, as sloganeers said it should, so some other approach would have to be found.
Though the firemen who rioted on November 2 did not believe it, when Giuliani gave “safety” as the reason for reducing their presence on the pile, he was completely sincere. This was somewhat counterintuitive, since the safety record so far had been extraordinarily good: despite the fires, the instability of the ruins, and the crushing weight of the equipment and debris, not a single recovery worker had been killed, and only a few had been seriously injured. Indeed, discounting possible long-term respiratory problems, the injury rate was about one half that of the construction-industry average. Some people claimed this as a sign of God’s favor, but a more mundane explanation was that the inapplicability of ordinary rules and procedures to such a chaotic environment required workers there to think for themselves, which they proved very capable of doing. Nonetheless, the city had reason to be especially concerned about the firemen at the site, who formed maverick groups on the pile, prone to clustering too close to the diesel grapplers and to taking impetuous risks in the smoke and debris.
The lack of discipline was a well-known aspect of the firemen’s culture. In some ways it was a necessary thing, hard to separate from their views of manliness and bravery and their eagerness to take on fires. It also, however, led to needless danger. After he left the service, in January of this year, Commissioner Von Essen mentioned that as a long-time firefighter, he had often stood on floors among thirty others where only ten were needed. Indeed, on September 11 many of the firefighters who responded were off duty at the time, and many bypassed check-in procedures, or arrived by subway or car in violation of orders to stay away. Many also went into the towers unnecessarily and with little coordination, at a time when there were enough other firemen on duty to handle the evacuations, and when the Fire Department had decided that the fires were unfightable. Sixty off-duty firefighters died that day. “Courage is not enough,” Von Essen later said. “The fact that the guys are so dedicated comes back to hurt them down the line.” The police at the site were better disciplined—and, partly as a result, suffered fewer casualties on the day of the attack. But nearly two months after the tragedy, with no conceivable justification for continuing to jump into voids or clamber across unstable cliffs, there were still firemen running wild.
Giuliani had good reason, therefore, to rein them in. Viewed from the outside, the plan seemed reasonable and right: you scale back the searchers from three teams of seventy-five to three teams of twenty-five—one from each of the uniformed services; you allow only one spotter at a time to stand beside each diesel excavator on the pile; until human remains are found, you require the other team members to wait in designated “safe areas” nearby; you do not allow ordinary firemen to keep shutting down the site; you create a joint command to soothe people’s egos but give practical control to the engineers and the construction types, who are workmanlike and know how to finish the job; you shrink the perimeter, with the goal of returning even heavily damaged West Street as soon as possible to the city; you thin the crowds of hangers-on by requiring new badges for the inner and outer zones, and asking the Red Cross and the Salvation Army to consolidate and simplify their feeding operations; you encourage people to get on with their lives.
The planners were not completely naive about the transition: they suspected that they might have some difficulty in getting the firemen to comply. Mike Burton decided that the best approach would be to start with strict enforcement of the new rules, and loosen up later for the sake of efficiency. I was surprised by his confidence that anything here could go according to plan. And indeed, little did.
Questions of personality and professional formation were at play. The construction crews, like the DDC itself, were made up of hard-driving people, accustomed to shaving minutes in a time-obsessed industry. Though they understood the desirability of finding the human remains at the Trade Center site, they were not going to slow the excavation of the ruins just to ensure that the final inspections at the Fresh Kills landfill did not turn up body parts. Mike Burton in particular was pushing for speed, and was determined to finish the job below cost and ahead of schedule—however arbitrary those targets may have been. He was climbing his mountain of success, and was not about to let a gang of irrational firemen get in his way. In public and during the morning meetings he was gracious and respectful toward them, but in private—in the confines of the kindergarten rooms, or during long walks with me on the pile—he let his impatience show. On the evening after the riot we came upon one of the new search-team “safe areas” (a ten-foot square of Jersey barriers spray-painted “FDNY”), and he shot me a hard little smile of victory. He used the firemen’s term for it and said, “The penalty box.” I assumed he was thinking about the attack on the police. He may have believed that the way forward was clear. He seemed not to notice that the penalty box was empty.
This was not a game. There were no rules. The firemen continued with their headstrong ways on the pile, refusing to submit to civilian authority. Five days after the riot, after the unions formally apologized to the police, Giuliani began a partial retreat. He said he would increase the size of the search teams to fifty. The firemen were unmollified. The place where their friends had been killed was still being turned into an unholy “construction site.” Three days later, on November 10, charges were dropped against all but one of the arrested demonstrators. It did no good. The firemen pulled out the stops and demanded a meeting between the mayor and the dead firemen’s families.
The meeting took place behind closed doors in a Sheraton hotel in midtown Manhattan, on the evening of November 12. It had been a rough day already: that morning an American Airlines flight departing for the Dominican Republic had crashed into a residential neighborhood of Queens, killing 265 people, and most of the officials at the meeting had visited the scene. Now they sat behind a table on a raised platform—the mayor, the medical examiner, the fire commissioner, and, from the Trade Center site, Mike Burton and his old friend and right-hand man, Bill Cote. The crowd they faced consisted mostly of widows—an increasingly organized group that spoke for mothers, fathers, and children as well, and that after two months of national sympathy was gaining significant political strength. Payouts to the victims’ families hadn’t yet begun, and firemen’s widows, not without reason, felt neglected and put-upon. They believed that the city was essentially giving up on the search for the dead. And they were angry about it.
The medical examiner was the first to come under fire. He had begun to talk about the procedures in place for handling remains when he made the mistake of mentioning that full corpses had not recently been found, and that they were unlikely to be found in the future. A woman stood up and yelled, “You’re a liar! We know what you’re finding! You’re a liar!” Others chimed in, shouting that their husbands’ bodies had been recovered in good condition. One woman yelled that when her husband was found, the searchers on the pile could even see the dimple in his chin. It was as if an emotional dam had burst in the crowd. The medical examiner listened somberly. When the crowd briefly quieted, he tried to explain his reasoning: the excavation had moved into the mid-levels of the ruins, where the debris was severely compacted and the dead had been shattered or vaporized; furthermore, from what was known of the pile’s composition, along with the processes of organic decay, there was little chance that whole bodies would be discovered in future. The widows would have none of this. They continued to shout “Liar!” until the medical examiner sat down. The months ahead would show that the medical examiner was wrong—that the ruins were riddled with unexpected cavities deep down, and that nearly whole corpses, particularly of heavily clad firemen, lay waiting to be found. However, this would have been impossible to predict at the time.
The mayor handled himself well that night. He was patient and compassionate, and he allowed the grieving crowd to rail, but he did not pander to it. About the medical examiner he simply said, “He’s not lying. He’s telling you what we know.” Then it was Burton’s turn to talk.
Burton started gamely into an explanation of the transition on the pile, including the new placement of spotters, the “safe areas,” and the handling and inspection of the debris. The crowd listened sullenly for a while, until a woman stood up and yelled, “We don’t even want to hear from you! You’re Mr. Scoop and Dump!”
Burton was flustered. He said, "Listen, this will only be a few more minutes. Just let me explain our thinking, so we’re all on the same page and can have a rational conversation.”
The woman shouted, “No! You’re not the sort of person I want to talk to! You’re the problem!”
Burton tried a soothing tone. He said, “We’ll get through this, if you’ll just ….”
“No! You’re Mr. Scoop and Dump!”
Others joined in, shouting, “Scoop and Dump! Scoop and Dump! Scoop and Dump!” Burton allowed a small, nervous smile to flicker across his face. His tormentor saw it. She yelled, “You’re smirking? You’re smirking at me? You think this is funny? This isn’t funny!” Someone else shouted, “Yeah, he’s smirking!” and again the whole crowd started in. Burton was mortified. He made a few weak attempts to speak, but the widows were relendess, and they overwhelmed him. For minutes he stood miserably on the platform, absorbing the abuse, unable to advance or retreat. Bill Cote felt terrible for him, and wanted to go to his rescue, but could not. Finally the mayor stepped in and got the crowd to simmer down. He told a little story and made a quip that caused Burton’s tormentor to smile. The mayor noticed and said, “You see, you just smirked. When people are nervous, they smirk. So can we please put this behind us now? Let’s just stop.”
