NEWS/PRESS

October 01, 2001
Onsite at Ground Zero

Phil Bishop reports on the crane and rigging endeavors displayed in the aftermath of the 11 September attack on the New York World Trade Center.

Can there be anyone who has not seen the television footage of the two hijacked airliners being flown into the twin towers of the New York City World Trade Center on the 11 September, and the subsequent collapse of the buildings? These structures had stood at a height of 1,368ft (417m) and had defined the Manhattan skyline. With an unimaginable fire burning inside at SOO'C, fed by the 80,000 liters of aviation kerosene that each 767 was carrying, steelwork weakened and both 110-storey towers collapsed to the ground. Many escaped between impact and collapse, but about 5,000 people were killed.

In the hours and days that followed the terrorist attacks on the USA there were many deeds of remarkable courage and endeavor, not least by the firefighters who went into the burning buildings to save lives.

On Friday 28 September I visited the site, which had become known as Ground Zero. .I had thought that the hours spent watching television news footage would have prepared me for what to expect. I was wrong. There are some sites in the world, like the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon, that no photograph has ever truly captured. Ground Zero was like that, except in negative. It was powerful stuff.

The pile of twisted steel and rubble, the remaining representation of what were the tallest buildings of the world's most dynamic city, was eerie. At Ground Zero that day I felt that I was witnessing some kind of battle between good and evil, where evil had been given too much head start. The sight of the fire fighters and the construction workers setting about their horrific task with single-minded commitment was inspiring, but it didn't change the fact that there were thousands dead under that horrendous pile of rubble.

I cannot even imagine the feelings, the emotional torment, of those who experienced it first hand. or those who have spent weeks since that day working on site in shifts of 12 hours or more.

On the pages that follow we record and acknowledge the work of a group of people who were crucial to the emergency response of the immediate aftermath, and remain crucial as they continue working today, sifting through the debris and clearing the site.

From pages 36 to 41 we concentrate on some of the people who have been central to the disaster response initiative. On subsequent pages we report on the machinery that has been used and the logistics of setting up equipment on such a site, traffic of cranes, excavators and tractor/trailer units and unload. This being the absolutely polar opposite of a green field site, clearly they could not all arrive at once. When boom assembly began, there were trailers with boom sections (one boom section to each trailer) parked a couple of miles to the north on Joe Di Maggio Highway, waiting their turn to come to site.

To start with, the 21000 was put together with 300ft of boom. By mid October, another 300ft of luffer plus a Max-er attachment were on site, waiting for authorization to be assembled and put to work. The Max-er attachment involves 1,124,00016 (510 metric tonnes) of counterweight on the ballast wagon.

This crane is just one of six 21000s that Manitowoc has so far built. The real beauty of the 21000 is its low ground bearing pressure. It seems counter-intuitive but it really does exert less force than the much smaller long-reach excavators, owned by local demolition companies, that are also busy pulling twisted steelwork from the rubble mountain, which is what the towers now are. The excavators, after all, tip pressure onto their toes, while the 21000 has eight evenly balanced crawler tracks. The fire department and main contractors took some convincing of this point. But this was all part of Jimmy Lomma's job. He is their crane expert, and regular meetings were held for him to advise on equipment needs and capabilities.

Jimmy Lomma arrived at Ground Zero at 9pm on 11 September. Lomma, owner of JF Lomma trucking company and New York Crane & Equipment, brought with him a 450 ton Krupp all-terrain crane and a 200 ton Demag. Rubber tired machines were easier to mobilize swiftly. The next day he brought in more cranes. The city fire department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were calling the shots. 'They told us what to lift.' Lomma says. For the first two weeks it was a search and rescue mission, carefully lifting away hunks of iron to give access to whatever survivors may be underneath. Union ironworkers, suspended in manbaskets or just climbing on the deathly pile, would drill holes in exposed steelwork and cut it into lift able segments. The cranes would pull the segments away and load them onto waiting trucks. Exactly what remains of the victims these guys found is too gruesome to report.

In the early days after the attack there was, inevitably, an element of chaos. This should not be read as any kind of ' criticism of the emergency services or (he construction workers supporting them, however. Five factors were at work. Firstly, this was the scene of a crime, not a regular construction site. Secondly, the sheer scale of devastation made it hard to know quite where best to make a start. Thirdly, the emergency planning center, set up after a bomb went off at the World Trade Center eight years ago, was on the eighth floor of one of the no-longer-standing towers. Fourthly, there was uncertainty about the integrity of surrounding structures, both above and below ground. And fifthly, such was the tremendous outpouring of goodwill that there were far more people making themselves available than could be managed, and more machines made available than could actually get to the site.

