GT: My immediate reaction was that the fire department needed something to flag them on where they had to be careful and what was dangerous to them at the site. As I left the site, I told Mike Burton that I would be looking ahead at things that were going to happen, even though they might not happen in the next day or the next week. I wanted to prepare information to be helpful to people from when they were going from ground down, because we had roughly a ten-story pile of debris that was still covering the site, and that material had to be removed before any of the underground work could begin. So I began preparing things they could use perhaps two months down the road.

I decided to come back here and I found there were a good number of people within the office who had come in just wanting to come in and do something. We marshaled a group of people. We printed all of the photographs that I had collected into books for distribution to the fire department, police department, EMS people. We, put together some drawings that showed all of the utilities, all the ramps, all the wall penetrations for the fire department. Around ten o'clock at night I delivered them to the fire department for their use.

That was kind of the part of the recovery aspects of things. The next thing we did was collect all of the information we had. That must have been Thursday. We began collecting all the information we have which is in this room that I'm sitting in right now. We created what I guess you'd call a command center for below grade. The DDC, the Design and Construction group, were very occupied from grade upward. So I collected all the stuff here.

I made all of our facilities available to the Transit Authority, the Port Authority, to anybody who had a need to know. FEMA was here. People were coming in and out of this office like it was a subway station and we would have perhaps twenty or thirty people here at a time conducting meetings. The Transit Authority, for the moment, didn't have an office. Their facilities were shut down, so they were working out of here. I tried to make this place available to everybody, and staff available. That was kind of the collection of information phase of the work. And from that phase, we began doing surveys for different clients -- the Port Authority, the Transit Authority and the like. We designed the plug for the PATH station in exchange place. We came up with a plug for the No. 1 and 9. We did inspections of these facilities and were trying to respond to the needs of individual clients. We assigned a different partner to each one of those clients so they could have somebody attending to their specific needs.

GT: As I was working with the DDC, I sensed that there was an intention to exhume the whole site. If we were going to do that, we had to have an understanding of what was within the site. So I proposed to Mike Burton that we begin putting together a set of drawings that would reflect the underground conditions that we would probe wherever we could gain access -- down the ramps, through stairways, however we could get into the basement -- to determine where there was structure. It was apparent at the customs house, which is the northwest building, that there was a significant amount of below grade structure in place that was holding the slurry walls satisfactorily.

Within the middle of the site, there was primarily a debris pile. The towers themselves were just a compact pile of debris. And on the south end of the site, there was random debris, and it was almost like a valley when we finally cleaned it up and we understood what was going on. At the south end of the site, the wall wasn't really supported anymore. So we began putting together a level-by-level set of drawings, and I called it the red-green drawings.

What we did was we identified the debris fields that had no structure in red. We identified the areas where we had floor structure in place in green, which meant that we had the walls supported. And then we had some cross-tasked areas that were kind of questionable. We were not certain actually as to how the walls were being supported. And we developed these in conjunction with the EMS people, the fire department, the police department and with FEMA. Everybody who investigated a particular area would report to us and we would put it in this set of drawings. Then our spelunkers, as I called our cave explorers, would be called over. Somebody from a fire department would say, "Jeez, come here, I just found this, I'd like to show you something."

And they'd drag this fellow down into the bowels of the basement where they found a particular means of access. Within a matter of about a week or two, our people had covered the whole building. They knew that there was a piece of the PATH station that was complete, and that there was part of a train in there that was not damaged. We had a very good understanding of the status of the basement.

GT: There was a group of the younger engineers, which I exclude myself from, who were very distressed or upset by this incident, and who wanted to do as much as they could to be helpful. They did most of this exploratory work and most of this on-site work, providing engineering assistance to the recovery people. They are not specialists in rescue and recovery, nor in work in these confined spaces. The way we managed this was that they went nowhere without having suitable EMS, fire, or police that were properly prepared. Our people always piggybacked on a team of either FEMA, police, EMS, or fire so that we would have the proper people guiding them and protecting them, for example, sniffing air to make certain that they were not in problem areas and that in confined spaces they were protected. I had a concern, frankly, that our people were not used to this type of risk. Nobody was used to this kind of risk to be very candid with you. It was a circumstance that you couldn't anticipate encountering.

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