The Ironworkers of 9/11

The following article appeared in the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone. T hey jump out of the van and grab their cutting torches and gas and air tanks, their heavy gloves and goggles, then just stand there on West Street in a moment of eerie calm, confused and overwhelmed and trying to make sense of it all: huge iron beams twisted like drinking straws, white and black smoke rising, mountains of glinting steel, the acrid smell of burning plastic swirling with the gut-wrenching smell of decaying flesh. And the weirdness of the blue, blue sky above, while hundreds of men crawl around like ants on the rubble. “It was like I’d stepped into hell,” Larry Willett says. Willett, 34, is among the youngest of the New York City ironworkers in the van — unlike some of the guys he works with, he has never been to Vietnam, never worked on a rescue crew, isn’t well-versed in catastrophe and mayhem. But even the toughest ironworkers, the guys covered with tattoos and scars, the guys who can guzzle a beer and then walk with perfect grace on a five-inch-wide beam fifty floors above the city are knocked on their ass by this. Finally, someone yells something about bodies over by the American Express building, and the next thing Willett knows, he has his mask on and is cutting beams with his torch and hooking chains onto iron so that cranes can lift the seventy-ton pieces away. When he tires of cutting, he works on the bucket brigade, passing debris back to the rear of the line, and down on his hands and knees, digging in the tangle of insulation through dust and muck (water mains had broken) for any signs of life. There is a lot of yelling at one point — they found a fireman pinned by an iron beam on the bridge over West Street — so Willett runs to help, but by that time the crushed fireman has already been zipped up in a body bag. A few minutes later, Willett is working in an area where the smell is so pungent that they know there has to be someone buried there; they lift a beam, pull up a chain-link fence and discover the torso of a young girl. Willett, who had never seen a dead body before except for those prettied up in funeral parlors, takes a quick glimpse, then turns his pale-blue eyes away. For the next sixteen hours, he works with furious energy, cutting and lifting debris, driven by the hope that all this can somehow be redeemed by finding one person alive. But each time he lifts a beam or a scrap of iron, he is greeted by fresh horror: a scalp, a mess of entrails, a hand. And each time, a fireman or a police officer comes over and shovels the remains into a white plastic bucket and carries it away. No one had a clearer view of this tragedy than the ironworkers. At the time of the attack, they were hanging off buildings and bridges all over the city. Willett was working with a dozen other guys five stories up on the new wing of a school off Myrtle Avenue in Queens — he happened to miss the first plane slamming into the tower, but had an unobstructed view of the second one. And like everyone, Willett scrambled for news on the radio. But never in his wildest nightmares did he imagine that the Twin Towers would fall. In fact, after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured more than a thousand people but hardly rocked the buildings, ironworkers mocked the idea that any terrorist could ever take down those great structures. They knew the craftsmanship – not to mention the many tons of iron — that had gone into building them. “They were a symbol of accomplishment,” says George Goodleaf, Willett’s foreman on the Queens job, who worked side by side with him cleaning up the debris. Goodleaf’s father had helped build the towers, as had the fathers and grandfathers of many of the ironworkers who responded to the collapse. “It was something you could look up at and say, `We did that,’” says Goodleaf. Editor’s picks Ironworkers have an unabashedly romantic feeling for their buildings, and for the work itself. They love the hard physical labor, the camaraderie, the feel of the iron, and most of all the sense that they are, as Goodleaf eloquently puts it, “putting something up in the sky that has never been there before.” Many trace their lineage back to Ireland or Newfoundland, to nineteenth-century ship riggers who found that their talent for building and fearlessness of heights were ideally suited to the work of erecting skyscrapers that began in New York after the turn of the century (Native Americans, particularly from the Mohawk tribe in upstate New York, were also part of the early generation of ironworkers). Although the buildings have gotten taller over the years, the essential tool of the trade — a spud wrench that every ironworker carries on his belt to tighten the bolts that hold the beams together — has not changed in fifty years. For a tradesman, pay is excellent — thirty-four dollars an hour for union workers, plus generous benefits. Related Content The job, needless to say, is also incredibly dangerous. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the fatality rate among structural ironworkers is among the highest in the nation (right up there with commercial fishermen and loggers). Men routinely fall off buildings, get electrocuted, crushed or maimed. Willett is one of the lucky ones — in his fifteen years as an ironworker, his worst scare happened a few years ago when a massive iron beam rolled over on his leg, pinning him but not breaking any bones. Most of the guys he works with, however, are orthopedic nightmares. Goodleaf, who has been in the trade more than thirty years, has broken innumerable bones, herniated disks in his back; his knees are shot, his shoulder is shot, and he has arthritis and bursitis. When he was a kid, Goodleaf’s father fell off a bridge in Queens, shattering both heels; he also cut his thumb clean off (it was sewn back on). His grandfather died in his father’s arms when a load of metal fell off a building and split his head open — a scene so gruesome he says it made the cover of the New York Daily News. Amazingly, not a single structural ironworker died during the construction of the World Trade Center, says John Kelly, the union shop steward who was in charge of safety at the site (one ironworker apprentice did slip off a ladder and was paralyzed for life). The ironwork for the towers was completed over twenty-six months, starting