MB: One of the very first things that we realized on September 11th was that in the year 2002, everyone has come to rely upon cell phones. But the phone lines weren't there. They were completely overwhelmed. I had a cell phone on me, but I could only make a phone call about every twenty minutes. I would have it on automatic dial and every twenty minutes I would get a phone call through. What I actually did was, I reached out to people who had access to landlines and gave them lists of people that I wanted to call, including Lou Mendez. And I called Lou Mendez and I asked him to call people and to start mobilizing people for an assessment team. We also formed phone trees and we actually asked people to start collecting cell phone numbers and people's home phone numbers so that when we finally had a full assessment of what we needed to do that night, we could reach people at home. We reached out to people like Richard Anderson of The New York Building Congress, and we reached out to Lou Coletti, from the BTEA. We reached out to union leaders and they reached out to hundreds and hundreds of members. And those people reached out to additional members.

One example is the ironworkers. The ironworkers very, very quickly found out what happened and they actually just started showing up. They left whatever jobs they were on and they just started marching south. The only way you could was walk: the subway lines were shut down and New York City was shut with traffic jams. Many, many people just literally walked all the way to ground zero. The only two ways of getting around effectively were actually with a police escort with flashing lights or actually to walk. The assessment team that I actually brought in, the fourteen people that I brought in for that initial assessment, I actually had to arrange to have police escorts pick half the team up in midtown Manhattan. And everybody that was located in Queens and Brooklyn, I had to meet at my offices back in Long Island City. Then we had a police escort take them from Long Island City into Manhattan because all the bridges and tunnels were shut down. There was a very, very real concern that there would be a subsequent terrorist strike, so everything was shut down. The mass transit systems were shut down, the rail-lines were shut down and the bridges were shut down. Everything literally had to be escorted in.

One example is on the very first night, we had a very large crane out at JFK Airport that we needed. And we actually called the operator, had a police escort pick up the operator of the crane. The New York City police officer drove out to Kennedy where he met up with a port authority police officer, who brought the operator onto the JFK grounds. That port authority cop had to take him to the airside of the terminal to get the crane. The crane then had to drive off out of the airport property, get hooked up again with the New York Police Department cop, who actually escorted him through Brooklyn, over the bridges, and down to ground zero. And that's just one example of the intense multi-agency coordination that was needed to actually get all the equipment and face the logistical challenges.

Something that we also did very early on was we instituted the badging system, where everybody got badges just so that we knew who belonged on site and who did not belong on site. Still to this day, the logistics of how we allow access to the site is very much something that a lot of thought goes on to make sure that people that don't belong on site, that are just curiosity seekers, don't get onto the site and get hurt. Also, whereas the terrorist threat has greatly receded from those first days, it was still a very, very big issue. You had thousands of rescue workers in a very, very concentrated area. The thought of another terrorist attack was very, very real. There were rumors, there were actually phone threats that were not acted upon, thank God. But security was a very big issue. And that had to be balanced with getting the materials, equipment and people in that we needed to get in.

MB: The first effort we had was to get a very large amount of construction workers, ironworkers and operating engineers to the site. Then we had to actually marry them to the equipment that we were mobilizing throughout the New York metropolitan area. Once we actually had the trade's people and we had the equipment, the next step was to coordinate our efforts with the fire department to see where they needed to help people. As massive as the engineering construction effort was, we were very much subservient to the fire department. We were helping the fire department. Our sole purpose was to help the fire department save people and to try to be in a position whereby we identified the hazards as quickly as possible and corrected some of the hazards. We also identified conditions that could adversely affect the safety of the rescuers and got that information out. During the first seventy-two hours, there was a combination of forces that we had brought to the area. The fire department had brought a significant force to the area and the third leg holding up the stool was the volunteers. Without the volunteers, the initial efforts would not have gone as well as they did. But within the first seventy-two hours, we had to get into a more organized management structure. That's actually when I divided up the site into four quadrants. I gave each one of the construction managers control and responsibility to manage that sector. We did the same thing with the engineering groups. We actually divided up the control and put them into geographic regions working with each one of the individual construction managers. Engineering assessments would then be immediately forwarded to the managers of the quadrant. Then the information would immediately get filtered down to the operating engineers and the ironworkers. It was an organized effort that was twice as effective as a less managed effort. We kind of went from chaos to managed chaos to more of a managed structure, but it still took us quite some time given the immensity of what was happening.

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