High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Page 31

  In the early weeks, after most of the ironworkers had gone back to their regular jobs, and long after they really had any good reason to hope, Mike and the other rescuers at Ground Zero searched for the living. “We really all believed that there were people down there in air pockets, hanging on, waiting for us to uncover a hole. I’d been in that building nine million times. I knew there was a lot of underground, all these different levels. You really logically thought somebody could have made it out alive. But then, after two or three weeks, we were like Man, I can’t believe we didn’t find anyone alive.”

  Now it was about finding the dead. Before 9/11, Mike had seen guys get badly hurt on jobs, but he had never seen a dead body. In the months since, he’d seen a great many of them in various states of disorder. The discovery of a corpse had become a familiar, even welcome, occurrence. It meant that a grieving family would have a body to bury; a sort of closure, if not exactly peace.

  The work had become a regular job in many respects, albeit a regular job unlike any other on earth. It continued to be enormously dangerous. Ironworkers still pulled out cherry-red beams, the steel so fragile it could snap as they lifted it. Many of the men at Ground Zero had suffered minor injuries. As of early November, there had been 34 broken bones, 441 lacerations, more than 1,000 eye injuries, and hundreds of burns and sprains and smashed fingers. And plenty of dangerous work remained, for the further they dug, the more unstable the steel would be.

  But for all the danger, those who had the knack for the work enjoyed a deep satisfaction in accomplishing it. You knew you were doing something important. And you were treated like an important person. The perks included round-the-clock free food and coffee, warm shelter in which to rest, and a constant stream of celebrity visitors who came to gawk. Ground Zero was hallowed ground but it was also—this being New York—exclusive ground, and the blue police barricades were the velvet ropes of the moment. Susan Sarandon and Brooke Shields and Jack Nicholson and Miss USA and Derek Jeter—they all came to see the disaster and to ogle the heroes. For the ironworkers, this was an unfamiliar though not unpleasant sensation: being the object of a star’s gaze.

  Jack Doyle walked onward, greeting ironworkers. No one seemed particularly surprised to see him out here in the mud. A man brought over a photograph of the World Trade Center and asked Jack to sign it. As Jack handed the photograph back, a puff of black smoke drew his attention back to the pile. The firemen turned their hose on the smoke. “Something just caught fire out there,” said Jack. He squinted at the pile for a moment, then his eyes drifted to a husk of columns still standing near the Customs House. These columns were almost 10 stories high and had once belonged to the lower floors of Tower One. They were all that remained of it now. In a few weeks, they would come down, too, and nothing would be left. The columns had formed the northeast corner of the building, where Jack had pushed his rig 33 years earlier.

  “Every piece of that steel I know,” Jack said now. “I touched it all with these hands. And look, it’s still standing.” He smiled. “I’d say we did a pretty good job.”

  Mike Emerson in front of the remains of the north tower.

  (Courtesy of Mike Emerson)

  CHRISTMAS

  On the Wednesday before Christmas, Keith Brown rang in the holidays by slugging the project manager for ADF. The chance of Keith Brown, the walking boss, hauling off and taking a swing at somebody had always seemed high, and ever higher as the work at Time Warner Center sped up and Keith’s impatience and irritability waxed accordingly. But still—the project manager? The man was ostensibly Keith’s boss, several ranks above him. Nobody slugs the project manager.

  The fight was on everybody’s lips at the Coliseum that evening. Some of the ironworkers had overheard the two men arguing over an open frequency two-way radio shortly before the fight. They heard the project manager yell at Keith, upset that certain pieces of steel had not yet been bolted up on the 12th floor. They heard Keith yell back, suggesting that the project manager refrain from shouting. They heard the project manager shout again, something to the effect of This work is fucked up and you better get the fuck up here and get it done right. In retrospect, the project manager probably wished he’d chosen his words more carefully.

  “Sure,” Keith responded into the two-way. “You stay there. I’ll be right up.”

  The radio went silent. Everybody waited, including, to his credit, the project manager. Several minutes passed, as Keith rode the elevator, then climbed to the 12th floor on ladders. When he stepped out onto the derrick floor, he saw the project manager waiting for him. The conversation went something like this:

  “Keith, listen—”

  “Shut the fuck up—”

  “Keith, I’m your friend.”

  “Bullshit.” Smack. Keith hit him.

  “Keith, come on—”

  Smack. Keith hit him again. “Don’t you ever fucking raise your voice to me again.”

  “Jesus, Keith—” Smack.

  At this point, two ironworkers grabbed Keith and pulled him away from the project manager. “If it weren’t for them, I’d throw you off the side of the building,” shouted Keith at the project manager as the two men restrained him. “You should send these guys Christmas cards.”

  The ironworkers who gathered in the Coliseum that evening generally agreed that while perhaps Keith Brown had acted rashly in slugging the project manager, he had also been within his rights. “It’s one thing when one ironworker shouts at another. That’s in the family. But this guy, he’s not an ironworker.”

  “I’ll tell you this,” added another man, “he sure as hell shouted at the wrong ironworker.”

