American Ground Read online

  Praise for William Langewiesche’s

  AMERICAN GROUND

  “Told with even-keeled care, American Ground rumbles and shifts in ways as unpredictable as the 17-acre dead zone did itself . . . Any good writer could recount what happened. It’s difficult to imagine anyone besides Langewiesche so lucidly showing how otherworldly the World Trade Center remained after its death . . . The notion that American Ground is demeaning is nonsense; the book simply pushes deeper than the early mythologizing of sainted victims. The picture drawn by Langewiesche remains stirring—he shows how people on Sept. 11 and afterward rose to a long challenge. They did what was needed at any given moment, no matter how their motives and emotions might change from day to day . . . One job is done; Langewiesche has captured it with a succinct richness that probably can’t be equaled.”

  —JOHN KING, San Francisco Chronicle

  “The most thoughtful and original [9/11] book to appear so far . . . Langewiesche was granted almost unlimited access to the site and the rescue staff, and he made the most of the privilege.”

  —MALCOLM JONES, Newsweek

  “While much has been made of Langewiesche’s wide-ranging and rare access to the devastated site near Wall Street, what distinguishes his account is its pure journalism. This . . . kind of clear-eyed reporting and strong writing . . . seems fresh and original today because it’s so seldom that we encounter reporting at its most elemental . . . Extraordinary events demand not only extraordinary responses, which was the case at the WTC site, but also an objective witness who can testify with the facts, not prejudice. That kind of testimony is Langewiesche’s singular accomplishment.”

  —BOB HOOVER, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “By far the best of the post-9/11 books . . . A truly extraordinary work of original reporting in which diligent gathering of facts was accompanied by intelligent and informed reflection on their meaning.”

  —HENRY KISOR, Chicago Sun-Times

  “Remarkable . . . Teeming with . . . paradoxes and ironies, American Ground accomplishes the rare feat of restoring the unimaginable trauma to the events of Sept. 11 and presenting the everyday heroism of those who cleared the site of its rubble.”

  —ADAM BRESNICK, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “One of the most compelling, dramatic and uplifting pieces of writing you are likely ever to read . . . American Ground will make you proud of the ground you walk on.”

  —KEVIN HORRIGAN, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Artists have created some extraordinarily moving responses to the tragedy. [Among] the very best is American Ground . . . The chief protagonists are people never mentioned in most accounts of the disaster—structural engineers, building-collapse experts, bureaucrats from obscure government agencies who emerged as leaders of the unbuilding effort. [Langewiesche] takes us down on the ground among the steelworkers and firefighters . . . and makes the scene come alive in all its terrifying grandeur.”

  —THANE PETERSON, Business Week

  “Wonderfully reported.”

  —JAMES WARREN, Chicago Tribune

  “Magnificent . . . Journalism reached great heights in the wake of Sept. 11 and Langewiesche’s work . . . is a pinnacle. [He]

  plumbs the poetry of facts . . . with novelistic intensity, piecing together a mosaic of tragedy, fear, heroism, pettiness, steely resolve and grace under pressure . . . Langewiesche’s restrained prose achieves the easy elegance and heart-of-the-matter authority that come when a writer has both mastered and trusts his material . . . Unlike so many writers of 9/11 related works, he resists the urge to turn tragedy into melodrama or to mythologize all parties. Unsentimental and empathetic, clear-eyed and inspiring, American Ground recalls the best work of Joseph Mitchell and John McPhee.”

  —J. PEDER ZANE, The Raleigh Observer

  “Many Sept. 11 books and articles have attempted to re-create the horror of that day and its aftermath—the detail of Langewiesche’s account, drawn from months of 18-hour days at the site, trumps them all.”

  —SHARYN WIZDA VANE, Austin American-Statesman

  “Keenly observe[d] . . . In the face of byzantine intrigue, ever-present danger, and constant reminders of unfathomable horror, [Langewiesche] maintains his investigative instincts, his composure, and above all the sense of dignity without which we could not bear to hear the story again.”

  —AMANDA HELLER, The Boston Globe

  “For all the frenzied cultural effort that goes into manufacturing sentimentalized images from raw truth and fact, it always turns out that truth and fact are more interesting, and often even more inspiring. And so it is with the story of the World Trade Center site’s recovery after the terror and destruction of Sept. 11, 2001. [Langewiesche] embraced the unsavory, all-too-human aspects of his story as sympathetically as the genuinely heroic, and he is reluctant to judge any of his subjects harshly.”

  —RICK HARMON, The Oregonian

  “It’s going to be hard to find [a 9/11 book] more fascinating than American Ground . . . The access Langewiesche was granted to the site of the collapsed towers gives his account of the rescue and cleanup efforts a unique immediacy.”

  —CHARLES MATTHEWS, San Jose Mercury News

  “Langewiesche . . . doesn’t think of himself as a traditional reporter. And he doesn’t work like one . . . But in this case—chronicling the massive, nine-month cleanup at the Trade Center . . . his reporting style . . . served him well . . . Hard to put down.”

  —PETER JOHNSON, USA Today

  “Harrowing, sweaty-palm reading.”