But the widows were too angry for that, and they soon widened their attacks. They had some legitimate complaints—for instance, that the Fire Department had never gotten around to contacting some women about their husbands’ deaths, or to clarifying the associated administrative and financial details. A few of those whose husbands had yet to be identified were still having a hard time accepting their demises. And what about their paychecks? If a fireman remained trapped somewhere inside the pile, wouldn’t he still be on duty and earning overtime? Conversely, was it correct to assume that all those who had disappeared had stopped working at the moment of the collapses? Unexpected though these questions seemed, they were obviously practical, and the fire commissioner admitted that the department had done a poor job of handling such things.
For the most part, though, the widows simply vented their emotions. They argued as much among themselves as with the officials at the head of the room. One woman kept insisting that her husband was still alive, because she could send signals to his beeper and it would respond. Others, who had accepted the reality of death, were infuriated by the possibility that any of the firemen’s remains would be found at the landfill. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be the most difficult issue of the night. The crowd demanded to know why the final sifting operation could not be moved from Fresh Kills to the Trade Center site or the streets nearby. There were many reasons why—including dust, noise, neighborhood opposition, and, most important, the complete lack of space in Lower Manhattan—but neither Burton nor Cote was about to say that now. They promised to look into the possibility. Of course the crowd did not believe them. At one point a woman came forward with her son, a boy of about seven, and started screaming, “You tell him! You tell him!” Burton and Cote looked at her without understanding. Tell him what? She continued, “You tell him his father’s going to be found at the dump!” The crowd broke into applause. The woman began to cry. "Tell him! Tell him!” Her son watched her in apparent confusion. Friends came up, put their arms around her, and led her and the boy gently away.
Burton and Cote were badly shaken. When the meeting ended, after more than three hours of emotional storms, the two of them got into Burton’s Jeep and drove away through the quiet streets. At first they did not speak, except briefly to agree that the experience had been the worst of their lives. In the theater district they found a bar, and went in for a drink. The other customers there—tourists pioneering a return to the city, lovers hunched together before bed, late-night regulars of various kinds—could never have guessed the role of these nondescript men, or the utter seriousness of their talk.
The widows’ meeting turned out to be a watershed in the Trade Center recovery. Burton and Cote were tough guys, accustomed to seeing life as a struggle, and they would not have been unjustified had they responded impatiently to the encounter. This was dangerous to admit out loud, but it was on many people’s minds: the firemen’s widows were victims of victimization itself and in their agony and myopia they were starting to blunder around; moreover, they clearly did not represent tire thousands of others who had lost family on September 11 and were coming to terms with the events more stoically. It would have been understandable, therefore, if Burton and Cote had mentally stiff-armed the widows, privately dismissing their emotions as overblown, and rededicating themselves to the efficiency of the excavation. They had it within their power to do this—and had they been officials in many other parts of the world, they probably would have followed such a hard line. It was lucky for the ultimate success of the recovery effort that this was not the way they naturally reacted.
Instead, over a couple of beers they talked for the first time since September 11 about people’s emotional reactions to the attack, and they questioned why they themselves had felt so little affected by the death and destruction at the site. Burton called Cote a “cold fish.” Cote pointed out that neither of them had family or close friends who had died. It also had to be admitted that the project was going well, and that for both of them it was utterly consuming professionally, offering an emotional advantage that others did not have: Burton and Cote simply had no time to dwell on the tragedy. Still, each had been moved that night by the suffering of the widows, and had been troubled by the realization that, though they had tried to do the best possible job, there were people who believed that their actions were wrong, even wicked. It made them question the doggedness of their approach, and reminded them of a simple imperative that in the crush of daily decisions they were tending to forget; the unbuilding was more than just a problem of deconstruction, and that for the final measure of success they would have to take emotions into account. They finished their beers, drove downtown, and walked through the site.
In practice the firemen had lost the fight, but the terms of the peace would have to be generous. Burton knew this now, and Giuliani did too. The mayor increased the search teams’ numbers back to seventy-five per shift, though they would have to proceed on a less ambitious basis than before: it was understood that beyond being allowed to search for their dead, they would in fact have little say. The tensions never went away, and indeed escalated toward the very end. But already on the morning after the widows’ night, at the joint meeting at PS 89, one of the fire chiefs unintentionally made a show of his loss of power when his only contribution was to ask for a moment of silence for the dead of the Queens airline crash—a strangely irrelevant request that emphasized the changes under way by signaling that he had little to say about the work at hand. The widows would be heard from again—but increasingly through formal channels created for them. Mike Burton was now unchallenged as the Trade Center Czar. But he seemed to understand that to succeed he would have to keep his ambitions in check, and that America does not function as a dictatorship of rationalists.
And so the recovery proceeded, not as a united or a heroic exercise but as a set of accommodations worked out among self-centered groups sharing a pragmatic understanding that this was an important job, and that it was primarily a physical one. The only solution was to attack the ruins—to cut and drop the skeletal walls, lift the heavy steel, chew up the rubble mountains, pause to recover the dead, demolish the stump of the Marriott hotel, tear down the burned-through hulks of Buildings Four, Five, and Six. stabilize the neighboring high-rises, shore up the damaged subway, excavate the insanely packed foundation hole, reinforce and protect the slurry wall, and run a fleet of trucks and barges to haul the debris away. About halfway through Ken Holden said to me, “Excavation, remains, recovery, removal—repeat,” because in essence that cycle constituted the work. But of course the complications were considerable.
Indeed, the project defied most attempts to impose order, and it eventually defeated even the crudest organizational plans: the four-quadrant overlay, for instance, which slowly faded away; or the initial assumption that the excavation could proceed more or less uniformly from top to bottom, which because of the variability and interconnectedness of the debris it could not; or Mike Burton’s related hope that the aboveground work might be finished by Giuliani’s last day in office, December 31, 2001, which was far too neat to be even remotely possible. To the very end of the recovery effort and beyond, into the disputes over rebuilding that followed, nothing about the Trade Center site was tidy. Furthermore, as the work proceeded, the site became rougher and more complicated rather than less, a human landscape no longer shaped by its cataclysmic birth so much as by all the initiatives that had followed—histories measured in horsepower and steel, too obscure to remember or write down. To his credit, Mike Burton understood this. When he roamed the pile, as he did twice each day and once again at night, he seemed to accept the disorder there as being in the nature of an energetic response. Rather than hunting out infractions or putting a stop to unauthorized work, as a less confident ruler might have done, he watched for what he called “dead real estate”—unexpectedly quiet ground that resulted from supply-line breakdowns, trucking gridlock, or simple miscommunication between crews that worked the day shift and those that worked the night.
Sometimes he went without a hardhat, and often without a respirator—flouting the safety rules not just, it seemed, to show his toughness and rank but, more important, and to the exclusion of pettier concerns, to demonstrate his dedication to the real work of the site. This was the attitude he expected from others, and the message got through. Jan Szumanski, a superintendent with Tully Construction, once joked to me that Burton didn’t need the protective equipment, because people like him didn’t have a heart or lungs. In the context of the Trade Center site, Szumanski meant it as a compliment.
For a man with a comfortable house in Chappaqua, Burton was surprisingly at home on the pile. He could pitch his voice perfectly to make himself heard over the cacophony there—the roar of a hundred diesels, the hiss of cutting torches, the screech, rattle, and bang of extracted steel. He was too focused on the job ever quite to seem relaxed, but he was less skittish than many others, and did not hesitate to wade through the billows of smoke and dust, or to climb the steep slopes of loose debris. He would stand in the thick of the action, sometimes for an hour or more, with his arms folded and a frown of concentration on his face, taking it all in. His presence was crucial, especially in the fall and early winter, when the Trade Center crews were operating largely blind, guided only by common sense and instinct, and encountering dangers that had never been seen before. It was natural if occasionally they equivocated, or shied away from problems. Reliably, however, Burton never did—and instead had the habit of going out and actively looking for trouble. Most of the problems he discovered were so specific to the Trade Center site—and in that sense technical—that they would have been invisible to outside observers. Burton would have been invisible to those observers too: an unexceptional-looking man, moving among the more dramatic crowds, often accompanied by a trusted adviser (Bill Cote, for instance, or Peter Rinaldi), but generally making little effort to display his power. The work that he did on the pile was impossible to photograph, and difficult even to quantify, because it amounted largely to the avoidance of negatives. Nonetheless, it’s certain that without Burton’s frequent excursions there, those negatives would have added up.
