The September 11th attack
Recovery workers face a monumental task

USA Today

NEW YORK — Day and night, the trucks rumble through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan.

City sanitation trucks and private haulers alike, the trucks carry a heavy load: the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

Their 10-mile route takes them through a tunnel to Brooklyn, over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island.

There, in a field next to the now-closed Fresh Kills landfill, an American flag waves from the top of a crane. Below, 800 people, including investigators from the FBI, Federal Aviation Administration, and city police and fire departments, sift through thousands of tons of steel, concrete and ash delivered by the trucks. They search for evidence in the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center two weeks ago.

Vehicles crushed by the two towers' collapse, including fire engines, are lined up in a macabre junkyard.

A mechanized sifter shakes out pieces of debris smaller than 4 inches long, to be examined separately. Dogs sniff for human remains to be placed in refrigerated trucks for later identification. The searchers set aside personal belongings they find — a necklace, a watch — in the hope that they can be returned to families. They are tiny remembrances, mere fragments of a place, a work force and a catastrophe that were all enormous.

'A long damn job'

Built over 11 years, destroyed in 90 minutes, the World Trade Center will linger, twisted and crushed, for a long time to come.

"Some people say six months. Some people say eight months. Some people say years," says Anthony Novello, vice president of Nacirema Construction, one of many crews working to clear the site. "It's just a long damn job."

At the center of the wreckage of the World Trade Center, a yellow crane, 280 feet tall, lowers its hook into a smoking crater more than an acre wide, six stories deep and packed with the rubble.

Over the rest of the 16-acre site lies "the pile" — 1.2 million tons of twisted steel and pulverized building material. In some places, the pile rises 75 feet.

The crane reaches into the crater. Workers slip a noose around a 6 1/2-ton steel beam. The crane slowly lifts the 30-foot beam, bent like a discarded soda straw.

In two weeks, workers have reduced the pile by more than 106,000 tons. But that is a minuscule part of the challenge ahead.

Search-and-rescue teams continue working even though everyone, including Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, has said there is virtually no hope of finding anyone alive. Heavy construction equipment, usually brought in when the rescue teams are finished, has been needed from the start to allow searchers to penetrate the mass of steel beams.

The debris is peeled away piece by piece: raised by a crane, dragged away by a grappler's claw or lifted by the gloved hand of a rescue worker.

Thousands of men and women have worked around the clock, yet not even a tenth of the material has been removed. Four construction companies hired by the city to manage the dismantling have yearlong contracts.

The work is not getting easier, only sadder: Rescuers find bodies, or parts of bodies, but no survivors. No one has been found alive since Sept. 12.

"You can't just grab stuff up," says Beau Hanna, a specialist with the Army Corps of Engineers. "As soon as you find human remains, you're going to stop and deal with that, and that's going to happen all the time."

Underground 'bathtub'

Underneath the rubble is the biggest engineering challenge for the workers: the center's six-level basement. The underground structure is surrounded by a retaining wall that must be kept intact while the debris is removed.

The World Trade Center's builders had to dig through 70 feet of landfill to anchor their two 110-story buildings in bedrock. To keep the Hudson River from seeping into the foundation, they built a retaining wall around the entire perimeter, 3,000 feet long and 70 feet deep.

In that underground space — dubbed the "bathtub" — were six stories of shopping mall, garages, and a subway station. The walls had been braced by the basement floors. Now, with the floors crumbled by the building's collapse, only the debris holds them in place.

To keep the walls intact as this vast area is emptied, engineers will install "tiebacks," steel cables drilled through the wall and down to bedrock at a 45-degree angle.

There were fears that the bathtub had been damaged and water would be flowing into the substructure. That hasn't happened, city officials say. But the train tunnels underneath the World Trade Center are being blocked with giant plugs of concrete — 16 feet in diameter and 16 feet thick — just in case.

Like Berlin after World War II, the 16 acres of the World Trade Center complex have now been divided into four quadrants. In each sector, one construction company oversees workers from dozens of companies in the slow task of cutting 40-ton steel beams into manageable pieces.

The 3,000 or so construction volunteers who rushed to the site immediately after the attack have been replaced with paid crews, about 1,000 on each 12-hour shift. They work with New York City firefighters, federal search-and-rescue teams and more than 200 dogs trained to sniff out survivors.

Federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Small Business Administration, have sent 6,000 people to help, according to Ted Monette of FEMA, who is coordinating federal efforts. But the city is in charge.

"No other city would have the capabilities and resources that New York City has to deal with this," Monette says. "Within days, they were hauling thousands of truckloads of material out of here."

Focus on stairwells

Searchers are concentrating in areas where officials have the greatest hope of finding survivors or bodies: in the places where they believe the tower stairwells once stood. Firefighters and search-and-rescue teams slip into openings in the pile, burrowing into what remains of the complex.

"We'll open up a face (of the pile) and then they'll try to work on it themselves with the dogs and their detection equipment and then, once the area is as clear as they can make it, we'll go back in," says Dan Scully, vice president of Tully Construction, which oversees the southeast section of the site. Some of Tully's crew helped build the World Trade Center's foundation more than 30 years ago.

Structural specialists from the Army Corps of Engineers, veterans of earthquakes and hurricanes, work with crane operators to make sure that lifting a piece of steel won't cause the debris to shift and hurt or trap a rescue worker. "This is slow, meticulous work," says Kelley Aasen, who leads the corps team.

Meanwhile, fires continue to burn beneath the rubble, sending up smoke and keeping parts of the debris pile scorching hot.

The workers battle their own grief and exhaustion. "I'm not a squeamish person, but I've been in shock for days, putting bodies in bags." says Raul Perez, a volunteer who has been there since Sept. 12. He puts Vicks VapoRub in his nose to block the smell of death. "It's a rough deal."

The Rev. Edgar Wells, a retired Episcopal priest, volunteers by making himself available to workers and others who might need him — to talk or pray or just listen to a 10-minute ramble on the sorrow of the work.

"People are asking me, 'How can this happen? Is there a God? How can he let this happen?' I don't have answers that satisfy them sometimes," Wells said

On a wet morning, rain and soot turned his clerical collar a mottled gray. His gaunt face was pale. When the sun began to peek through the clouds, he tilted his head to the sky and opened his face to the warmth and the light.

"When the sun peeks out, you feel like you can stand up and carry on," he said.