Reclaiming the site of the Twin Towers fell to a Knoxville firm
by Mike Gibson
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Phillips & Jordan Vice Chairman Teddy Phillips, Jr. and a handful of other P&J officials were sequestered in the spacious conference room of the company headquarters off Callahan Road, reviewing a contract awarded by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers two years earlier. The contract entrusted to the Knoxville-based firm the responsibility of coordinating disaster recovery efforts, in the event of federal emergency, for a large portion of the United States, a nine-state area that included New York.
It was shortly after 9 a.m. when the group received word that American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, both from Boston, had crashed into New York City's north and south World Trade Center towers respectively. Over the next two hours, they tracked the unfolding drama on the conference room television, watching in awed silence as the burning south tower shuddered and sank into a malevolent cloud of black dust one minute before 10 a.m., and again when the north tower followed suit 29 minutes later.
"After the buildings fell, we were hit with the harsh reality that we were going to be tasked with the cleanup," Phillips says.
Begun 50 years ago as a land-clearing contractor by partners Ted Jordan and Ted Phillips Sr., P&J is a multi-million dollar civil construction firm that today boasts a number of specialties ranging from site development to golf course construction. They're also among the nation's largest providers of disaster recovery services, with a corporate resume that includes cleanup and reclamation efforts at nearly every major domestic hurricane site of the last 10 years.
But even as he watched the towers collapse, Phillips knew this effort would be different from all the rest. "We couldn't do anything in preparation, because it was so abnormal compared to the work we usually see," he says. "Instead of vegetative debris, we were looking at tons of metals and concrete, as well as enormous personal tragedy."
At 11 a.m. Phillips received the inevitable phone call from the Baltimore District of the Army Corps of Engineers: "How quickly can you get to New York?" the caller asked. It was the beginning of a nearly year-long odyssey that would change the lives of Phillips and other P&J employees even more profoundly than it would alter those of other Americans who bore witness to the tragedy and its aftermath from the comfortable remoteness of their homes.
The World Trade Center towers were part of a seven-building complex that covered 16 acres, comprising 325 firms, 15 restaurants, seven TV stations, a police precinct, several federal offices and two subway stations. Within that space was a three-level, 330,00 square-foot shopping mall, and another three floors of a miniature theme park. In its entirety, the complex employed some 40,000 workers and hosted about 150,000 visitors every day.
The two planes that were crashed in New York on 9/11 destroyed four of the seven buildings shortly after impact; another was severely damaged when the top of the first tower fell through its roof. One of the collisions ruptured and sparked a natural gas line, and the ensuing fire gutted the two buildings that remained intact.
When the first contingent of P&J representatives arrived at Ground Zero the morning of Sept. 14, they were aghast at the spectacle, all braided metal and crushed stone, loose wires and scatterings of burnt cars. The very ground had been blasted open in some stretches, peeled off to reveal the inner framework of the subway stations like broken fragments of honeycomb. "You were walking down a normal street, and all of a sudden there's nothing but an enormous pile of rubble," says P&J Executive Vice President Patrick McMullen.
Among the debris were munitions, firearms and bags of street drugs that had been in the custody of an FBI office; piles of aircraft and elevator parts; the sundered pieces of a 360-foot TV antenna; broken segments of enormous steel girders, leviathan fragments that weighed more than 4,000 pounds per linear foot.
"It was overwhelming," McMullen continues. "The rescue teams on the site had been going at it three days without sleep, and they were visibly exhausted. We could see just how long these people would be working on this, looking at how hard they were working, and yet there was still so much to be done."
But the thing McMullen remembers most vividly from his arrival at Ground Zero on that morning is the stench, an acrid mixture of charred electronics, human remains, and smoking detritus.
"It was horrible, a burning smell," says McMullen. "And it was raining, and it was foggy, and the rain held the stench down on top of us. It was something you never got used to.
"I'd never been around death and destruction of that magnitude," he continues. "Even cleaning up after hurricanes, I've never experienced that kind of personal loss. We saw people being removed in body bags, and these firefighters are just standing there watching, exhausted, this endless procession of fatalities."