Late one night in the fall we stood together on a debris hill, looking down across a scene that was at once familiar and surreal—the smoke and steam rising under harsh stadium lights, the orange sparks cascading from cutting torches, the teams of firemen standing in clusters with their rakes and shovels, the diesel excavators restlessly in motion, doing their dinosaur dancing in boiling dust and fields of flame. I said, “It’s your kingdom, Mike. It’s your empire.” He laughed, and didn’t hide his satisfaction. He seemed to be savoring the moment. Nothing had gone really wrong for a while, at least not to the extent of threatening Burton with failure. The dead were at last known to be dead. The protective slurry wall had been successfully stabilized. And the process of excavation was so well under control that the main thrust now was a pile-improvement project, Burton’s initiative, to build a temporary access road in the Bovis quadrant, from West Street into a deep depression, known as the “valley,” that lay at the center of the ruins between the footprints of the North and South Towers. The road was being built of ground-asphalt millings laid on top of the debris along a route that sloped steeply downward from the street. Over in the southeast corner, in Tullv territory, Jan Szumanski was coming on aggressively with a second access road that, after S-turning around and through the steel remnants of the South Tower, would eventually link up with the Bovis road. The imminent arrival of debris removal trucks at the heart of the ruins signaled a crucial shift in the geometry of the operation. The trucks would be loaded at the center of the pile—an important improvement over the current reliance on long daisy chains, in which the grapplers and excavators passed each piece of steel down the line and into the waiting trucks on the street.
Henceforth the excavation would proceed with increasing efficiency from the center outward, following a pattern similar to that of open-pit mining—albeit complicated here by variations in the ruins, by the need to preserve the slurry wall, and, of course, by the presence of the human dead. Those dead constituted an argument against excessive road building, because of the certainty that some of them were being buried under the millings, that their discovery would be delayed, and that for months to come, while their remains continued to decay, heavy trucks would roll across their graves. Burton had learned his lesson from the firemen’s widows, and he was determined to keep the emotional factors in mind. Nonetheless, when he looked ahead to what would soon be a deep hole in the Manhattan ground (seventy feet down, and increasingly defined by the sheer faces of the slurry wall), he saw no alternative to the roads for the removal of the debris. It was understandable, therefore, if that night when I stood beside him he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction with the progress being made.
But he was not a man to luxuriate for long, and with much of the debris-removal operation awaiting the completion of the Bovis road, he remained sensitive to signs of trouble. For instance, he turned now to a problem he had already encountered in the afternoon by the ruins of the Marriott hotel, where three diesel grapplers had been picking at the debris in a loose daisy chain, without contributing to the more important work in the valley. Burton had spoken about it to a Bovis field supervisor, and the grapplers had joined the main effort, but word had clearly not been passed to the night shift, because the machines were now once again squatting in a comer on a mound near the hotel. To make matters worse, two of the three had just broken down. One of them was a giant “750” with a long-arm attachment that had been pulling at the top of the ruins when a steel beam had snapped, cutting one of its hydraulic lines. Bleeding badly, the 750 began an awkward retreat, until, having lost 120 gallons of its vital fluids, it died. Burton was extremely annoyed. He clambered through the ruins until he found another supervisor, and with a smile that left no doubt about his anger, he calmly suggested that the company pay better attention.
But stronger words were often required—work for which Burton was not well suited, and which he gladly left to the site’s principal “pusher,” Lou Mendes, the DDC’s assistant commissioner for special projects. He was a blunt bulldog of a man, of Portuguese origins, whose technique for keeping things moving was to stand toe-to-toe with the other big guys on the pile and systematically lose his temper. Mendes in action was a phenomenon to behold. He had a large, jowly face, a low forehead, and small eyes, which gave him a glowering look even when he was feeling relaxed. When he was angry, his face darkened and became at times mocking, facetious, outraged, pained, or openly disbelieving. He would take on self-respecting men and ridicule and scold them as if they were delinquent children. At the most extreme, during a middle period when AMEC’s operation was stumbling, he grew so aggressive that he seemed to risk a complete breakdown in communications, if not outright physical assault. At PS 89 one day, after another slow night in the AMEC quadrant, Mendes called in the various vice-presidents and managers from the four prime contractors, sat them down in an abandoned classroom, and proceeded for nearly an hour to humiliate AMEC about its lack of performance. He said, “This is going to be a twenty-four-hour operation with or without AMEC. I go around, I look at Tully, I look at Bovis, and they’re productive all night. I want the same out of you.” The problem, as usual, seemed to result from a lack of communication between the day and night shifts. “I want to know what’s the matter with you guys. Don’t you talk to each other at all? You keep this up, and I’ll shut down your whole operation. You watch me. I’ll throw you off the job.”
The AMEC people tried to explain: certain equipment had broken down, a supplier had delivered late, there were unexpected complications with the steel, the Fire Department had not shown up with a fire-suppression team for the scheduled cutting of the steel spears from the wounded American Express building. Mendes would have none of it, and repeated the excuses loudly and incredulously, as if to allow others in the room to savor the incompetence on display here. He said, “If you need equipment, we'll lend it to you. You need a backhoe? Between Tully and Bovis, I’ll get you what you need.” He seemed to be implying that AMEC would have had trouble acquiring even a lawn tractor. The AMEC people listened with long-suffering expressions. They were of course seething at the treatment (and they later complained, to no avail), but they knew that any attempt to expel them from the job, even if unsuccessful, would seriously damage the reputation of the firm—an unexpected wrinkle in the otherwise proud claim of involvement in the World Trade Center recovery. Mendes in that sense had extraordinary power, and they had little choice but to accept his verbal lashings. He said, “I don’t care if your night guys are late or not. I don’t care about your dinner plans. You stay on and talk to the night shift before you leave. You make sure they understand the plan. And then talk to me. You call me before you leave.” He pointed at himself. “Lou Mendes,” he said, and rattled off his cell-phone number. “Did you write that down?”
“Yes, Lou.”
“And I want you to bring in lights. Tonight. You have a twenty-four-hour operation. I want to see lights. I want to see a twenty-four-hour operation. Assholes and elbows. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, Lou.”
Burton and Holden stayed away from such messy scenes, but each of them quietly insisted to me that Mendes was a good and necessary man. It turned out that he was a sentimentalist, too (of course), and not quite the bully that at first he had appeared to be. Even those on the receiving end of his attacks, which were by no means limited to AMEC, eventually came to recognize the legitimacy of his complaints, if never quite his methods of delivery. After a while a son of fondness characterized the exchanges.
AMEC solved its problems and began to make rapid progress on the pile, but then at the center of the action—the former valley that by midwinter had been deepened almost to bedrock and was known as “the hole”—Bovis started having trouble. The problem this time was with restricted maneuvering space in the loading zone, as a result of which near gridlock had set in, and the output of steel and debris (known as “production”) had dropped from a high of 12,000 tons a day to merely 2,000. On the final inspection line at Fresh Kills, where hundreds of law-enforcement officers were being retained to handle a larger flow, the people in charge were complaining about the lack of predictability, and demanding to know if they should plan on such low numbers in the future.
Mendes was outraged at Bovis. He called for a meeting with a dozen men he considered to be the key players on the pile—Peter Rinaldi, Sam Melisi, the Mueser Rutledge engineer Pablo Lopez, and managers from the most important contractors. Once they were all gathered, sitting around a small table or perched on the windowsills, Mendes said, “Shut the door.” Dispensing with the niceties, he immediately went on the attack. He called the work in the hole a “circus.” The field superintendent from Bovis, a ruddy man named Charlie Vitchers, who had a reputation for practicality and competence, tried to explain that the problem was due partly to the lack of clear command: someone needed to draw up a chart to show how authority was supposed to flow. Mendes grew apoplectic. “A chart? A goddamned chart? We’ve got charts coming out the ass. We’ve got charts of charts! We’ve got charts to make charts!”
“Maybe we should...”
