PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
In New York, it was a bright and crying day. The Hudson River was shimmering by midmorning, though the new bike path that runs along it on Manhattan's Upper West Side was empty save for a solitary rider. The tower cranes with "Trump Condos" on their sides that are hoisting yet another riverside monument to The Donald had their booms in an almost perpendicular position, cables and hooks hanging idle. No hammer could be heard.
A police car was blocking the path as it wended south past the piers where ocean liners dock and the aircraft carriet The USS Intrepid is now a floating museum. Beyond that point were enough runners, online skaters, and other bikers to make the morning seem mundane. The only odditiy was a crowd gathered in the street at the Jacob Javits Convention Center (40,000 volunteers had assembled, it was later reported).
Everything changed at a police checkpoint about a mile south. A blonde TV reporter was standing with her crew on a thick slab of concrete so they could catch the smoke from the still-smoldering World Trade Center in the background. Other members of the press were being walked to police headquarters for temporary I.D.'s. And apartment dwellers from Lower Manhattan were being organized into groups and marched to their homes to retrieve pets and belongings.
PAPER TRAIL. A motley platoon of workers stood patiently near a barricade until finally allowed to march toward the dead, the sad, and the relentlessly heroic. About 8 or 10 blocks down, they followed a flow of police, firefighters, and other workers into a building where heavy-duty air masks and hardhats were being handed out in a frenzy of emotion and shouting.
"One line, one line," the slight Hispanic woman in charge was yelling.
"Listen, just gimme a mask," said a man three times her size.
"No, you listen. One line. Get in one line."
He lined up.
Closer to Ground Zero, a blizzard of ash and paper had created drifts against a cyclone fence. In their tatters, the uncountable pieces of paperwork, once humdrum records of Wall Street, took on a poignant life. Many carried the name of one of the thousands of men and women who were cremated or crushed in the inferno now seared into the eyes of so many New Yorkers.
APOCALYPSE, NOW. Not all the detritus of disaster -- blowing about like the snows of a nuclear winter -- were about pluses and minuses on a ledger sheet. A torn business card randomly plucked from underfoot belonged -- or, hopefully, belongs -- to a PhD who worked for the Institute for AIDS Research in Two World Trade Center.
About half a block from the World Financial Center building that housed offices of American Express and Lehman Brothers, emergency-services police officers had a rope up. Eager workers, firemen, and cops milled about, waiting for ironworkers in a basket suspended from a crane to finish cutting through the girders of a pedestrian bridge that had once linked the World Trade Center to the World Financial Center.
There was little to do other than stand at the police line and gape at the smoking carnage. Television cannot convey the frightening enormity of the wreckage -- mountains of twisted girders, mangled pipes, smashed stone, pulverized masonry, and shattered glass jutting into the smoking sky. It was an apocalyptic scene that set hearts pounding -- especially when debris started falling and hundreds of cops, firemen, and workers stampeded north, splattering mud as they scattered.
DOG TIRED. After that happened once, almost everyone besides crane operators, heavy-equipment operators, a few Ironworkers, and some firemen were pushed back a block or so north. Brawny men and tough women hungry to help would be herded away by cops concerned that structurally unsound buildings could create more disaster. Then after a while, when the coast seemed clear, workers would drift back down.
There were firefighters from all over: Hoboken, Indianapolis, Wallingford, and Nancy Run. Armed men and women of every stripe, from small-town Jersey cops to agents of the Treasury Dept.'s Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms unit. Four tired dogs, including a Belgian shepherd named Tochka, who was so worn out after a day and a half of searching for survivors, she just laid down among the wreckage. Volunteers galore passed out bottles of water, power bars, and sandwiches. Some were from the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. Others had orange coats that said: "Scientology Ministers."
And there were the unions. Not just the dust-covered firefighters and phalanxes of cops but also Ironworkers, Pipefitters, Carpenters, Operating Engineers, Teamsters, and so many more. Hundreds of hardhats had abandoned work on projects uptown to lend a work-gloved hand.
LABOR SHINES. There was a certain irony in the workingmen and women of organized labor rushing to the assistance of the financial sector that has long pressured Corporate America to marginalize unions or plain put them out of business. On this day, it was hard not to thank the heavens for these brotherhoods of workers. To watch a crane operator swing a massive cross of girders gently to the ground and then see it swiftly attacked by Ironworkers with torches -- an almost silent ballet of determination -- was to suddenly appreciate why unions are called brotherhoods. It was also to witness one of Labor's finest hours.
As night fell and the smoke and steel jutting skyward were set starkly against the darkness, Ground Zero became even more eerie. Water from the fire hoses soaking the hot metal made for a dripping, steaming world out of Blade Runner. The grinding work was lit by powerful floodlights that also illuminated the iron beams sticking out of the southside of the American Express building. Every few minutes, the wind would kick up the toxic dust, and more paperwork would flutter to earth from the blown-out windows above.
By then, five heavy machines with claw-like arms were crunching mouthfuls of metal and moving them to waiting trucks. As they clawed away, the remains of a half-dozen fire trucks became visible (maybe a half-dozen other crushed NYFD vehicles had been dragged out during the day). After the first plane hit Tower One, the Fire Dept. had set up a command center under the now-collapsed pedestrian bridge. That's why, a K-9 cop said, the work was so feverish there.
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. Later, in what was once the polished lobby of the AmEx building, there was camaraderie and chaos among the rescuers seeking refuge from a driving rain. Just a few feet from a huge, muddy puddle that mocked the marble floor a medic was fitting liners into hardhats. A ruddy, white-haired worker greeted an old pal and shared a smoke as if they were in a busy saloon in Brooklyn.
Volunteers were offering protective glasses, air masks, work gloves, thick socks, Advil, baked macaroni, donuts, fruit, cold drinks, eyewash, and coffee. Hollow-eyed firefighters slouched in chairs, and a few lucky ones lay on hastily set up cots. Pumped-up ironworkers stripped off wet, dirty clothes and picked through boxes of donated duds for dry jeans and fresh sweatshirts. One proudly modeled a bright-red Gap number that on a normal day would have gotten him laughed off the job. And every so often, glass from the wide, broken windows would crash to the floor.
On the way back uptown, the street was lined with waiting trucks, the drivers dozing in the cabs. A string of flatbeds carried more heavy equipment. Dozens of TV trucks with satellite dishes atop were set up in a row along the river. And although it was wet and well into the early-morning hours, a troop of grateful citizens stood by the side of the road cheering a truckload of firemen who were being brought out for a few hours sleep and a change of clothes.
Outside the Islamic Cultural Center on the Upper West Side, a police cruiser sat conspicuously. Two officers carefully eyed a biker pedaling home, drenched by the rain. Or maybe it wasn't rain at all. Maybe it was the tears of the city.
Scotti, senior editor for government and sports business, offers his views every week in A Not-So-Neutral Corner, only for BW Online Edited by Patricia O'Connell
Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.
Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed.
Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video.
To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here.
Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