  The details of the fight having been duly parsed, and the chances of Keith Brown getting fired fairly weighed (the betting was that he would be, but the betting would turn out to be wrong), attention turned to more important matters, like the $500 pool of cash raised among the four raising gangs and the four crane operators. Each Wednesday the men put in a certain stake, usually $10 apiece, bumped up to $20 this week in honor of the holidays, then played for it with the poker hand in the serial numbers on their paychecks.

  “I plan on taking it,” said David “Chappie” Charles, slumped over the bar, his eyes crinkled into a smile. “I’m just saying it’s mine.”

  “No, I believe this one is mine,” said Frank Kirby, looking deadly serious.

  While the men discussed their respective chances of getting lucky, Christmas lights flickered in the window and on the wall behind the bar, over a glittering array of bottles. John the bartender cracked open beers five or six at a time. Down near the jukebox the free buffet steamed in stainless steel troughs, and several ironworkers grazed over the buffalo wings and baked ziti. The place was crowded, and the beer and the food cast a warm glow over the men. In another hour or so, the young professionals of the Upper West Side would start to arrive and there would be an awkward overlap of clientele—the pivotal half hour or so when John had to be on his toes to break anything up before it started. For the moment, though, the bar belonged to the 30 or so ironworkers who were there, and the atmosphere was convivial but subdued. Johnny Diabo and his connecting partner, Paul “Punchy” Jacobs, were sitting at a table together, and so were Matt and Jerry, talking about what ironworkers always talk about at bars: ironwork. From across the bar came Joe Emerson’s booming voice, shouting something at Matt—“Yo, NBC”—which was Joe’s nickname for Matt. It meant Nothing But Connect, and it was Joe’s way of ribbing Matt for his vow that, henceforth, he planned to do “nothing but connect.” Matt responded by giving Joe the finger. Kevin Scally glanced at his watch. He’d gotten married in October and had a wife waiting for him back home. Somebody handed him a new beer and suggested to Kevin that he might as well put any ideas of leaving out of his mind.

  Mickey Tracy was still there, too. It was time for him to start his long journey home to Connecticut, where his wife and son would be waiting for him. He took a sip of Heineken and scratched his
jaw. “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’ve had a good life. ironwork has been good to me. You’re part of something bigger. You changed the skyline. I’m 5'4", but I stand tall, understand? You can’t take that away from me, baby. This business gave me a great life.”

  “So would you like your son to be an ironworker?”

  “My son,” said Mickey, “is going to be a lawyer.”

  TWELVE

  Topping Out

  On a cold and gray November afternoon in 1951, John McMahon, a young ironworker for American Bridge Company, stood over the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, deep in the heart of Big Steel country. He was working in a gang of bridgemen rehabilitating an old steel bridge that crossed the river between U.S. Steel’s blast furnaces on one side and its open-hearth furnaces on the other. Half a century later, McMahon still recalls the moment his 20-year-old self grasped the enormity of Big Steel. “It was the day before Thanksgiving and I was packing up to go home, standing up on top of the truss, and I was looking down the river and I said, ‘Good God Almighty, this is some outfit I’m working for.’ Everything we used belonged to them. The rivets and the paints, and everything you could see—the barges, the trains, the factories—and every stack had smoke pouring out of it and all hell was breaking loose, and there was fifty or sixty thousand people working in there and it was just a-goin’ Jesse, twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. And I thought, ‘Hell, we’ll never run out of work.’

  “Now it’s all gone. And I’m still here. It’s all barren ground, they’ve torn it all down. They got waterfront property for sale.”

  No one in the middle of the twentieth century could reasonably have predicted the precipitous decline of American steel over the latter half of the century. The view that John McMahon took in from that truss over the Monongahela was one most Americans shared of the steel industry in 1951. It was a vast and inviolably American enterprise. Since its founding in 1901, U.S. Steel Corporation had controlled 30 percent of the world steel market, while the American steel industry as a whole had claimed as much as 60 percent of the world market. This advantage remained unchallenged through the first half of the twentieth century. Coming out of the war at mid-century—around the same time that John McMahon was marveling from the bridge over the Monongahela—the United States still produced half the raw steel in the world. In 1953, U.S. Steel would have its biggest year ever, producing 35.8 million tons of product. The company would never match that number again.

  The seeds of Big Steel’s demise were sown in its success. Postwar profits were so generous that Big Steel lapsed into complacency. The genius and drive that allowed Andrew Carnegie to anticipate the future was sorely lacking in the modern steel executives. They kept making steel almost exactly as they’d been making it the previous 50 years, in antiquated open-hearth furnaces. Postwar Europe and Japan, meanwhile, were rebuilding with new technology, most significantly the BOF (Basic Oxygen Furnace) that would make steel production more efficient and less expensive, and that would shortly help those countries take a huge bite out of America’s share of the world steel market.

  The decline was swift. In 1960, America produced just 25 percent of the world’s steel—a 50 percent loss of market share in 10 years. By 1970, as Jack Doyle was topping out Tower One of the World Trade Center (to which Big Steel contributed not an ingot), the number had fallen to 20 percent, and by the mid-eighties it was just over 10 percent, where it has been parked, with slight variation, ever since.