  —SIAN GIBBY, Slate

  “[American Ground] draws the reader in with gripping details and lucid style. By rendering candid character studies of the men who claimed their positions in the cleanup efforts, Langewiesche’s opus is at once detached and intensely personal . . . His ability to see through the heartbreak to the achievements on the pile translates into writing that allows the reader to understand what happened, and why the American response was so unique.”

  —ERIC ELKINS, The Denver Post

  “American Ground is astounding in its detail and focus . . . A small book with a quiet approach to epic, disquieting events.”

  —Associated Press

  “Remarkable . . . For anyone who thought there was nothing left to say about the attacks on the Twin Towers, here’s a lesson . . . Most dramatically, Langewiesche captures the human spirit, in both its depths and its heights: from its astonishing capacity for heroics to its innate drive to explore the unknown, this is finally what this story is about. The details are full and fascinating, but this is before all else a beautifully written tale of humanity at its best: as monumental a journalistic achievement as the unforgettable events of Sept. 11 demand.”

  —DEREK SHELLY, Ottawa Citizen

  “Fascinating . . . Langewiesche takes readers right inside the smoking pile . . . This is a genuinely monumental story, told without melodrama, an intimate depiction of ordinary Americans reacting to grand-scale tragedy at their best—and sometimes their worst.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Langewiesche has written an admirably honest book.”

  —DAVID HINCKLEY, New York Daily News

  “A marvelous work of committed reporting.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Literary journalism at its best . . . In the same league with John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Joan Didion’s Salvador, American Ground offers poignant testimonial to the people who were there . . . Unlike the essayists, Langewiesche stood next to the fire. His strength is his vivid assembling of details.”

  —B. W. POWE, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  “The first outstanding literary work to engage with the Manhattan cat
astrophe . . . Investigative journalism in the most eloquent American grain. American Ground . . . deserves to rank as a classic of frontline reportage. Langewiesche forsakes sentimentality or sensationalism in favour of painstaking research, shrewd observation, and a darkly resonant prose.”

  —BOYD TONKIN, The Independent Magazine (London)

  ALSO BY WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE

  Cutting for Sign

  Sahara Unveiled

  Inside the Sky

  AMERICAN GROUND

  AMERICAN GROUND

  Unbuilding the World Trade Center

  WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE

  NORTH POINT PRESS

  A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  New York

  North Point Press

  A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2002 by William Langewiesche

  Afterword copyright © 2003 by William Langewiesche

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in 2002 by North Point Press

  First paperback edition, 2003

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Atlantic Monthly, where this book originated as a three-part series.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Langewiesche, William.

  American ground : unbuilding the World Trade Center / William Langewiesche.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-86547-582-3 (hc. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-86547-582-2 (hc. : alk. paper)

  1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001 2. World Trade Center (New York, N.Y.) 3. Wrecking—New York (State)—New York. 4. Incident command systems—New York (State)—New York. 5. Skyscrapers—New York (State)—New York—Design and construction. 6. Construction and demolition debris—New York (State)—New York. 7. Structural engineering—New York (State)—New York. 8. Underground construction—New York (State)—New York. I. Title.

  HV6432 .L364 2002

  974.7'1044—dc21

  2002075153

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-86547-675-2

  Paperback ISBN-10: 0-86547-675-6

  Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

  Map designed by Jeffrey L. Ward

  www.fsgbooks.com

  11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  To Matthew and Anna

  CONTENTS

  Map of World Trade Center and Environs

  The Inner World

  The Rush to Recover

  The Dance of the Dinosaurs

  Afterword to the Paperback Edition

  THE INNER WORLD

  When the Twin Towers collapsed, on the warm, bright morning of September 11, 2001, they made a sound heard variously around New York as a roar, a growl, or distant thunder. The South Tower was the first to go. At 9:59 its upper floors tilted briefly before dropping, disintegrating, and driving the building straight down to the ground. The fall lasted ten seconds, as did the sound. Many people died, but mercifully fast. Twenty-nine minutes later the North Tower collapsed just as quickly, and with much the same result. Somehow a few people survived. For an instant, each tower left its imprint in the air, a phantom of pulverized concrete marking a place that then became a memory. Prefabricated sections of the external steel columns tumbled down onto lesser buildings, piling onto terraces and rooftops, punching through parking structures, offices, and stores, inducing secondary collapses and igniting fires. The most catastrophic effects were eerily selective: with the exception of Saint Nicholas, a tiny Greek Orthodox church that dissolved in the rain of steel, the only buildings completely wrecked were those that carried the World Trade Center label. There were seven in all, and ultimately none of them endured. Not even the so-called World Trade Center Seven, a relatively new forty-seven-floor tower that stood independently across the street from the complex, was able to escape the fate associated with its name. Though it did not seem seriously wounded at first, it burned persistently throughout the day, and that evening became the first steel-frame high-rise in history to fall solely because of fire.