“It’s all maybes! I don't want maybes. I want to know what you guys think you’re doing out there! What, digging holes and filling them in? Building Six is on hold! The Donut is on hold! Greenwich is on hold! The whole goddamned hole's on hold! My job is to get this job done! You may not like me. You may think I’m a pain in the ass. But my job is to do the job! I want to know what the hell you think your job is!”
Charlie Vitchers’s face was getting ruddier. He worked visibly to maintain his calm. He said, “We got ourselves into a cluster fuck. We knew it. We saw it coming. We knew we’d be in it for a week. But it’s getting better now.”
One of the Tully heirs, Jim Tully, was in the room. He was a lean, quiet man with hooded eyes and a pockmarked face, the very image of a New York street tough. Of the siblings who were running the company, with the hands-on approach for which the family was known, he was the field man, the one most at home on the pile. Currently he was managing the trucking and heavy-equipment operation as a subcontractor under Bovis, in one of the numerous shifting arrangements that had blurred the original quadrants. Incongruously now, he tried to placate Mendes. He folded his hands on the table as if to show that he was unarmed. He said, “Look. Lou. I’m a production maniac too. I mean, you’re not the only guy, Lou. It’s been burning holes in my gut all week. So maybe you can understand—just a smidgen?”
Mendes was in top form. He said, “Maybe I understand ‘just a smidgen,’ I'll give you that. But this whole operation is bullshit!
Sam Melisi was sitting at the far end of the table observing the argument with his fellow firemen in mind, as always, and by his mere presence reminding the people there of values other than speed and ambition—particularly the importance of allowing sufficient time to find the dead. Melisi had questioned Mendes’s methods at least once, in his apologetic, unassuming way, voicing to Burton the firemen’s complaints that Mendes was running roughshod over the inspection process in the hole. Mendes had immediately backed down; there was something about Melisi's moral authority that even Mendes could not resist. Jim Tully seemed to want to borrow some of that now. He said, “Plus, yesterday was a very tough day for the firemen. There were a lot of recoveries.”
Melisi said nothing. He would have called it a good day.
Mendes refused to get dragged into the conversation. He pointed his finger at Tully and bellowed, “Jim! I want guys pushing trucks! Today! Tonight! Trucks! You got it?”
“Yes, Lou.”
“I’m only a city fucking worker. You guys are the experts! So what are you doing about it?” He glared around the room, and repeated himself more quietly: “I’m just a damned civil servant.” Then he paused and said, “Well, maybe I’m not so civil.” People laughed, though it was more a verbal reflex than a joke.
Charlie Vitchers said, “Okay, Lou. Tonight I'll read them the riot act. We’ll see what happens.”
Mendes was spent. He said, “Push them, Charlie. They’re not made out of wax.”
But the problems of the project generally had more to do with too much motion than with too little: confusion, lack of focus, gridlock, risk-taking, the chaotic, free-for-all nature of the emergency response that was also its genius and strength. After years of struggling with the New York unions, some of the construction man agers had a hard time understanding that inside the inner world people’s attitudes had changed, and that the same workers who couldn't be made to care beyond their paychecks about erecting the next shopping mall or office building cared inordinately about pulling these ruins apart. Not that they worked here for free—or could have afforded to. After the site matured, the only volunteers in that sense were some of the Salvation Army and Red Cross people who served food in a large white tent known as the Taj Mahal, a communal space that, by offering the workers, firemen, and police officers a place to sit down for free meals, did as much to soothe wounds and maintain the peace as any political bargaining or formal compromise. Those volunteers were restricted to the outer zone of the site—the staging area where the debris trucks queued up and, when loaded, were tarped and driven through the washdown stations on their way to the piers, and where a large but conventional effort was under way to clean and reconstruct the variously damaged buildings all around. The pile itself was open only to the elite inner-core crews, and it was strictly union ground—but not as New Yorkers had seen union ground before. The mob shied away from the job. There was little featherbedding, and no strong-arming of the New York kind. With the exception of the firefighters' action, which was a special case, there were no threatened walkouts or strikes.
Because of the physical unknowns of the debris, as well as the frequent interruptions for the recovery of the dead, the work was done on the basis of open-ended “time and materials” agreements, as opposed to the standard packaged bids, and though some of the truckers cheated, and certain contractors grossly inflated their costs, on the whole, workers never got the idea to slow down and take advantage of the federal largesse. They were by no means perfect. There was the looting, of course. And Burton threw an entire AMEC crew of twenty-seven ironworkers off the site for spending a shift doing nothing at all. But Peter Rinaldi, who for all his adult life had overseen construction projects for the Port Authority, regularly expressed his amazement to me at the efficiency of the operation. Never before had he seen a time-and-materials job that functioned so well. The overtime helped: the heavy-equipment operators, for example, were earning at a rate of up to $200,000 a year, and some of the firemen and the police, whose pensions were based on their last level of pay, were experiencing such a windfall that financial logic required them to retire after leaving the site. But it would be a mistake to think that people were going around silently counting their blessings. They were in fact responding to the attack with all their might. They were doing the country’s dirty work, and somewhere in the background the money was flowing into the bank.
Working fast and in tandem, the grapplers picked the ruins apart one piece at a time. The steel they took on included the heaviest ever used in a building-box columns weighing 3,100 pounds per foot, so that a merely man-size length would amount to almost 19,000 pounds.
The stars of the show were the machines themselves, and particularly the big diesel excavators, marvels of hydraulics and steel, which roamed through the smoke and debris on caterpillar tracks and in the hands of their operators became living things, the insatiable king dinosaurs in a world of ruin. They came in various sizes, from the “small” 320s (which could pull apart an ordinary house in minutes) to the oversized 1200s, monstrous mining machines rarely seen in New York, which proved to be too awkward for many uses on the pile. Most of the work was done by the 750s—sufficiently big, sufficiently lean, enormously persistent beasts that battled the debris without rest. Each 750 weighed in at 180,000 pounds (as compared with 140,000 pounds for the heaviest trucks fully loaded), and was equipped with an articulating arm and one of three hydraulically powered attachments—steel-cutting “shears'” (often attached to an extra-long arm, for reaching high or wreaking havoc deep inside the standing ruins); conventional “buckets,” useful at the lower levels of the pile in areas of pulverized debris; or. most often, “grapplers,” gap-toothed claws that could open eight feet wide, but could also close into an overbite so tight that it could snap twigs. The grappler-equipped excavators (known simply as grapplers themselves) dominated the battle until it moved well below ground. Working fast and in tandem, the machines picked the ruins apart one piece at a time. The steel they took on included the heaviest ever used in a building—box columns weighing 3,100 pounds per foot, so that a merely man-size length would amount to almost 19,000 pounds, and a fifty-foot section would come in at nearly the weight of the grappler itself. Some of the loose steel could be “flown” out by the enormous cranes that ringed the pile—but the process was so tedious that it was reserved for special cases: for instance, for lifting beams during the search for survivors among ruins too rough to allow the grapplers access, or for the dismantling of the skeletal walls, most of which were torched apart one section at a time by ironworkers in suspended baskets, and then lowered gently to the ground. This left the bulk of the fight to the grapplers, which were just tough enough to take it on.
Actually, of course, it was the operators who accepted the fight. They were said to be the best in the business, and this was easy to believe. At the start of a shift they didn't just climb aboard and sit down but seemed, rather, to strap on the equipment much as good pilots strap on their wings. Like those pilots, too, they were artists of motion—fluid, expressive, and intuitively at one with their machines. The cabs that they sat in were enclosed in wire mesh and sound-dampening, shatterproof glass; they had single comfortable seats, filtered and cooled or heated air, automotive stereos, and a combination of pedals and tightly coupled, variable-rate joysticks that allowed the operators nearly bionic control. It was that control especially that gave the grapplers their beauty. The operators might drive to work like ordinary commuters, frustrated by traffic, by parking regulations, by lines at Starbucks for insipid coffee; but after they settled into their machines, they could put all that aside, and go rumbling off into the faraway land of ruin; and if they came to terrain too wild to cross, often they could build their way through; and when they came to the field of battle, typically among other grapplers straining there, they could reach their own arms out twenty feet. clamp their own steel claws around multi-ton splinters, and with fire and smoke erupting, while shuddering and rocking forward onto the toes of their tracks, they could wrestle those splinters clear. They could also then stretch their claws wide and angle them up to use just the bottom fingers to gently stir loosened debris for the firemen to see. The operators had all that power and grace at their command, and they possessed more imagination than ordinary construction jobs had let them exercise before. Now they had been given a high purpose, and been told roughly what Sam Melisi had been told: just go and see what you can do. It was a liberation, because they knew they could do a lot. They were resourceful. They were like pioneers.
