High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Page 29
What distinguished the ironworkers from the masses who responded to the disaster in those early days was the skill they possessed. It was as Mickey said: There was nobody more equipped to do it. The most important project of those early days—and indeed for months to come—was the careful but speedy removal of structural steel. Cutting steel. Rigging steel. Hoisting steel. This is what we do every day.
If their chosen trade placed a moral obligation on them, it also gave them an intimate connection to the fallen buildings. The dead were not their dead, but the buildings had been their buildings. ironworkers put them up, raised their 192,000 tons of steel, and loved them even when most of the city found them unlovable. “These were buildings you were proud to look at,” said Matt, the broad-shouldered ex-Marine fellow ironworkers called Rambo. “They were beautiful buildings. Now it’s lying all over the place. You wanna cry ten times a day. And that’s not even the human toll. Just looking at the structural damage you wanna start crying.”
The ironworkers funneled into lower Manhattan by the hundreds that Wednesday morning. They were structural ironworkers from Local 361 and Local 40, as well as non-structural ironworkers, as well as ironworkers from beyond the New York City jurisdiction. They arrived in torn blue jeans and decal-smothered hard hats, in large groups but also in pairs or alone.
About a hundred men came down from Columbus Circle that morning. They came en masse after convening briefly at the Time Warner building. A large segment of that group came by subway, while another “hijacked” a city bus, persuading its driver to abandon his assigned route and take them straight to 14th Street. They covered the last two miles on foot, pausing at police checkpoints along the way to flash their union cards. They were still half a mile away when they began to see the dust, the fluttering paper, the smashed cars.
Joe Emerson was among the group that arrived by bus. Joe was a great big lumbering man, 6'2", well over 200 pounds, who turned graceful the moment he stepped onto steel. He was easygoing and good-natured, 32 years old, married to his grade school sweetheart, father of two young children. As they closed in on the site and the smoke thickened and darkened, he drew alongside his two older brothers, Tommy and Mike, and the three of them walked together down Broadway. A fourth brother, Jimmy, the youngest, was already down there with a gang from another job.
The Emersons were bred-in-the-bone New Yorkers. One grandparent came out of Little Italy, another from the old Irish stronghold of Hell’s Kitchen. But the Emersons’ bloodlines also reached back, on their father’s side, to the ironworking dynasty of Kahnawake. Their great-grandfather, Louis Lee, was among the Mohawk riveters who died on the Quebec Bridge in August of 1907. The Emersons had given a lot of themselves to building this city. The three brothers walking down Broadway that morning had set thousands of tons of steel and fallen a dozen times. Their father, a highly regarded connector and pusher in his day, was on early retirement, with two replaced knees, his own having worn out from repetitive stress and too many clashes with steel.
The Emersons passed City Hall and the Woolworth Building. They passed St. Paul’s Chapel, its graveyard blanketed in the awful gray snow, then turned west toward the pit—and there it was. Or, rather, was not. “Where in the hell is the building?” said Mike Emerson, second oldest of the brothers. “Where did it go?”
“I just could not believe it,” Mike said later. “I couldn’t believe that was two hundred and twenty stories of steel.”
The Emerson brothers, along with Kevin Scally and a number of other men from the Time Warner job, found their way to one of the cranes on West Street. “Everybody put their game faces on,” said Mike Emerson. Again, nobody said much; they just got down to work. The work was tricky and rife with hazards. One of the most hazardous things about it was the surfeit of men. Dozens of ironworkers swarmed around the base of every crane, everyone trying to lend a hand but mainly getting in each other’s way. At each crane, 15 men shared a job that required perhaps 5. Crane operators would look out into this riot of good will and see three or four different men giving conflicting hand signals, some of these would-be signalmen obviously not even ironworkers. The operator had to locate an ironworker he knew and trusted and ignore the rest. Gangs from Time Warner and other jobs around the city tended to reconstitute at the site and follow the direction of their pushers, but outside of these small chiefdoms the chain of command was uncertain and inchoate.
