Interview with Mike Burton

This transcript is based on videotaped interviews conducted by Great Projects Film Company for the documentary "America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero," and has been edited lightly for readability. The interviewer's questions have not been included; the interviewee's initials indicate where answers to questions begin.

Mike Burton (MB): What I want to be able to say to my children and my children's children is that the job was completed with tremendous intensity and focus; that we tried to make it a safe job, and that the job was finished without any further loss of life after September 11th. My role was to organize probably the most massive amount of talent in the engineering and construction industries and to have them all assembled and to get them all focused and working for the common goal. Everybody knew what the end result was going to be. Everyone knew that we had to assist first in the rescue efforts, then in the recovery efforts and then in the building stabilization and the substructure stabilization. Everybody knew what the end goal was and I just need to make sure that people were all focused and going towards all the interim goals that we had. Initially there were daily goals and there were weekly goals and there were monthly goals. And I just needed to make sure that the all-star team of engineers and contractors were all focused on getting to those interim goals to make sure that we would reach our end goal of recovering remains in a dignified way, of allowing the city to return to normal and making sure that there were no additional losses of life. We're halfway through it now. We're four and a half months into it and in another four months my goal is to be able to say that there was no loss of life. Hopefully fifty years from now, if I'm still around, I'll still say that.

MB: On a personal level, the situation at the World Trade Center from day one has been emotional and stressful for the firefighters, the contractors, the management team and basically for everybody. That certainly can cause people to burn out since adrenaline only runs for a certain period of time. What keeps people going further and further I think, is the challenge. And this is certainly the biggest challenge of the decade or potentially of the century, I think from an engineering or construction perspective. The challenge is keeps everybody going and knowing that they're kind of fighting, not just a fight for New York City, but they're fighting to show the world that we're gonna recover and we're not gonna let terrorists beat us.

MB: One of the challenges that is before us is the fact that there is zero time for planning, and that everything is critical from a safety perspective. In terms of environmental issues, there are many, many unknowns and we need to react now. We don't have a week or a month to plan for it. We have seconds or minutes to formulate an entire plan and put the plan into action. There is just zero planning time. On the structural side, we need to actually design and build simultaneously. With a normal design-build job in our industry, you're designing and building at the same time, but you have planning time and you always know what you're building. Here, we don't know what we are deconstructing and what we are constructing. Since this is a destruction process, there are environmental and structural hazards and just so many unknowns and we don't have a long time to plan for it, we just have to do it. We have to make decisions on a daily basis of structural engineering, construction and logistics decisions. Just his past week, we made a decision literally over a period of two hours where the final bridge leaving the structure is going to be for all debris removals. That impacts the recovery operations and future traffic plans for the next several years. The bridge we're talking about is a pre-manufactured bridge that will stay in place to assist us in the recovery operations. It will also assist the port authority people with rebuilding the PATH station and it will assist the developer when he starts building whatever buildings and memorial are reconstructed on the site. That decision will also impact traffic patterns for five years. And that decision was made over a series of two one-hour meetings. So the long-term implications of what we do are very, very significant. Additional things that that bridge will affect include the traffic and utility reconstruction in the area. In the downtown Manhattan area, the transportation, the steam, the gas, the data and the telecommunications are some of the most complex sub grade areas in the world. We need to work in and around that and we need to make sure that the transportation routes are restored to their pre September 11th states. We need to make sure that the telephone and data lines are ready so that businesses can return to the area.

MB: The complexity, in summary, is the factor that we have no time to plan, and at the same time, the decisions that we're making on a daily basis are going to impact the city's economy. They impact the recovery operations and they will impact downtown Manhattan for a period of about five years. Five years is the period of time it will take for the full infrastructure reconstruction and building process.

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