Taking risks was a necessary part of the deal. That was true for others there too: even when they were not breathing in the smoke and dust, or climbing across treacherous slopes, the workers worked on top of weakened, partially collapsed structures, which bounced and shook underfoot, and sometimes gave way. But the grappler operators were particularly exposed, not only because they led the effort, often balanced precariously and pulling on unstable debris, but also because they seemed to feel protected by the mass of their machines. This was an error. The grapplers were like dinosaurs, but with thin skins. On two occasions when they ventured into areas from which Peter Rinaldi had excluded them, the pile suddenly collapsed, dropping them into voids. The two machines were badly damaged. It was a matter purely of luck that neither of the operators was injured. Rinaldi told me he would be very surprised if no one got killed at the site. On another occasion I was with him when he noticed to his alarm that one of Tully’s 750s had nosed into a comer of the partially collapsed Building Five, and was reaching up and pulling heavy debris down from overhead. Even if the building itself did not let loose, the pieces that were falling could have sliced right through the cab. Rinaldi got on the radio, which didn’t work. We walked across the pile to find Jan Szumanski. After a period of anxiety and confusion the grappler retreated.
With us at the time was an affable, boyish-looking man named David Griffin, age thirty-four, who was the project’s chief demolition consultant and its token southerner. Demolition in this context meant the unbuilding not of all the ruins but of the standing structures, of which there were plenty—Buildings Four, Five, and Six; the stump of the Marriott hotel; and all of the intact and partially intact basement levels of the foundation hole. Griffin, as usual, was wearing immaculate golfing clothes, and his site ID tag on a neck strap embroidered with “I Love Jesus.” He was less concerned than Rinaldi about the errant grappler, having seen much worse in his professional life, but he had gentlemanly manners, and said nothing about that now. Instead he reflected on the Trade Center work in general. He said, “It’s like playing Jenga—who’s gonna pick out the last piece? Only thing is, instead of falling down on your kitchen table, the pile falls five levels down—and you’re in it.” I asked Griffin if he was good at playing Jenga. He grinned and said. “Yeah, I reckon I am.” It was typical Griffin. He was a personable guy. He came from faraway Greensboro, North Carolina, and was the butt of a lot of NASCAR jokes. Indeed, his uncle was a NASCAR official. Griffin thought it was a pretty big deal. But he was not a complete rube. He knew all about the stereotypes, and even found them funny. Once, at a morning meeting at PS 89, when Griffin asked about the value of the bullion that was soon to be removed from the vault under the ruins, Burton said, “It’s enough to buy all of North Carolina—and they’ll throw in South Carolina for free.” Griffin laughed along with the rest.
But the bullion was worth only about a quarter billion dollars, and Griffin’s own daddy, as he called him, was probably worth that much or more. His daddy’s name was David too, though people called him "D.H.” He was a tobacco farmer’s boy, a ninth-grade dropout who in 1958, when he was nineteen, went to work on a cigarette production line, where he met his wife, and where he thought he’d spend his life. In his spare time he sold parts off a dozen junked cars in his front yard. In 1959 he tore down an old church to salvage the lumber and nails, and did it so well that the city inspector (who stopped by because D.H. lacked a demolition permit) asked him to handle a small apartment building next. D.H. soon realized that the value of demolition lay as much in the resale of salvaged materials as in the service rendered, and, as he liked to explain, he just kept going from there. By the time of the Trade Center collapse he had become one of the three largest demolition contractors in the United States, one of the largest scrap-metal dealers in the South, a construction magnate, and the master of more businesses and real estate in North Carolina than even he could remember.
New York was not his kind of town, and he had opposed David’s impulse to get involved, but after the Griffin name became attached to the Trade Center project, D.H. arrived twice at the site to see the work, of which, of course, he was proud. He was a burly, gray-haired man of sixty-two, with a bad knee, a strong Carolina accent, and unusually quick eyes. David took him around on an all-terrain “Gator.” D.H. was friendly, but didn’t have much to say to the New Yorkers who passed by. He wanted to talk to David about family, and a little business. He told me about his weekend relaxation, which he called “riding around,” and which amounted to an activity rather close to his work—a Sunday-drive form of looking for trades, in which the size of the deal didn’t matter so much as its quality. David laughed and said that just last week his daddy, having come into 20,000 T-shirts (D.H.: “Class One T-shirts. Orange ones, white ones, blue ones”) at 25 cents apiece, had taken a few boxes of them to the parking lots of local shopping centers, and for a dollar each had sold dozens out of the trunk of his car. His customers must have figured he was an old man down on his luck. Even D.H. could now chuckle about it. But later that afternoon, as we talked, I got the distinct impression that he was feeling out my interest in acquiring, say, an antique shotgun, or maybe a knife.
When the Twin Towers collapsed, D.H. Griffin, like most Americans, was so wrapped up in his affairs that he was unable to respond beyond the standard feelings of anger and surprise. David Griffin was a rich and busy man in his own right, president of the demolition company, with a wife and voung children, but not quite so established as his father. He was drawn to the Trade Center site much as Ken Holden and Mike Burton were—because he had knowledge to offer, and could not stand still and stay away. He had a business justification, too: on Thursday, September 13, he called his father and said, “Daddy, I’m going to New York. Because this is the kind of job, if it breaks—when it does break—they’re not gonna pick up the phone book and look under ‘Demolition Contractors’ to see who could help them. I’m gonna leave, and if I don’t have anything by Monday, all I'll feel is I wasted a weekend in New York. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
His wife, who had been to New York only once before (for a day), insisted on accompanying him, and on bringing their children. They loaded up their Suburban, drove nine hours north, and in the middle of the night checked into the Palace Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. Griffin got a few hours’ sleep, and early Friday morning, in a pouring rain, he drove downtown as far as he could, grabbed a raincoat and a hardhat out of the back of his vehicle, hung a respirator around his neck, and started walking. When he came to a police barricade at Canal Street, he did not hesitate, and he passed through unchallenged. His heart pounded. He thought, I’m in! I’m in! But four blocks from the site he was stopped at another barricade—this one manned by the New York National Guard. A soldier said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going to work.”
“Well, lemme see your pass.”
“I don’t have a pass.”
“If you don’t have a pass, you’re not going in. Who are you working for?”
“Well... Bovis.” Griffin had contacts there, some names to look up.
The soldier said, “What, you don’t have a pass or anything?”
Griffin said, “I come from North Carolina.”
That fixed it. The soldier said, “No pass—you can’t go in.”
Griffin stood around, unsure of what to do. The rain came down. People with passes went through. After a while a group of Red Cross volunteers showed up with drinks for the soldiers. The soldiers began talking to them. Griffin drifted inside the barricade. The soldiers didn’t seem to notice. He walked toward the pile, and the next thing he knew, six months had gone by.
His Bovis contacts knew him by reputation: this was D.H.’s boy, a kid who’d grown up at wrecking sites from the age of two, sleeping in concrete culverts at night, with laborers standing guard. The Bovis people understood the value of the homegrown experience that Griffin could provide, particularly for what promised to be the tricky problem of wrecking the Marriott hotel. They hired him for their quadrant, and introduced him around. For the first several weeks he had competition from a more flamboyant demolition man, who ultimately flamed out in the eyes of the site managers at PS 89 and was asked by Ken Holden to leave the job. People had trust in Griffin by then, as much for his lack of grandstanding as for his obvious technical competence. At Burton’s request he took on the role of demolition consultant for the whole site, planning and managing the dismantling of all the standing structures both above and below ground. It was a crucial position, central to the entire project.