P&J's initial task was simply that of monitoring the cleanup efforts, and consulting with local and federal officials on how to best orchestrate the removal of debris.
"For us, it was quick at first," McMullen says. "It was a huge disaster, but the cleanup crew had already taken shape. After the first week, it didn't look like we'd have much to do."
But within days, P&J was recalled to take charge of the larger recovery operation at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, when the task of sorting through the debris proved overwhelming for local authorities unfamiliar with the tools and methods of large-scale reclamation.
On the western shore of Staten Island about a 45-minute drive from Ground Zero, Fresh Kills Landfill had been all but dormant in the years before the events of 9/11 necessitated its resuming large-scale operations. In the weeks after the tragedy, it became the locus of the recovery operation, with 140 acres devoted to operations, and another 35 to the sundry support buildings—from a mess hall to a medical tent—serving some 1,200 workers who took part in the effort.
While P&J often uses its own equipment and manpower in such efforts, Phillips says the company worked with local sub-contractors in this instance, with about 20 of its own employees acting in coordinating and managerial capacities. "We had heavy equipment being handed over for the recovery on nothing but a handshake," Phillips says. "I had never seen anything like that before."
Their task was multifold; incoming debris, most of which arrived via barge, had to be unloaded and trucked a short distance to the heart of the recovery site. From there, crews faced the crushing assignment of separating the wreckage according to size and material, all the subsets of which had to be further sifted and inspected. Inherent to the latter task were finding and identifying police evidence, recovering lost property, and identifying human remains.
Working in tandem with the Corps of Engineers, the FBI, New York Police and city public works officials, P&J planners devised a process whereby larger debris—steel girders, crushed automobiles, and the like—was separated from the rest via huge cranes (31 in all, some of them 300 feet tall) and grapple excavators. The remaining tons of rubble were sifted through multi-level metal "shakers"—consisting layers of sieve-like plates, each plate with sifting holes smaller than those of the one above it. Materials that measured less than six inches in any dimension were ultimately divided according to size into three sub-groups, then run through screeners on a conveyor belt.
At every stage, the separated materials were subject to new screenings and walk-through inspections. Human remains were taken to a temporary morgue, tagged and refrigerated for later DNA analysis. Even the smallest items of personal property were removed, photographed and catalogued by the New York Police Department in hopes of returning them to families of victims.
Phillips explains, "We weren't looking for anything. Our job was to present remnants to the other agencies in a manner whereby they could do all that. We just laid out the evidence. We kept it coming in a manner where the belts never stopped."
The story of the Fresh Kills operation is told in some part through the boggling numbers that attended it: By the time the recovery and disposal effort ended in August of 2002, Fresh Kills had seen 1.65 million tons of debris shipped and rolled onto its grounds, including 1,400 wrecked vehicles; more than 400,000 cubic yards of concrete; 12,000 miles of electrical cable; 125,000 tons of steel; and 4,250 human remains.
Phillips remembers the endless, grim procession of heavy trucks lumbering through the gates of the landfill, most of them seemingly laden with tons of dirt. "I'll never forget watching them come up the hill, and wondering 'Where is all this dirt coming from?' But it wasn't dirt; it was burnt concrete, pulverized so much that it looked like dirt.
"The motto at the landfill was 'We will not leave any stone unturned,'" Phillips says of the nearly 2 million man-hours the effort of processing all that tonnage would eventually consume. He notes that even the leavings from each barge- and truck-load of debris were sprayed from the beds, collected and run through the screeners.
"I'm convinced we got as close to achieving 100 percent of that motto as is humanly possible."
For the first several months of the operation, the recovery effort was a 24-hour, seven-days-per-week affair, the workers splitting days with two 12-hour shifts. For P&J overseers, however, workdays usually began with a 5 a.m. wake-up call, and ended when they straggled back to a hotel room in nearby Piscataway, N.J. somewhere between 10 p.m. and midnight.