Two weeks later there was a much greater sense of routine - organized chaos, perhaps. Access had been strictly controlled and machines were, for the most part, working in a coordinated fashion. Getting trucks and machinery in and out was still a logistical game of Twister but it is apparent that all around were people who had a job to do and knew how to do it. Rubble was being removed at a rate estimated at 10,000 tons a day, and the road running north south along the west side of the World Trade Center - Joe DiMaggio Highway was accessible once again. For Lomma, this gave a staging area for his cranes to work from.

Among the FEMA specialists on site early on was Frank Bardonaro Jr, a volunteer who is the crane and rigging expert for the Ohio Task Force. FEMA Division. He is also the general manager of the Midwest operations of Maxim Crane Works. It took Bardonaro and the Ohio team until the following afternoon to reach the site since air traffic was halted. By that time, he says, the New Jersey and Massachusetts teams were already there. The Ohio team was designated an area of the site to search. For Bardanaro an early issue was finding a place to set up a 450 ton Demag.

The proximity of 500 volunteers searching through the rubble, and 200 ironworkers trying to hook things up made the site more dangerous than it already was, Bardonaro says, His prime role was trying to instill some coordination, stressing the need to synchronize the searching part of the operation with the lifting part. 'The two had different goals,' he says. 'The crane and rigging people's goal was to lift steel out of the way. The rescue workers' goal was to get to the people. The two goals were pretty much in conflict. It was total chaos for the first three days, dangerously so. It was very frustrating because there were so many volunteers that were trying to help but they were basically in the way. It took until the third day before they realized that they had too many volunteers on site.' After that, security was stepped up and access to the site was tightly controlled.

At the beginning. Jimmy Lomma called the shots. 'Lomma was the lead person at the outset. He was the point man' was a very impressive operation from a crane standpoint.' Bardonaro says that, in the beginning, it was Jimmy Lomma who was calling all the shots as far as cranes were concerned. 'Lomma was the lead person at the outset. He was the point man.'

Jimmy Lomma lives only ten minutes away from the World Trade Center site, just the other side of the Holland Tunnel, which when I visit he can still get through thanks only to his special pass. granted only to the emergency workers. 'Jimmy lives for that city/1 have been told on several occasions. He had a camper van on site, enabling him to grab the occasional couple of hours sleep. It was nearly two weeks before he got to go home and get some proper rest. It is not that he wanted to stay, he says, giving the impression that he couldn't wait to get away from the sheer hell of the place. but the fire department had asked him to stay. They needed his advice regarding the machinery.

Working to these are one of three lifting and rigging contractors. Lomma is working to both Bovis and Amec, along the whole western side; Bay Crane is working to Turner in the northeast quadrant; and AmQuip is working to Tully in the southeast quadrant. Frank Bardonaro left the site after five days. 'By then, the local contractors had taken over the equipment side of things,' he said.

The city has budgeted $2SOm for each of the four contractors.

Lomma and Bay are the main players in the New York City crane rental scene, each taking about half the market. Competition is not exactly friendly, though each seems to recognize the excellence of the other's operation. Amquip, based in Pennsylvania, has a depot in Carteret, New Jersey and its cranes visit the city only occasionally.

While at other times there may be professional rivalries, these were all put aside at Ground Zero. Says Bardonaro: It didn't matter what companies people were from, or what state. It was like an All Star game instead of a Super Bowl. Everyone joined together and forgot about their team colors;'

Eight clays after the attack Kenny Barnardo of Bay Crane was evidently a stressed man. 'Safety is the main concern,' he says. There's a lot of pressure.' We agreed to talk later once he could afford the time. Unable to see him on site. I called him on I October.

'It's been tough for the men,' he says. 'It's tough for everyone. It's a tough place to work. It's a tough thing, it really is.'

Clearly he has been affected by the events of 11 September. 'I'm a native New Yorker, I live in Manhattan,' he says. 'The reality of it lingers every day. It just goes on and on.'

for Bay Crane, it was Kenny's brother, Ray Bernardo, who led the efforts on site. Crane operator Tom Lennon is also cited as one of the company's heroes, though there are many others, from all three companies and the local unions. Operators have been working 12 hour shifts, night and day, seven days a week.

Such shifts are not a problem, says Joe Wesley, president and owner of AmQuip. 'People are used to working those hours, especially people in the rental business who are involved in turnarounds.'