  There was wider damage, of course, and on the scale of ordinary disasters it was heavy. For thirty years the Twin Towers had stood above the streets as all tall buildings do, as a bomb of sorts, a repository for the prodigious energy originally required to raise so much weight so high. Now, in a single morning, in twin ten-second pulses, the towers released that energy back into the city. Massive steel beams flew through the neighborhood like gargantuan spears, penetrating subway lines and underground passages to depths of thirty feet, crushing them, rupturing water mains and gas lines, and stabbing high into the sides of nearby office towers, where they lodged. The phone system, the fiber-optic network, and the electric power grid were knocked out. Ambulances, cars, and fire trucks were smashed flat by falling debris, and some were hammered five floors down from the street into the insane turmoil erupting inside the World Trade Center’s immense “bathtub”—a ten-acre foundation hole, seventy feet deep, that was suffering unimaginable violence as it absorbed the brunt of each tower’s collapse.

  The energy released within that wild, inaccessible core lit fires that cooked the ruins for months afterward. Outside of each tower’s footprint, and still within the foundation hole, it demolished most of the six-story subterranean structure—consisting largely of parking garages that were either pulverized or badly broken and left to hang. Deep underground it also destroyed part of the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) commuter line—a railroad from New Jersey that, having passed in a single-track tube through the watery muck of the river’s bottom, emerged into the foundation hole and traveled to a station on the far side before looping back to a parallel tube and returning under the river to New Jersey. The PATH tubes were century-old cast-iron structures, probably brittle in places, and now at immediate risk of failure. If either of them broke catastrophically, the Hudson River would flood into the foundation hole, filling it at high tide to a level just five feet below the street and drowning unknown numbers of trapped survivors. Moreover, on the far side of the river a wall of water would flood the Jersey City station, and from there, via connecting rail links, would circle uncontrollably back into Manhattan, rush through the passages beneath Greenwich Village, and take out the West Side subways from the southern tip of the island nearly to Central Park. Vulnerability to sequential flooding was a known weakness of the PATH system, and it had been highlighted in a report circulated discreetly among government officials after the earlier World Trade Center attack, the parking-garage bombing of February 26, 1993. But maybe because such flooding was also something of an apocalyptic vision—and therefore somehow unreal—no defenses were erected against it. Of course now it was too late. And immediately as the Twin Towers collapsed, it became obvious that even in America apocalypses could come to pass.

  On the surface the scene was just as rough. At the southwest corner of the World Trade Center complex the twenty-two-floor Marriott hotel was transformed into a raw, boxy thing three stories high. Just to the north, across West Street, a pedestrian bridge gave way, killing groups of firemen and office workers who had sheltered beneath it. The streets buckled under heaps of smoking steel. So much heavy debris fell across the access routes that rescue vehicles were rendered useless. Major fires ignited in all directions. Simultaneously, air-pressure waves shifted small cars and shattered windows for several blocks around, blowing powdery World Trade Center remains into apartments and across the chest-high partitions of corporate offices. The powder was made primarily of crushed concrete. The waves generated winds that pushed it through the streets in dense, choking clouds and lifted it to mix with smoke and darken the morning. Then all the white paperwork floated down on the city as if in mockery of the dead.

  The suddenness of the transformation was difficult to accept. It had taken merely one brief morning, merely twenty seconds of collapse, an
d now all that remained standing of the Twin Towers were a few skeletal fragments of the lower walls, the vaguely gothic structures that reached like supplicating hands toward the sky. After the dust storms settled, people on the streets of Lower Manhattan were calm. They walked instead of running, talked without shouting, and tried to regain their sense of place and time. Hiroshima is said to have been similar in that detail. The site itself remained frightening because of the confusion of ruins and fire, as well as the possibility of further attacks or collapses. But a reversal soon occurred by which people began moving toward the disaster rather than away from it. The reaction was largely spontaneous, and it cut across the city’s class lines as New Yorkers of all backgrounds tried to respond. A surprising number of stockbrokers, shopkeepers, artists, and others got involved. For the most part, however, it was the workers with hardhats, union cards, and claims to a manual trade who were able to get past the police checkpoints that had been established earlier that morning, after the first airplane struck. Few of these workers lived in Manhattan, though typically they were there that morning on jobs. They hailed from Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and the close-in suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, and most had accents to prove it. From the start, therefore, the recovery site was what it remained: an outer-borough New York blue-collar scene—overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, and male, terribly unrepresentative by social measures, and yet authentic.

  Arriving at the site over the first few hours, the volunteers joined with the firefighters and the police, who by then were shaking off their disbelief and struggling to take effective action. By afternoon thousands of people in these combined forces were searching through the ruins for survivors, attacking the debris by hand, forming bucket brigades, and climbing over the smoking pile that in some places rose fifty feet above the street. At 5:20 P.M. World Trade Center Seven collapsed tidily in place, damaging some adjacent buildings but killing no one. By dark the first clattering generators lit the scene, and an all-American out-pouring of equipment and supplies began to arrive. The light stuff got there first: soda pop and bottled water, sandwiches, flashlights, bandages, gloves, blankets, respirators, and clothes. Indeed, there were so many donations so soon that the clutter became a problem, hindering the rescue effort, and a trucking operation was set up just to haul the excess away.