Toward the end, over a sandwich with his father and me, Griffin described his early thoughts. He had considered some selective blasting at first, to drop the skeletal walls and bring down the ruined buildings. He called it “shooting” them. Holden and Burton vetoed the idea, primarily because of the jitteriness of the neighbors. As much to his father as to me, Griffin said, “These New Yorkers just flip out. You know, this ain’t South Pittsburgh.”
D.H. said, “Nope.”
Griffin figured he would have the space to use a wrecking ball on Buildings Four and Five, and indeed that is what he did, after pre-cutting the internal structure of the buildings, a dangerous process he called “juicing them up.” It was an unusual procedure for New York, but faster and cheaper than the city’s standard labor-intensive technique of incremental deconstruction.
He also figured correctly that he’d be able to topple the north skeletal wall, a towering structure that had broken at the base and was leaning heavily against Building Six. This was done with five grapplers arranged side by side, pulling simultaneously on cables bolted to the top. Eventually he was able to rock and topple Building Six, too. But for the most part, such wholesale wrecking techniques were not going to work at the Trade Center site. Griffin said, “I knew there wasn’t but one way to do it.”
D.H. said, “Yep.”
“That’s to start cutting and pulling it down.”
He meant piece by piece, and it was no big deal. He had a way of making things seem simple. He brought in a few of his own people—southern boys all, who had the hardscrabble background necessary to get the job done. They moved into some vacant apartments nearby. They were the most un-daunted workers at the site. Months later Burton expressed surprise over beer one night when he discovered that Griffin had only a high school education. No one had bothered to ask before, and afterward no one thought it mattered.
The truth is, what Griffin had grown up knowing about risk and safety, others at the site, more formally educated, were now having to learn. Regulation was simply not possible at the start, and even after it began to creep in, its real purpose was to exist officially on the books, playing a rearguard position while the project surged ahead and continued to allow personal responsibility and individual choice to prevail. Peter Rinaldi adapted to the freedom naturally, despite his years spent within the confines of the Port Authority, and he became Griffin’s ally in the ordinarily cautious camp of the engineers. Others had a harder time accepting risk, but even they eventually came around. There was, for instance, an encounter that became well known at PS 89, between Griffin and a DDC engineer who was nominally responsible for the aboveground structures, but whose penchant for memo-writing made him something of a misfit at the site. For weeks Griffin had been pushing the engineer to let him proceed with the demolition of the Marriott ruins, which rose three stories above the street and extended ail six levels down into the foundation hole. There was no safe way to take those ruins on. Access from the sides was impossible because of the proximity of unstable structures and of the vulnerable slurry wall. Griffin’s solution—to put an excavator directly on top and wreck the Marriott from above—was obviously very risky. The DDC engineer kept blocking the action. At last Griffin came as close to losing his temper as he ever did. He said, “We’re not going to talk it down. We gotta do something.”
The engineer finally gave in. He said, “Okay. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I guess it’s okay." That formulation quickly went around. It described how the site actually worked—by people out of necessity turning a blind eye. Given the go-ahead, a grappler operator immediately drove his machine to the top of the hotel and, at conscious risk to himself, began to tear it apart nearly underfoot. It was dangerous behavior, but typical on the pile. Griffin, who often stood in the thick of the action himself, once had a narrow escape when the counterweight of a swinging excavator hit him hard in the back, luckily knocking him down a slope rather than against the debris, which would probably have been fatal. He checked with the site doctor, and went back to work. At another time, when a large section of steel unexpectedly fell, a fire chief came rushing up to Griffin yelling, “Where’s the safety zone on this job?” and Griffin calmly responded by naming the site’s outer-perimeter line: “Chambers Street. Do you want to close the whole place down?” The fire chief got the message. Most people eventually did. Risk was the very nature of the Trade Center operation. The danger there was almost a necessary thing.
This was sometimes difficult to grasp for people on the outside, where there were flurries of news reports about worrisome safety violations at the site. Outsiders believed that the constant danger—along with the presence of the dead—had to be getting to people. One afternoon when Pablo Lopez stopped by the midtown engineering offices of Thornton-Tomasetti, he was offered a session with a consulting psychologist, a woman whom the company had dutifully retained to assist its Trade Center crew. The psychologist asked Lopez to make himself comfortable. She had a slow, soothing way of talking, which had the immediate effect of irritating him. He told me about it the next day, exaggerating the intervals between her words.
He said, “She says, ‘Close ... your ... eyes.’
“So I close my eyes. Okay, now what?
“She says, ‘Imagine ... a ... safe ... place.’
“I think, safe place? What’s that? At least she could have said ‘Imagine a steak house.’ I mean, where’ve you been, lady? I live in New York City, and there’s an anthrax scare going on! I go home, and my wife is ironing the mail! And where is it I work? It’s underground in the World Trade Center’
I don’t know what Lopez said to the psychologist, but his point to me was that he wasn't planning to move away. He lived at the center of the world because he liked the action. He worked at the Trade Center because he wanted to. He wasn’t searching for safety. He didn’t need to close his eyes, or to make himself comfortable. He didn’t need the teddy bears that volunteers kept handing out. And he wasn’t afraid of the dead.
In the end, 1.5 million tons of ruins were extracted from the seventeen acres of the Trade Center site. The vast bulk of the material was barged twenty-six miles to the Fresh Kills landfill for sorting, final inspection, and burial. Despite the negative emotions it evoked in Manhattan, Fresh Kills was an excellent choice for the work—one of the largest open spaces in New York City, a magnificently barren landscape of earth-capped refuse, spreading across 2,200 acres and rising in places about 200 feet above the tidal estuaries of Staten Island. It had been retired from service six months before, in March of 2001, presumably to become a park someday, but had been reactivated for this one final purpose. Now again it was a dump, and one of the largest in the world. But it offered complete privacy and calm, and allowed for surprising dignity during the sad and gritty operation to come.
For the landfill itself, the prospect of accepting the ruins did not pose a significant challenge. The docks and equipment necessary for offloading the barges remained in place, as did even the little service boat that opened and closed the floating boom that kept flotsam from drifting away. Moreover, no matter how rapidly the Trade Center excavation proceeded, on the scale of New York City garbage its output was not expected to be unusual; in fact, the disaster site’s highest level of daily production, at 13,900 tons, was only a thousand tons more than just the household rubbish that Fresh Kills had dealt with every day in its last years—a level that itself was merely a third of the city’s solid-waste production, estimated at 14 million tons a year. In strictly material terms, therefore, the Trade Center debris was hardly more than just another curiosity—a variation in the urban detritus that Fresh Kills had accommodated for a half century. But of course in emotional terms the Trade Center material was very different stuff.
The hilltop at Fresh Kills, where the debris was sorted, was a wildlooking place, with American flags whipping in cold winds, like the outpost of a government expedition to a toxic planet. It was roamed by hundreds of workers garbed in white protective suits.
On 176 acres across the top of its highest hill, Fresh Kills set aside an area for the operation. The ruins began arriving by truck the very first night. The initial loads were of high-grade structural steel—torn perimeter sections of the Twin Towers, and fractured and twisted beams from the inner cores. At the site they had been cursorily inspected for the dead, but a few nonetheless contained the occasional human remains. These pieces of steel arrived in a rush that echoed the urgency of the search for the living, and they accumulated uncontrollably in piles so heavy that they began to crush the hill, damaging the system of subsurface pipes that channeled methane gas from the site. Fresh Kills cried for relief from the weight and soon got it when for independent reasons an agreement was worked out to sell and send the structural steel from the Trade Center site directly to scrapyards in New Jersey. As much to manage the quantities as to turn a profit those scrapyards wasted no time in cutting the steel up for further resale and shipment. Fresh Kills was able to unburden itself by shipping its heavy steel to those same yards, but the accumulation was so great (and the pieces so dangerous and difficult to handle) that the process took months to complete.
Meanwhile, the barges had been put in motion, the Trade Center debris was arriving by the thousands of tons daily, and production-line procedures for handling it were proving up to the task. Those procedures remained remarkably stable over the course of the operation, because though the conditions at the Trade Center site frequently changed (resulting in production spikes), once the heavy steel had been redirected to New Jersey, the nature of the output destined for Fresh Kills remained largely the same: bargeloads of rubble consisting of broken and crushed concrete, asbestos, asphalt millings, rebar and other forms of light steel—all stirred through with a homogenized mixture of details from 50,000 working lives, nearly 3,000 of which had just ended violently. Fresh Kills' job was to separate the human mixture from the rest, and to de-homogenize it.