For AmQuip, which has had up to 30 men on site, the key name is Bill Pace. 'If anybody in our organization deserves the credit, it's Bill,' says Wesley, his boss. 'Bill Pace didn't go to sleep for three days Everybody else was there but he was organizing it. He was just bouncing around like a ping pong ball.'

Pace stayed on site, sleeping occasionally on a camp bed in makeshift quarters, and finally went home for the weekend on Friday 20 September, returning again to the site on Monday morning.

'During those first nine days we only slept for a total of 17 hours,' says Pace. 'When we weren't building the equipment, we were working with the engineers.'

It was not an easy place to work, he says. 'It was actually quite challenging, because everyone was a little bit spooked by what had occurred. There would be panic runs. Some glass would fall from a nearby building and that would set everyone off into a panic run away from the site. For the first 24 hours or so. it was common practice - it happened every two hours or so.'

Pace was better prepared than most to cope. 'He's an old marine and Vietnam vet,' says Wesley, himself a former marine who saw action in Korea. Does AmQuip make a point of recruiting from the military? 'Not particularly,' says Wesley, 'but we have found that that sort of background fits with following through with things.'

There are many unsung heroes of the World Trade Center response action, who gave support to the police, the fire brigade and the construction workers. The Red Cross, Salvation Army and local people just wanting to help out manned sustenance stations around the clock. handing out food, hot and cold drinks, cigarettes, counseling, whatever was required.

For Bardonaro, though, it was the ironworkers that made the greatest impression. 'Everyone knows how heroic the fire brigade was, but I can tell you that the ironworkers were absolutely unbelievable at knowing what to do without being told, and getting the steel hooked and burned and lifted away. It was a real privilege to work with the unions up in New York.'

Half close your eyes and all those machines could almost be just working a mundane open cast mine. But this is not a regular site. There are thousands of bodies in there. Utmost sensitivity is required, both emotional and. when operating machines, physical. Each lift is carefully directed by the fire department, which itself lost many members when the buildings came down. Were it just a collapsed building, an efficient method to move all that material might be to put a massive tower crane in each corner. But that would require excavating straight down to the foundations to make a footing. That is not an option. The correct approach can only be to pull material from the top and work down very carefully.

Northeast quadrant

The police turned up at Bay Crane's yard at 11am. On receiving the call, all the company's operators made their way back with their machines. All jobs in the city had come to a halt anyway.

The first crane on site at three in the afternoon of the attack was. Bay Crane believes, its 45 ton Tadano TR450 XL-4 rough terrain. There was just debris everywhere. There was no clear path to the actual seat of the collapse, where any survivors would be- Soon. Bay Crane had 10 hydraulic cranes at work, from 35 ton to 100 ton capacity, picking steelwork off what used to be the bustling city streets.

As the surrounding area was cleared, these rubber tired telescopic cranes simply didn't have the reach to cope and over the course of the next few days, some of the smaller hydraulics were moved out and in their place came seven lattice boom cranes and larger all terrains. By 1 October Bay had on site three Manitowoc 888s (230 ton crawler), a Link-Belt HC-258 (200 ton lattice boom truck), and an American 9530 (220 ton lattice boom truck). It also had four ATs -Liebherr LTM 1400,1225 and 1120/1 and a Krupp KMK 5175 - and half a dozen Tadano RTs.

One of the 888s was supplied to Bay by Baldwin Crane of XX, and the 9530 came from United Crane Rentals.

Southeast quadrant

AmQuip got a call from the emergency control department at around 5pm on the 11th. "We took a 300 ton crane off another job and had it on site by 1am,' says AmQuip president Joe Wesley. While the logistics of getting large machinery to a disaster area are not easy, with police and military checkpoints around the place needing to be satisfied, Wesley says there were no problems. 'We had a police escort through the tunnels and over the bridge. I was impressed by the organization that the police had behind them.'

AmQuip's first crane on site was a 300 ton (280t) Liebherr LR 1280 crawler crane, transpired on 13 trailer!,, each of which had to have a police escort over the George Washington Bridge and, eventually, onto site. 'As you can imagine space was at a premium,' says Bill Pace, AmQuip's lead man on site. The tractor/trailer units were parked a few blocks away and brought on site one at a time as the crane was assembled. Given the circumstances, it was an impressive performance to get the crane built in 12 hours, compared to the eight hours that it normally takes in an ideal scenario, according to Pace.

While checks were made to get AmQuip's first Liebherr into action, the company received an order for a second crane. AmQuip had recently taken delivery of a second LR 1280, having signed up as a Liebherr Nenzing distributor just this year. It had just been put through checking and was being disassembled in the yard, just about to go out on a job.