“It felt very dangerous,” said Mickey Tracy, who had hitched a ride down early that morning in a police car. “Everybody was nervous, trying to do the right thing.” But in their ardor to help, said Mickey, “the younger guys were being aggressive, they were fighting for the hook. They weren’t even letting the metal land—they wanted to get right on it.”
Matt described it more pithily: “It was a big cluster fuck.”
After a few hours of grappling with the cranes and trying not to decapitate fellow ironworkers with twisted beams, the Emerson brothers and Kevin Scally decided to move on. “We thought, what the hell, we don’t have to be some hero with a crane,” said Kevin Scally. “Let’s go burn some iron.” They found a few acetylene torches and picked their way onto the pile to assist the firemen in a more immediate capacity. The pile may not have been high but it was steep and difficult to scale, a jagged terrain of steel columns, twisted joist, and rebar, all madly knotted together by 50 miles of elevator cable. It took half an hour just to climb out into the middle of it, as the ironworkers tested each foothold, watching for snares and shifting debris, often going down on all fours. Fire smoldered under the surface, making the steel hot to the touch and turning the rubber soles of their boots sticky.
The terrain and the heat were nothing compared to the ghastly vapor—“the nasty fog,” John White called it—that vented from the pile and passed easily through the masks the men wore, clawing at the back of the throat and leaving a strange sweet metallic residue on the tongue. The smoke contained molecules of burning plastic and paper, of office furniture upholstery and fiber optic cable, of steel and human remains—of physical things returning to elemental states. “We’re used to smoke,” said Joe Emerson. “We burn things all the time. But this was different.” Later, respirators would be standard equipment for anyone working on the pile, but such precautions were rare in those early days. Many men clambered over the pile lacking even a rudimentary facemask, sucking gobs of potentially toxic fumes and particulates into their lungs. As many as 500 fire-fighters would eventually consider early retirement as a result of chronic lung problems brought on by that smoke in the early days after the disaster. But nobody was concerned about any of that on Wednesday, September 12. Most of the men were just trying to stay focused on the work, trying not to think too much about what all of it meant.
“It had to be over a hundred degrees out there,” said Mike Emerson. “It was hot as hell. And I got out there, and there were a lot of bodies—pretty much unrecognizable body parts—and I took a couple deep breaths, almost like a little panic attack. I didn’t know that I could handle it.” Here, a fireman called. Over here. He’d found a crevice under the steel where several dead comrades lay. The ironworkers lit their torches and started to burn.
The work broke down into three distinct stages. The first of these was “burning”—sawing through the steel with the 2,000-degree flame of an acetylene torch to cut out sections, piece by piece. The second step was hooking the cut pieces onto crane cables so they could be hoisted and removed. The third step was loading the steel onto an awaiting truck.
Subtract the heat, smoke, and urgency, each of these steps—burning, hoisting, loading—was rote procedure for an experienced ironworker, albeit in reverse order of the normal work of building. But there was one other critical difference beyond the heat: the ironworkers had little way of judging how a piece of steel would react when it was cut free. Nor could they predict how the pile around it might shift when they extracted it. “When you have iron bent and buried like that,” explained Mickey, “you
don’t know what it’s going to do. It stores energy. So how’s the energy going to release when you lift it?” Would the piece simply drop or would it pop up? Without knowing what strains the piece was subjected to under the pile—and there was no way to predict this since much of the piece was likely to be covered up—the ironworkers had to guess, then get ready to jump if they guessed wrong.
Before the gang burned a piece, they lassoed it with a choker and hooked it onto a crane. They signaled the crane operator to lift the load a hair, putting enough tension on the line, they hoped, to hold the piece when it broke off but not so much tension that the piece would leap off the pile like an arrow from a bow. It was very important to burn the piece evenly and cleanly. “If you don’t know how to burn,” said Kevin Scally, “and you leave a sticker”—that is, you don’t make the cut clean through—“and you get up on the piece and it’s hung up because of that stupid sticker, you’re gonna be the nitwit that’s gotta go cut it, and it’s gonna go flying while you’re right there.”