For P&J Safety Manager Steve Thompson, that schedule entailed countless daily safety and operations meetings, site walk-throughs, and conferences with other agency heads—all sandwiched around the process of drafting new operating plans as well as changes to existing ones. And the contingencies were never-ending, from problems associated with bringing electric power into the compound, to dust suppression, to continual monitoring of the air quality at the site.
"The first two months were the worst," Thompson says, noting that P&J was tasked with some 200 changes in its original work orders before the recovery effort was through. "At first, every day was something different. After that, we had more of a routine that we settled into; you knew what was coming at you every day."
The stench, so pervasive at Ground Zero, was nothing short of immersive at the landfill, exacerbated by the methane gases that roiled out of the aggregate piles of new and long-standing refuse.
"It was a nasty place," Phillips remembers. "You couldn't leave out of there and go to a restaurant at the end of a day. It clung to your clothes and your skin. You were absolutely rank."
The Phillips crew would continue in their grueling schedules off an on for 11 months. And while breaks came more frequently as the operation progressed (Phillips says he became "intimately familiar with the direct Continental flight to New York"), most of Phillips' men had no more than two days off from late September to Christmas.
But the wearying pace had its advantages, in that workers were wholly absorbed by their task, and none of the men at Fresh Kills had time for unhappy ruminations on the events that precipitated their efforts.
"Everybody was very focused and workmanlike," Thompson says. "Nobody was walking around crying. There was a sense of purpose— even more than at other disaster sites I've worked, there's no question."
There was a singular camaraderie among all the workers at the site, however, a sense of shared mission unequaled by that of any previous experience. Says Phillips, "You became like family with people you never would have been around otherwise."
Thompson went home for the better part of three weeks around Valentine's Day of 2002 when his son, Eli, was born, and remembers his first morning-operations meeting when he arrived back at the worksite.
"I was just trying to stand in the back, inconspicuous, listening, getting reoriented," Thompson says. "But then all of a sudden everyone was asking about the baby, wanting to see pictures, happy for me...It was pretty cool.
"It's a different culture in New York. There was a lot of irony, in that folks from Tennessee don't necessarily have the most favorable opinion of New York, and vice versa. Then you're thrust together, and you start having mutual respect."
He pauses and chuckles, adding that the latter phenomenon was nonetheless a very gradual process. "We didn't bond quickly. But we did, and I still feel like I could call one of those guys even now and start talking, as if no time had elapsed."
Phillips describes the 321 days he spent in New York City between September 2001 and August of 2002 as "absolutely draining, mentally and physically." Even so, he and his fellows experienced an inevitable letdown as the days grew ever less frenetic, and their work came to an end on Aug. 22.
"When you come off these high-intensity projects, you go through a kind of depression," Phillips says. "You're used to doing a lot more than you ordinarily do in your job. Sometimes you find yourself sitting around saying 'This is boring.'"
"The normal daily routine just won't do it for you," says Thompson. "You're accustomed to the adrenaline rush. Sometimes I felt like I needed someone to give me a good kick, shake me and say, 'It's time to get after it.'"
Thompson went into the 9/11 reclamation convinced he would remember even the smallest details of his experience in New York. He admits now that the rush of events, the fog of time, and the vagaries of memory have eroded much of it.
Still, he believes his life was in some ineffable way changed by the experience. "My wife is very clear that I'm different now," he says, still bemused. "I'm still not quite sure I know what she means by that."
Phillips says all the post-9/11 workers shared in the powerful knowledge, never articulated, that what they were doing was bigger and more resonant—historically, spiritually, and personally—than anything else any of them would do in their lives.
"I think we saw something first-hand that was like the equivalent of our generation's Pearl Harbor," he says. "A lot of people witnessed it on TV, but not so many saw it up close.
"When they ask 'Where were you when the World Trade Center got hit?' 20 years from now, I'll know the answer. I was sitting here in this conference room, wondering 'What are we going to do when that phone rings?'"
September 11, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 37
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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