The process started intuitively on the barges themselves, where some of the tugboat crews believed they could judge the organic content of the loads from the seagulls overhead, scavengers who were drawn by odor but had little chance to feed, and whose flocks diminished over time. Throughout the fall and into the winter some of the debris was so hot that, fanned by harbor breezes, it smoked and burst into flame. When it arrived at Fresh Kills, it was lifted by giant excavators into specialized dump trucks, which drove it up a curving dirt road to the top of the lull and released it into little mounds, where the sorting began.
The hilltop was a wild-looking place, with American flags whipping in cold winds, like the outpost of a government expedition to a toxic planet. It was scattered about with heavy equipment, truck trailers, and prefabricated structures of various kinds, and roamed by hundreds of workers (typically police officers or FBI agents) who were garbed in white protective suits, respirators, gloves, and high rubber boots. For visitors first arriving from the Trade Center site, where people worked largely unprotected, the clothing in particular seemed odd. as if something must have happened to the debris to make it more dangerous on the way over. Otherwise there was plenty of evidence that workers in both places were handling the same materials: all around stood huge piles of Trade Center debris—much of it now sorted, inspected, and awaiting burial—that elicited unexpected feelings of familiarity and later even of fondness, like old acquaintances encountered in a foreign land. The hilltop was of course a part of America, and by geographic measures it was not far removed from the city: on a clear day from there you could even count the monuments of the Manhattan sky line, minus two. But it was isolated and exotic nonetheless.
Certainly no one had ever run a dump this way before. After the debris arrived from the piers, the large metal pieces were extracted, most significantly the vicious tangles of rebar “spaghetti,” which by hanging untrimmed off trucks had threatened Trade Center workers with decapitation, and now in due justice were to be sliced, sold, and melted down. Once the metal was extracted, the rest of the debris was scooped up and poured into giant shakers, of which there were as many as four. Debris that was larger than six inches across was removed, spread over a field, and raked through by hand. The remaining materials were fed into equally giant mechanical sifters, which shook and spun the loads into three separate debris streams according to size. The first stream contained material less than a quarter inch across, and (with the exception of the occasional fingernail, as an FBI agent mentioned to me) it consisted almost entirely of asphalt millings and dirt. and was discarded without being inspected. The second and third streams contained the larger debris. These materials were carefully scrutinized. They were fed onto variable-speed conveyor belts that ran through plastic-walled structures where white-clad workers sat on stools along what amounted to disassembly lines, watching ninety minutes at a time for anything that might be assigned to a victim—badges, guns, and Palm Pilots, for instance—or that might be material evidence bearing on the acts that brought the buildings down.
Peter Rinaldi's long-expired Port Authority identity card was found there, on one of the lines: he had discarded it in his desk on the seventy-second floor, and it was returned to him ceremoniously by two Port Authority policemen, who called him with the news and then escorted the card to his office. Most of the personal effects that were found at Fresh Kills were equally unimportant, for the happy reason that 95 percent of the people who had worked in the buildings were still alive. Nonetheless, the searching had to be done. The eagerly sought cockpit voice recorders from the hijacked airplanes were never found. But the inspection process did turn up an average of five body parts a day, most of them very small—which by the time Fresh Kills closed again, in the summer of 2002, had led to the positive identification of an additional seventy-eight missing people. Equally helpful in the emotional climate of the time, the process ensured that none of those particular body parts (and obviously very few others) had been treated disrespectfully or “thrown out at the dump.”
The other effect of the inspections, of course, was to free the debris for burial. The interments began right away, in a patchwork pattern across the hilltop, and consisted not of digging graves but of spreading the Trade Center remains and covering them over with a thick blanket of earth, hi that most unexpected way the hilltop slowly grew, with the World Trade Center adding rolls and variations to the ground where someday people would come to relax. In fact nothing was just “thrown out at the dump”—not a single piece of those buildings. The work of sorting through the debris was enormous. But it was accomplished, and then at last the job was all over.
On Thursday, May 30, 2002, the closing ceremony was held at the Trade Center site, and was televised to the world. A 460-foot inclined steel bridge had been built from Liberty Street to the bottom of the foundation hole, which, with the exception of some intact basement structures along the north side, now appeared to be barren and almost clean. The occasion of the closing ceremony was the removal of the last load, a steel column from the South Tower. All the players were there, as usual in separate groups and distinguishable by their clothes: the firemen, the New York City and Port Authority cops, the construction workers, the families of the dead, and, of course, the politicians. Giuliani’s Republican successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was five months into his term, had the sense to keep the ceremony short. The idea, it seemed, was to get this over with, and let people proceed with their lives. There were no speeches of any kind. Among the workers who had been there from the start the mood was a little sweet, like that of a graduation night, when people know but don’t admit that they may not see one another again. The steel column lay on a flatbed truck at the bottom of the hole. Peter Rinaldi was down there with it, in a line of others who had been selected for the honor guard. Over the previous months he had continued to gain in reputation and influence, and now, as control of the ground was being returned by the city to the Port Authority, and the subway and PATH commuter-rail restorations were getting under way, he had been asked to stay on and manage the site. It was a strange turn for someone who had built his life inside the Twin Towers, to measure his success by the cavity they had left behind. But he was brimming with self-confidence these days.
Bagpipes played. The truck rolled at the speed of a slow walk. Rinaldi and the rest of the honor guard accompanied the last load as it was carried up the bridge and north along West Street. And that was it, the end—or almost. Actually, several additional weeks of cleanup lay ahead, during which debris continued to arrive at the landfill and to go through the process of sorting and inspection. The final disposal proceeded at the normal pace. The steel was absent. But otherwise, by midsummer, less than a year after the attack, the World Trade Center and its burned and pulverized contents lay under bare earth, absorbed, like so much else of New York’s past, into the man-made hills of Fresh Kills.
But for the residents of the inner world the end had essentially come months sooner, by early March, merely a half year after the collapse. It was a time when few problems remained to be solved, and the future of the unbuilding had become entirely clear. The steel bridge had just been completed, and soon the excavations would start on the last major area of compacted debris, under the Tully access road. David Griffin had packed up and gone home to North Carolina. Safety restrictions were increasing by the day. Ken Holden was philosophical about it, and, as his father might have years before, he played a little word game—something like metaphor-cramming. He said, “When the smoke clears, the nitpickers come out of the closet." And it was true: the regulators and auditors had arrived in force. Those from the federal safety agency called OSHA were most in evidence; they had been present from the start, and had been largely ignored, but were suddenly multiplying now and gaining the upper hand. They wore bright safety vests and had helmets equipped with red flashing lights. One afternoon, with about a dozen of them in sight, their lights blinking in the hole, Pablo Lopez said to me, “Look! The Martians have landed, and they’re communicating!” A few days later one of them asked me to don safety glasses or leave the excavation site, and I remember my surprise when I realized that he was serious. It felt sort of silly, like being required to wear sunblock in a combat zone, but the truth was that the battle was over, and the hole had become a tame place. Lopez’s partner, Andrew Pontecorvo, explained it to me as a fact of life that he had observed before. He said, “The safer things get, the greater the restrictions.” He was a realist. He shrugged.
It was a tough time for some of the victims’ families, to whom it was increasingly clear that their missing would never be found. The firemen also were feeling that same frustration, and with less to do inside the hole, rather than reducing their forces they were concentrating with increasing zeal on raking through the debris that was laid out for secondary inspections in the southeast corner of the site. Relations between the tribes remained fractious. Among themselves, construction people accused the firemen of dragging things out for overtime pay, and the firemen, in turn, accused the construction men of profiteering. A gang of Port Authority cops attacked and severely beat a construction worker and a DDC fieldman, who tried to come to his rescue, sending both men to the hospital. Once, in early spring, when some New York City policemen refused to break off the recovery of one of their own dead to honor the remains of a fireman being carried up the bridge, a brawl broke out in the hole. The uniformed groups especially seemed sometimes to be clinging to their tragedies.