In retrospect, the fact that no one died in those early days was a small miracle. Thousands of people flung themselves into one of the most perilous environments imaginable, making it all the more perilous by their teeming presence. But still they came. The Wades and the Doyles and the Jacobses and the Collinses and the Beauvais and the Diabos and the Costellos; the Mohawks from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Six Nations; the Newfoundlanders from Conception Bay and Placentia Bay and Brooklyn; the Rebs from down south and the boys from New Jersey—they all came. Some of those who came had started their careers building the towers over 30 years earlier, which made this return visit especially grim and poignant. “I connected that steel there,” Willie Quinlan, 54, murmured to his gang one evening on the pile. “I don’t believe I’m here cutting it up and taking it apart. It’s strange, a strange feeling.”
Joe Gaffney had strange feelings of his own down there. Joe Gaffney was an ironworker in his mid-30s who’d worked many months earlier at the Ernst & Young building on Times Square—the ironworker whose mother watched him through binoculars from her office window on Sixth Avenue. After leaving the Ernst & Young building (and his mother’s sightlines) in the early winter of 2001, Joe Gaffney had gone to work at the World Trade Center. He’d joined a gang of about a dozen ironworkers to install a radon ice shield around the television antenna atop Tower One. Every night for several months that winter he’d climbed a ladder that ran through a narrow tube inside the 350-foot antenna at the top of the tower, to a point 250 feet or so above the roof. The work had to be done late at night, after Letterman went off the air, to avoid disrupting television signals. The wind whipped fiercely and wind-chill factors dipped into single digits, but in order to squeeze through the narrow mesh tube he had to remove his coat. When he got to the top of the ladder and walked out onto a catwalk at 1,600 feet, nothing above him but dark winter sky, Joe Gaffney was the highest man in Manhattan—the highest earthbound man for miles in any direction—freezing and exhilarated.
But it wasn’t upon that experience that Joe dwelt as he worked on the pile in the days after September 11. Nor was it upon the eerie fact that he was meant to have been back at the Trade Center on the morning of September 11, working a new job—a daytime job—that would have placed him on the summit of the north tower when the first plane struck. (The job, by some fluke, had been postponed by several weeks.) Rather, what Joe Gaffney thought about down there now was his dead father. Joe’s father was a small-time hood from Bay Ridge who was “into the rackets,” as Joe put it. His nickname in the Ridge was “The Enforcer” because he had a knack with his fists and a tendency to use them. “People used to tell me there was no one tougher. When it was time to collect book, he always got his money.”
Joe’s father had one legitimate job in his life. He was an ironworker on the World Trade Center. His brother—Joe’s uncle—was a Local 40 man who arranged it with the hall. For a few months, it looked as if Joe’s father had turned over a new leaf, that he’d put his criminal past behind him and settled into a regular domestic life with his wife and three sons. The illusion lasted only briefly before Joe’s father quit work and went back to the rackets. But Joe would never forget what it meant to him as an eight-year-old kid to look up at the Twin Towers from across the river and think: My Dad. He built those. He built those towers.
Wednesday was a day of spontaneous heroics at the site, but it was also a day of rampant chaos. And so, on Thursday, two days after the attack, the machines of order, the giant bureaucracies of the city, began to impose a makeshift structure onto Ground Zero. The city divided the site into quadrants and contracted four building companies, including Bovis Lend-Lease (builders of the Time Warner Center) to handle the physical removal of steel. Ironworkers who wanted to work at the site were to report to the union shape hall. Local 40 would limit the number of ironworkers to about 400 men cycled over three shifts: 8–4, 4–12, 12–8. The ironworkers had been working without pay since Tuesday, but starting on Friday they would be compensated at normal union wages. Any man not chosen for Ground Zero was urged to report back to his regular job Friday morning.
Those men tapped to return to Ground Zero enjoyed a peculiar kind of honor. They had the job everyone wanted—and now they were getting paid for it—but it was an increasingly grim job. The sour odor of death wafted over the pile on Thursday. Decay had set in. Everybody still desperately wanted to find survivors, unwilling to accept that there were none. Instead of survivors they found shoes, stuffed animals, wallets, gym bags, photographs, many tons of paper, wedding rings, and lots of small body parts. Most ironworkers of any experience had seen someone die or get severely injured. But there is no preparation for the experience of finding a human foot in the middle of a field of rubble, as Joe Emerson did one afternoon.
