Q: Did you have any thoughts about the people you knew?

PR: Obviously, I had concerns about people that I worked with and friends in the building when I saw the building hit. I thought of my coworkers. My staff was on the 72nd floor, including my project managers and my technical staff. I [also] had friends throughout the building. So I worried about that. Especially when I saw Building Two collapse and I realized that the buildings were really damaged and that it was really a dangerous situation.

I remember when I saw Building Two collapse and then Building One collapsed a little time thereafter, I recall looking at the clock where I was staying to see how much time had elapsed between the time the plane first hit Building One and the time that Building One collapsed. I calculated that it was about an hour and a half. And I realized that if everyone had started to evacuate right away that it would have taken about 40 or 45 minutes to get out of the building under good conditions. So I was hoping that all my coworkers and friends had gotten out of the building.

Q: Can you tell me how that turned out?

PR: Actually, what happened is, starting that evening, we were making phone calls. I was calling back some of the people that had gotten out of the building. And for the next several days we were making phone calls to staff. The whole Port Authority in the first several days was trying to ascertain what the status of all the people that worked there for the Port Authority was. We were able to locate virtually most of our people. We had lost some people in the engineering department. Several people did not make it out. Also, we eventually found that we lost 74 Port Authority employees including 37 police and 37 other staff workers. And then one person who was severely burned died later in the hospital. So, we lost a total of 75 people from the Port Authority in that accident. As a matter of fact, some of those people were my very close friends. Some of them were found early on, within the first week. And actually, when I came back up from North Carolina, the first thing I did was attend wakes and funerals for some of my friends. That was kind of a disheartening thing.

Q: Maybe you could tell me, when did you first come to the site?

PR: The first time I came to the World Trade Center site was actually on September 25th. It was, I believe, two weeks to the day after the accident. That morning I had found out, I was called in by the Chief Engineering's Office at the Port Authority and told I was going to be sent on special assignment to work with New York City Department of Design and Construction on the recovery effort and clean up at the World Trade Center. That morning, I understood there was a meeting that I should attend on slurry wall issues and stabilization issues. That was just the beginning of what was going to happen with the whole below ground, and the concerns about the whole stability of the wall.

So, I left my office in Jersey City, our temporary offices, drove in over here and attended a meeting at 11 o'clock on Tuesday, which was the first slurry wall meeting. We had a group of people there brainstorming what we were going to do. That was the first time I had met Mike Burton from the DDC. He actually leaned over and introduced me and said, "This is Peter Rinaldi from the Port Authority. He's going to be working with us, and he's going to be heading up this whole effort on the slurry wall and the stabilization and the whole below-grade effort." And from that point on, it was just intense effort. I actually didn't get back to my office for a week. I thought I would get back that day, but it was just so intense. Everything that was going on back in September, you just got absorbed.

Q: Do you remember the first moment that you actually saw the site?

PR: The first moment I actually saw the site was that day after that slurry wall meeting on September 25th. I actually took a walk around the site with Ray Finnegan, our senior construction manager. And we walked around the site. At the first impression, you're awestruck. You see things on TV, but they're not in three dimensions, really, and you don't get the full feeling of sound and space as you do when you're walking around a site. And for me, it was intense because not only did I lose some close friends there, but I also spent my entire career of 29 years in that whole building complex in downtown Manhattan, and watched all of Manhattan grow around the World Trade Center. So it was quite an experience.

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