The larger mood at the site was based more on the recovery process itself than on the attack, and it was a complex mixture of nostalgia, satisfaction, and regret. People felt that this had been the peak experience of their lives, that they had ‘“ gone to the moon,” as they said, and that they would never do anything to equal it again. Bill Cote told me about an encounter he had with Jim Miller, the big, blunt, blue-collar founder of a small company named Angel Aerial, normally in the business of producing theatrical rain (for Victoria’s Secret ads, for instance, or the fishmarket scene in Godzilla), who through sheer force of personality had busted into the dust-suppression role at the site. In the spring, with dust no longer such a problem, Cote required Miller to lower his prices or leave the job. Miller did not complain. Rather, he came up to thank Cote for the opportunity to stay. He said, “You don’t understand what this means to me. I won’t even bargain with you on it. I’ll lower my price right now—what do you want it to be? Because I don’t want to leave. I can’t leave.”
Of course, everyone eventually did have to leave, and it was that certainty coming into view that defined the final mood. Ken Holden was dealing with the consequences back at the DDC headquarters in Queens, to which most of his emergency team had already returned. The people who were feeling listless and depressed were not necessarily those who had been most exposed to destruction and death on the pile but, rather, those who had worked in the classrooms of PS 89 and were faced now with returning to a workplace of fluorescent-lit cubicles and networked computers—an environment that, paradoxically, was all too much like that of the World Trade Center before the collapse.
Holden himself was riding high. During the last months of the Giuliani administration he had played a dangerous defense against the powerful and politically connected Bechtel Corporation, the San Francisco-based civil-engineering giant. Through mechanisms that were never made clear but presumably had to do with Republican contacts in Washington, Bechtel had gained backing within City Hall and had repeatedly and aggressively attempted to insert itself into the Trade Center operation as an additional (and costly) management layer between the DDC and the construction companies. This was widely seen at the Trade Center site as an intrusion so unnecessary that it could be understood only as the worst kind of opportunism. Holden fought back hard, using a variety of tactics including indiscreetly wondering how the “sweetheart deal” headlines might read. And he won. though at considerable risk to his own career. For several months afterward, during which Bloomberg took office, Holden was on ice—managing the DDC and the Trade Center operation on a “transition” basis, and rather miserably looking for a job. By late winter, however, with a flurry of favorable reports mentioning his name in the press, things took a turn for the better and he was reappointed. Now again he was a happy man, swimming in the sea of New York politics and, with the Trade Center recovery to his credit, full of new plans and ambitions for his beloved DDC.
Mike Burton was having a harder time letting go. One of his friends had warned him of the difficulty he now confronted: as the publicly anointed Trade Center Czar he would find it hard when someone said to his face, “Mike who?”—and that day would come soon. By the spring Bovis had taken over the day-to-day management of the operation, and though Burton was still in charge, he had fewer decisions to make; there were times now when he seemed cut off and alone. What was left of the DDC team had moved out of PS 89 and into temporary quarters high in the American Express building overlooking the site. I found Burton there one afternoon among the silent, empty cubicles, standing at a window as if he had nothing to do. I stood beside him, looking down at the hole, where the once entombed PATH train now stood in daylight. I’d been gone for a few days, and I asked him if anything had changed in my absence. He answered, “Oh, yeah, a lot!" But the truth was, nothing had. Things were slowing down.
Still, it was Burton’s prerogative to see this job through. On that point even Ken Holden agreed. Of course Burton was never going to return to DDC headquarters. Neither he nor Holden could have stood it anymore. Holden tried to be gracious. When the Bloomberg administration called to inquire about Burton, Holden recommended him for higher public office—though perhaps with reservations. In the spring Bloomberg offered Burton a position as head of the city’s Department of Buildings, considered an intractable bureaucracy in need of reform. Burton wisely turned it down. He talked to me a little dreamily about starting a company to respond to emergencies worldwide—he seemed to be searching for a way to relive the experience of the first few months. Many people at the site had that same wistful thought. In the end, though, Burton had his family and ambitions to look after. With Holden’s blessing, he stayed on for several weeks beyond the closing ceremony, and this past summer finally quit the DDC to become a senior vice-president for the same large construction company he had worked for before joining the city government. It was the standard revolving-door arrangement. He would be based in New York and responsible for regional operations, along with the company’s growing “homeland security” business. He would also make a lot of money. And that, too. had been predictable for months.
Sam Melisi ended the job in some ways worse off than he had begun: as the emotions had continued to intensify at the site, he had come under attack by some of the more extreme firemen and widows, who felt that he had turned on them—that the very act of listening to their opponents was a form of betrayal. Of course they completely misjudged him. He was an empathetic person, it was true, and because of his own background in construction he under stood the mentality of the unbuilders at the site, but his only real allegiances had always been to the firemen and families of the dead. Though he refused to complain about the accusations now, they must have been difficult for him to bear. No doubt, however, it was for more physical reasons—call it absolute exhaustion—that in April he suffered a mild heart attack. He was put on medical leave, and had to withdraw from the site. I went to see him for dinner one evening at his house on Staten Island. He told me he wanted nothing more than to get a clean bill of health and return to being a front-line fireman. His plan was to join one of the heavily hit rescue squads in Brooklyn, even though this would mean a cut in pay, because he felt he could be of use there. But the truth was that even such humble goals were now in doubt. After dinner the conversation drifted to the meaning of it all, and the subject of history came up. He said he hadn’t cared about it before, but cared about it now. He said he sometimes worried about an apocalyptic future. The conversation might then have become too lofty for either of our tastes, were it not for the children at the table, Melisi’s young son and daughter, who were bored by all the vague talk. They wanted their chocolate cake. The boy showed us a card trick. Melisi forgot about history, and simply got on with living.
The next morning I went to the pier of a company called Metal Management, on the industrial shores of Newark Bay, to watch the Trade Center being sent away. It was steel that was going—a load of the heavy perimeter columns from both of the Twin Towers. Cutting crews were torching them into three-foot sections, sized to fit into the charge boxes of steel-mill furnaces overseas. The sections they cut lay in hills on the pier, with rust already setting in. An old diesel loader rumbled back and forth, moving them into a huge wedge-shaped pan, which was then lifted by crane and tilted to dump the steel into the cargo holds of an aging 500-foot ship that lay alongside the pier. With the exception of a few samples that had been held for the engineering investigations, this was the fate of almost all of the World Trade Center’s 200,000 tons of structural steel, the columns and girders that had given the buildings their strength and then, wounded, allowed them to fall. It was exceptional steel, some of the purest these cutters had ever seen, but too expensive for American mills to reuse, because of high transportation and operating costs in the United States—the standard laments of the industry. It was sold overseas, primarily to Asia, because steel-recycling costs were lower there, and of course labor and environmental rules were more relaxed. For better or worse, the scrap-metal market is famously global.
The ship was the Osman Mete, which hailed from Istanbul with a Turkish crew, and not by chance. Turkish shippers were said to be less sensitive than others about the damage that could be done to their vessels by the ultra-heavy Trade Center scrap. They were by now accustomed to the business in part because Turkish mills had acquired some of the Trade Center’s structure. With this load now, however, the Osman Mete was heading in the opposite direction, forty days through the Panama Canal and on to China, one of the main destinations for the Twin Towers. I scrambled up the pilot ladder and onto the deck, and for several hours just stood there and watched. ’The ship was rusty and badly maintained. Its deck machinery looked like it had been broken for years. The crew was filthy, and obviously indifferent to the meaning of this load. The hatches lay wide open. Seen from above, the holds were cavernous and badly battered. Every few minutes the crane brought the loaded pan overhead and emptied it. The steel tumbled down with a roar, and sent shudders through the ship. The dust that rose up had the old sweet smell of the pile. After it cleared, the steel was visible again, lying haphazardly where it had fallen, already in foreign hands, and destined for furnaces on the far side of the globe. It was a strangely appropriate fate for these buildings, named for just this sort of trade. Unmade and remade, whether as appliances or cars or simple rebar, they would eventually find their way into every corner of the world.
As explained further in the author’s postscript [link], the article has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to the Gap clothing store and to clarify that the author was describing the perspective of construction workers at the World Trade Center site, not the author’s own perspective, on jeans discovered inside a fire truck.