While the first crane was sited on sound footings, the second unit was to be put to work over a subway tunnel. 'They weren't able to move it into place right away since they'd not done the engineering checks on the structures underneath, says Wesley. 'It was nearly a full day before we could put it to work.'

Calculating where to set the cranes up was a key challenge for all companies on this site. Underground structures may have been damaged. The last thing anyone needed was a great big crawler crane collapsing through the ground into one of the many galleries and tunnels beneath the streets surrounding the World Trade Center.

For the second crane, extra bracing was put into the subway and steel grillage was fabricated on site. On top of this was placed more than 100 crane mats to provide a roadway for the crane.

Scott Moreland coast sales director for Liebherr Crawler Cranes, helped with the set-up of the second LR 1280. 'It's really incomprehensible,' is how he described the scene. 'You couldn't believe how much rubble you had to get through just to get to the scene.'

AmQuip also sent in a telescopic Liebherr LTM 1090/2 as an assist crane to assemble the crawlers. While the grillage was being constructed, the 1090/2 was used to keep the rescue mission moving. It then stayed on site and worked the areas in between because it could move over the subway. A 50 ton Grove RT was also used on site.

Pace says that the lifting was, some of the time, 'seat of your pants', but more often was carefully planned. 'At one location we were working closely with engineers, estimating weights. When there was a problem we would put chokers around the girders and drag them into radius with excavators.'

'Safety, at all times, was a big, big part of their thinking,' says Wesley. And a big safety asset, he adds, was that these Liebherr cranes have a read-out showing ground bearing pressure at all times. 'That was very helpful,' says Wesley.

Northwest and Southwest quadrants

Jimmy Lomma arrived on site at 9pm on the 11th with a 450 ton Krupp and a 200t Demag all terrain. The next day he had mobilized three Manitowoc 4100s and a Link-Belt LS-278, crawler cranes all, from the Brooklyn yard of New York Crane. Lomma and his company New York Crane were working - still are in two quadrants, to Amec on the northwest and Bovis on the southwest. Lomma himself plays down his own role. It was the city fire department calling the shots, particularly in the early stages, he says. The fire department ran the job,' says Lomma. They lost many colleagues in the collapse When the twin towers blazed, firemen raced up the stairs, as office workers raced down. The priority is to access what remains of the stairwell. One of the main engineering issues on the western side is the slurry wall.

When it was built the World Trade Center was right by the Hudson river. Buildings to the west have been put up since, founded on reclaimed land. A slurry wall was constructed on the river side of the WTC, six stories deep to the foundations of the WTC. At time of writing, the structural integrity of this barrier is not known. It could be that it has been breached by the collapse, and a second disaster - the flooding of Manhattan - is a real threat. The back side of it has been temporarily reinforced with sand. This is the context, the backdrop to which Lomma is working.

Cranes cannot just drive up to the pile of rubble and pick away. Steel bridges have been built over the slurry wall on which a 4100 and the LR 1550 sit and work the site (see photo on page iv). Other cranes are set up 70ft back from the slurry wall. So on this site, reach is key, not lift capacity. 'We can cut the pieces if we have to,' Lomma says. The 4100s have 370ft of reach.

The Link-Belt LS 278 was put to work with a long reach excavator behind the 4100s, pulling buckled girders from half demolished structures next to the American Express building to the west of the site. The 9530 is also demolishing a neighboring building. The 200 ton Demag was taken away once the streets had been cleared. It was 'to small', which gives a good indication of the size of the task before them. The other rubber tired cranes were not going to be there for much longer. There is only so much these machines can achieve.

Lomma has also brought in to the south side of the site a 450 ton (400t) crawler, a Liebherr LR 1400, but its maximum radius of 350ft proved inadequate, Lomma says. Soon it was being used effectively both Link-Belt and Kalmar) and two Manitou telehandlers. Supervising crane operations is New York Crane's maintenance director Frankie Signorelli. Lomma also deployed The Captain Johnson, his barge crane equipped with a 300 ton Manitowoc 4100 Ringer.

Perhaps it is indicative of the state of the market that the crane companies were able to get so much equipment onto site so quickly. Some machines were taken off other jobs, but for Lomma the only machine to be pulled off a job was from nearby Battery Park, where no work was going to take place for the foreseeable future anyway. Construction work in the whole city pretty much came to a halt in the wake of the attacks anyway, so all resources were concentrated where it mattered.

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