August 6th, 1968, and employed more than 500 workers. “It was the greatest human undertaking since the Pyramids,” says Kelly. “We all imagined they would be standing forever.” When the towers fell, ironworkers felt a special sense of urgency and despair. Yes, many of them were worried about friends and family who might have been in the buildings or who were firemen or cops, and yes, they knew their skills were necessary in getting the debris out of the way so that rescuers could penetrate the debris in their search for survivors. But there was also something deeper and difficult to articulate: The buildings their fathers and grandfathers had built had fallen down. Willett works through Wednesday night, not stopping to eat, sorting through the rubble with frantic energy until his hands are sore and feet ache. At about 2 a.m., Goodleaf persuades him to knock off – they are both so exhausted it is dangerous to continue. Willett crashes at a hotel, sleeps for two hours, then drives out to the job site in Queens — his boss wants him back at work. “I couldn’t keep my mind on the job; I just kept thinking about the people buried in the steel,” says Willett. The following day, work on the job is canceled because of rain (water makes iron beams slippery as ice). Willett and Goodleaf are determined to go back to the World Trade Center, but they hear from the union hall that they should stay home. By that time, hundreds of ironworkers, some from as far away as Kentucky and Maine, have arrived on the scene. They are camped at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, sleeping in their pickups on Tenth Avenue, loitering in the union halls. “It was the greatest human undertaking since the Pyramids. We all imagined they would be standing forever.”John Kelly, the union shop steward in charge of safety at the site “It’s fucking chaos,” says Dick O’Kane, the business manager of Local 361, to Willett and Goodleaf when they step into his office that Friday morning, three days after the attack. “They’re flooded with ironworkers down there; they don’t know what to do with them all. You guys should just keep away until they call for more help.” Willett is wearing a green sweatshirt with “Ireland” across the chest; his eyes are red and glassy, and in contrast to Goodleaf, who had worked for years as a fireman and is used to carnage and horror, Willett still seems to be in a state of shock. Willett and Goodleaf mill around in O’Kane’s office, staring at the TV and talking with other ironworkers who drift in and out. O’Kane is a 1930s-style union boss: gold bracelet, gray pinstriped suit, loud and colorful. “The Bill of Rights is for people who live here, not for terrorists who come here and fuck up!” O’Kane shouts when Tom Brokaw announces that one of the men suspected of plotting the attack has been detained. “Put him in a cage and drag him around!” While O’Kane steams, Willett and Goodleaf talk about the heroism and selflessness they’ve seen in their fellow ironworkers, including the amazing Tommy Roache, an ironworker and fireman who had reportedly been on the scene for forty-eight hours straight. Willett looks ashamed that Roache is still there and he is not. Not wanting to rile his union boss, Willett spends the rest of that day at home in Bayville, Long Island, staring at the TV. He tries talking to his wife, Jennifer, and playing with his two kids, Barrett, 2, and Emily, 4, but he can only manage it for a few minutes before he returns to the TV. “I just felt helpless,” Willett says. He thinks about the faces of the men he had seen working around him, the suffering he imagined just a few feet below where he had been standing in the rubble and, always, burned into his brain, the terrible smell of the bodies — it is suddenly all too much for him. For the first time, sitting alone in his bedroom, he breaks down and cries. The next morning — Saturday, four days after the collapse — Willett wakes at 5 a.m. and drives into the city on his own. Because he does not have an official work pass, he has a hard time getting past the increasingly strict military checkpoints. Finally, after flashing his union card and ID, a sympathetic cop lets him in. He meets up with Goodleaf and some other men and starts back to work. But the mood is different now. Much of the perimeter debris has been hauled out — they are now working in the vast tangled heart of the wreckage of the South Tower. It is less gruesome, less urgent, more orderly — cutting beams, calling for cranes to lift them onto trucks, cutting again, lifting, cutting, lifting. The horrible smell is still there, maybe even worse, but he only sees two bodies all night – one of which is intact and which rests, spookily, in a body bag on the sidewalk for several hours before someone carts it away. Every hour or so a search dog smells something in the rubble and starts barking, and the workers shut everything down and send in a remote camera to see if they spot anything. They never do. Because of this, progress is painfully slow. Many rescuers are just sitting around waiting, looking burned out. Sometimes, Willett and others pull out a beam and open a big hole, and a fireman lowers himself down inside. Occasionally something is hauled up in a plastic bucket, but Willett never cares to look. He keeps slinging steel, trying not to think about what he knows is true: This is a cleanup job now, not a rescue operation. Trending Stories At about 3 a.m., Willett can do no more. Contractors are approaching all the volunteers, telling them that if they weren’t employed by one of the firms hired by the city to clear out the debris, they have to leave. Willett doesn’t argue. He talks with Goodleaf for a minute, then grabs his tool belt and hard hat and walks up Church Street in the darkness toward his truck. The TV lights that greeted many of the rescue workers are off now – there is no applause, no flag-waving, no talk of heroes. The streets are deserted, the glow of the floodlights on the wreckage fade behind him. He passes a smashed police car festooned with flowers, tired volunteers clutching coffee cups at the Salvation Army outpost, sleepy military police officers at the barricades. He slides into his truck and heads for the Long Island Expressway. He has the windows down, the dark, cool air blowing in, hoping he won’t fall asleep and afraid that when he does, the nightmares will begin.