MB: On the morning of September 11th, I had a scheduled meeting at City Hall at 9:15, so I was actually several blocks from the World Trade Center site. After the second plane hit, I ended up going into the Office of Emergency Management, and we proceeded to get closer to the site. We actually were only about two blocks away when tower two collapsed. And after Tower Two collapsed, we realized that we were in a very, very precarious situation. I guess that's a little bit of an understatement. But we actually proceeded to drive north and we went two additional blocks away. All I could remember thinking is that now that a second plane has hit, it's not an accident, it's a terrorist incident. It took probably about ten minutes to drive two blocks, just due to the chaos, the debris on the street and the people running. People were terrified, and all I can remember in those ten minutes was that the last place I wanted to be was at the site of a terrorist incident, in a big orange and blue bus that belonged to the New York City Office of Emergency Management Command and Control Center. As soon as the bus stopped four blocks away, I was the first person off that bus. It's somewhat ironic that I was at City Hall and I went closer and then the building collapsed and the bus drove further away. I actually went back closer to the site after I got out of the bus to get a better vantage point. That's actually when Tower One came down and what I remember thinking was, "Well, the tower's coming down and that tower is a hundred and ten stories high." My engineering, mathematical brain kicked in and I thought, "If that tower falls in my direction, it can hit me." So that was the second time of the day that I thought that my life was in danger. Everybody was running at that point. Knowing that the building could potentially reach me, I actually got in front of the command and control bus. So the very bus that I wanted to get out of, I now used as shelter to potentially help me.

MB: After that I took the command and control bus and we actually went to a temporary command center up in the Village, which was about a five-minute ride away. That's where the Mayor and many of the Deputy Mayors were congregated. I spoke to Deputy Mayor Tony Coles, and he advised me that the police department had established a command and control center in their headquarters, and actually that's where I got a police escort to go down to police headquarters. That is also when I started mobilizing what I'm calling the assessment team. It was about fourteen people that did the first walkthrough to determine what engineering and construction resources we would need. And what I thought at the time was that the biggest and best companies that were local could really help me. In many respects, I think they were the best companies that could help us because they were still there.

MB: In many respects those companies were the best companies to call because they're still here and have done a phenomenal job to date. Richard Tomasetti of Thorton Tomasetti is still on the job. He mobilized not only the structural engineering resources of his firm, but he reached out to all the structural engineering firms in the city. He mobilized the entire New York City engineering community into a solidified management team to do structural engineering assessments on over four hundred buildings before we were done. On the construction side, we mobilized AMEC, Turner, Bovis, and Tully Construction. Tully just happened to be working on the Route 9 project, which is the West Side Highway. They had a lot of equipment there, so that's why I mobilized them. The three others are probably the largest contractors in New York City and also the country. They were very effective at the initial mobilization efforts and still are very effective, four months into this cleanup effort. All have performed well above and beyond the call of duty.

MB: My initial phone calls started shortly after I got to City Hall. I'd say it was about 9:30 when I actually just started mobilizing. I called Regional Scaffold, who was one of the larger scaffolding companies in the city, and at that point in time, I thought all I needed was some scaffolding and netting and some sidewalk bridging. All I saw was that a plane had hit the building and there were going to be some hazardous structural elements hanging off the building. I knew we needed to protect the public from walking in and around the Trade Center complex. I never realized that the towers would actually collapse. Within two hours, both towers had collapsed, and that's when I started making phone calls to the construction community and the engineering community. I didn't know what I needed at the time. So I actually put together a list of what I thought would be the resources needed for a cleanup. At that point in time, there was so much smoke and dust that I knew the towers had collapsed, but I still wasn't sure if the entire towers had collapsed. So I mobilized three times the amount of equipment that I thought would be needed, and I put together a list and had contractors and subcontractors start pre-positioning equipment. The magnitude of what we now know makes it ironic that my estimate of ordering three times the amount of equipment I thought I needed was probably only one-third of what we actually needed. I don't think anyone could have contemplated what was really needed until you were actually there. After several hours of getting the entire assessment team down to police headquarters, we finally got the go ahead from the fire department to actually go down to ground zero. The fire department was very concerned about another building collapsing and they didn't want civilians go into a situation that was highly hazardous. Then they finally gave us the go ahead and we were just about to leave police headquarters, which was only a five minute walk from ground zero, and that's when tower seven came down. Then there was a very, very great fear of what other buildings would collapse. There were still fires raging around the actual ground zero. Ninety West Street was one of the buildings that was burning for three and a half days. There were many, many hazards that the fire department was aware of and they were trying to protect the public. At the same time, it was a coordinated effort between the fire and the police department whereby the entire perimeter was sealed so that people who didn't belong there were not put into harm's way. Once we got down there, we finally realized that the undertaking was going to be massive and was going to take a significant amount of time.

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