Friday was the worst day. Friday was the day it rained. And the day the president came to town.
Mickey Tracy was standing in the basket of a cherry picker, burning a piece of steel under a cold drizzle, when a cop told him to come down at once. No one was permitted to have any height on the president. Mickey was initially reluctant to go anywhere near the commotion attending the president’s arrival. He’d noticed that the police were behaving skittishly, “nervous and sweating,” and he planned to avoid getting shot by an overwound cop. On the other hand, he had some time on his hands now. He cleaned up his tools, then strolled over toward the sea of police and firemen that had gathered to greet the president.
“Stop right there!” a cop called as Mickey started to slip under the police tape.
“The president’s here,” said Mickey to the cop. “I’m going to see the president.”
“You can’t get any closer.”
This offended Mickey. “Hey, he’s not just the cops’ and firemen’s president. He happens to be my president, too.”
A big burly cop approached Mickey. He glanced at the nametag above the brim of Mickey’s hard hat. “You wanna see the president, Mickey?”
“Yeah,” said Mickey. “I wanna see the president.”
The big cop grabbed Mickey and pulled him into a bear hug. He held Mickey tight for a second, so close Mickey could feel the cop’s beard scruffing his cheek, then let him go. “All right,” said the cop, “let him in.” Only after Mickey was through on the other side of the tape did he realize he’d just been frisked. “But he did it really nice,” said Mickey later. “It was a class act.”
Mickey, at 5'4", could hardly see a thing over the heads of the firemen. He maneuvered his way into the crowd. A few of the firemen in front of him parted, and there, suddenly, was the president, standing right before him, his hand thrust out. Mickey shook it.
“He says, ‘Mickey, thanks for being here.’ I said, ‘Thank you for coming, Mr. President, I think you needed to see this.’ I didn’t want to take too much of his time, even though I am a pretty good talker. I didn’t want to start crying. I think he was on the brink of crying, to tell you the truth.”
T
he president’s visit, while welcome, proved a mixed blessing to the workers at Ground Zero. The Secret Service, in an effort to secure the area, refused to allow a new shift of men to enter the site and replace the men already down there. Which meant that every ironworker had to work a double shift of 16 hours in the cold rain. By the end of the day, the men were shivering and exhausted and accident-prone. After Mickey cut a small piece of steel with an acetylene torch, another ironworker picked up the piece and brushed the burnt end of the steel against Mickey’s arm, branding a permanent scar into his bicep. “I could hardly blame the guy,” said Mickey. “Still, I had a word with him about it.”
That night, after 16 hours of work, Mickey was too exhausted to go anywhere. He fell asleep on a floor between two elevator shafts on the second story of the World Financial Center. The smashed-out windows let a cool breeze flow in from the river, free of the smell of death from the nearby morgue. The next morning he woke up and went back to work, “a bad decision,” in retrospect. He was spent, drained, wasted. He’d had enough. That night, after 10 more hours, he left for good. He made his way back to Columbus Circle, paid his hotel bill, and got his car out of the parking garage on 58th Street where it had been sitting for the last five days. He started for home.
“That was a terrible drive, being in the car alone for one and a half hours. I never felt so lonely in my life. I had never been away from my family for five days.”
He pulled off the highway and drove down the suburban streets, then turned into his neighborhood. American flags flew on every mailbox. He passed the local firehouse, and waved to a fireman he knew. And then he saw the banner at the end of the street. “Thank You, Mickey. God Bless America.” Everybody in the neighborhood had signed it. It took Mickey a second to realize the sign was intended for him. He turned into his driveway and saw a big flag flapping on the front lawn. His wife, Karen, he later learned, had spent the day hunting down the flag. American flags were scarce by the end of the week. She went to the hardware store. The owner told her he was sold out. “Well, you have one in your window,” observed Karen.