  At the start of the twenty-first century America produced less steel than China, Japan, or the European Union. U.S. Steel Corporation—known now as USX—produced a tiny fraction of the world’s raw steel, and none of it was structural. Bethlehem Steel, whose wide flange H-columns had had a profound impact on the construction of early skyscrapers, was also out of the structural steel business and filing for bankruptcy. American Bridge Company, once the most formidable steel erection company in the world, still existed, but barely. McClintic-Marshall and Post & McCord were gone entirely.

  The largest American producer of structural shapes at the start of the new century was Nucor Corporation, which made its steel from recycled scrap, including junked auto bodies, old refrigerators, and demolished steel-frame buildings. The scrap steel was melted down in electric arc furnaces, recast, then sent back out into the world as new shapes and products. The 192,000 tons of steel that had once supported the World Trade Center were destined for just such a fate. If the towers’ steel would not end up in one of Nucor’s electric arc furnaces—most of it had been shipped to steel manufacturers overseas—the result would be the same: melted, recast, reincarnated. Some of the new steel would probably return to these shores and find its way into a skyscraper of the future. This assumed, of course, that skyscrapers of the future were going to be made of steel and not, for instance, of reinforced concrete. Once this would have been a safe assumption. No longer. The demise of the American steel skyscraper was already well under way before September 11, 2001. The fall of the Twin Towers was bound to hasten it.

  Why did the towers fall? Journalists, engineers, politicians, and the bereaved families of victims began asking the question almost immediately after the collapse. No fewer than three major studies—two federal, one private—have been devoted to answering it. It’s tempting to dismiss all of this inquiry as speculation into the obvious. Any seven-year-old knows why the towers fell: because planes traveling over 500 miles per hour and loaded with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel slammed into them. The very question—why did they fall?—assumes the towers could have done otherwise, that somehow they failed when they fell. But as one of those federal studies (commissioned by FEMA) declared in its final report, “The structural damage sustained by each of the two buildings as a result of the terrorist attacks was massive. The fact that the structures were able to sustain this level of damage and remain standing for an extended period of time is remarkable and is the reason that most building occupants were able to evacuate safely.”

  The exact sequence of events that led to the collapse of the towers will probably remain a mystery, since much of the forensic evidence turned to dust in the collapse. From such evidence as exists, though, most engineers agree that the initial impact of the planes, destructive as it was, had little, if anything, to do with the towers’ collapse. The buildings absorbed the force of the planes quite easily. The structure was so strong that, by one estimate, columns as close as 20 feet to the impact zone barely registered the strain.

  It was not the initial impact that brought the buildings down but the fire that came afterwards. First fed by the conflagration of jet fuel, then by ignited paper, carpet, and furniture, the fire weakened the steel and made it unable to support the building. Steel doesn’t melt until temperatures reach about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit—the temperature at which it is smelted—but it softens and distends at much lower temperatures, around 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the Twin Towers in their last hours were far higher than that, perhaps as high as 2,000 degrees in some areas. New York City fire code requires contractors to spray steel components with a thin coat of fireproof material, but apparently this material chipped off the steel when the planes hit the buildings, leaving the metal bare and vulnerable.

  The most vulnerable steel of all happened to be in the floor trusses. Those trusses, 60 feet long in most cases, spanned the gap between the core of the building and the exterior columns. They not only carried the weight of the floors, but also provided the all-important lateral support between the perimeter and the core. They kept the perimeter walls from caving and buckling. A study by FEMA surmises that as the trusses heated up, they began to “lose rigidity and sag into catenary action”—they began, in other words, to droop. As they drooped, they lost their function as lateral braces for the columns. The angle brackets that held them to the columns, relatively small pieces of steel, probably sheared. The floors broke free of the columns and began to cascade, in a vertical domino effect, one on top o
f the other, the weight of the higher floors tearing through the lower floors. The columns, lacking lateral support, buckled and followed the floors to the ground.

  The theory of the falling trusses has been disputed in a study commissioned by Larry A. Silverstein, leaseholder of the World Trade Center. This study suggests that it was not the floor trusses but the towers’ columns that gave way under the intense heat. If so, the towers behaved much as any other steel building would have behaved under similar circumstances and were not uniquely vulnerable. This conclusion happens to benefit Silverstein, for the more like other buildings the Twin Towers behaved, the less liable Silverstein will be to legal claims made by victims’ families. In the end, whatever the reason for the towers’ collapse, one thing seems certain: it was a body blow to the reputation of steel.

  A few weeks after the disaster, in a television interview, Barbara Walters asked Donald Trump what lessons builders of the future might learn from the Trade Center. “More concrete,” said Trump. Concrete would not have melted as the steel did; it is more heat resistant than steel. Trump’s view was echoed widely in the months after the attack. “It’s better to build in reinforced concrete,” Dr. Mir M. Ali, a professor of architecture at the University of Illinois, told the New York Times. “If there is an impact, crash, or explosion, it can absorb the energy better. That makes the building less vulnerable.” The technology of concrete had improved greatly in recent years, said Dr. Mir, and an all-concrete structure would have lasted longer than a steel structure. “The trend is toward more concrete.”