CV: I think there was really no one, single image, because there were so many. Just walking around the site and seeing the catastrophic event that had happened and what we were left with to clean up in itself was a sight. It's really beyond description. I know there's been a lot of film, there's been a lot of footage of the movement of the equipment on the job site, taking the cars off of the street. Everyone down here has had a moment to ponder and ask, "How could this have happened and how are we going to move forward?"

CV: There's no such thing down here as a typical day. I think we're now into our two hundred and eighty-seventh day on the job site. You don't count the days in hours and you don't count the days in weeks. You just keep moving on. It's a twenty-four hour, seven-day operation. Your time down here is always busy. There's never a moment that you aren't on call or don't have a meeting to go to or have to go out and make a change because of the recovery efforts have suddenly run into a block where there's a safety issue at hand and the engineering staff has to get together and make a decision. Every minute of the day here you're making an assessment of what is. And you're just moving on. There's no typical day here at all. Everything just flows right from one hour to the next.

CV: The good example of a change that comes up in a moment's notice was when we came in from the southwest corner of the building and we were attempting to go into the Vista Hotel with some of the grapplers coming off of West Street. The grappler operator fellow, Jamie, had called me on the radio. We had given everybody radios on the grappler, and anybody on this job site could give me a call or call any one of my superintendents at a moment's notice. And I got a call from Jamie and I went over there and he said, "Charlie, I don't think I should go out there with the piece of equipment." He was on a seven hundred fifty thousand pound unit. I said, "What's the problem?" He said, "The ground is shaking." And I said, "Well, let's back off and get the engineering team down here."

I made a call up to the DDC office to get an engineer down here because at the time every engineer that was available in New York City, from out of state and out of the country, was on the job site working 24/7's. I believe Peter Rinaldi had come down from the Port Authority Engineering Department. I told him what the concerns were and they told us to back off. We went and got as-built drawings of the area. We determined that the debris collapse had compromised the slabs. We were just starting to set up monitoring for the slurry wall and we found that the slurry wall was moving on Liberty Street, which was just south of the Vista Hotel. So we were told to stop work there until we could stabilize the slurry wall.

It may not be a big event but that event changed the mode in which we were going to enter the debris pile on the southwest corner of the site. So you shifted from a major recovery operation into putting it on hold until you could assess and stabilize what the problem was that was coming up. And we had a very talented set of engineers down here on the job site that gave a good look ahead and they basically helped the whole team come up with a good logistics plan on how to move forward after that point. But nobody realized the dangers that you faced. You couldn't just rush in and start where you thought you wanted to work. You couldn't talk to a fire department member who wanted very much to get into a certain area where he knew that there were firemen last seen taking civilians out of an area. They wanted to get to that recovery area immediately. That was kind of an event and those type of things changed and came up hourly here. Hourly. If it wasn't in our quadrant, it was in somebody else's quadrant. Basically things just changed at a moment's notice every day. I'm going to turn this off. Okay.

CV: The movement of the slurry wall was very alarming to everyone on the job site because we knew that the entire perimeter sub-grade had groundwater from the Hudson River in it and it was completely saturated. Had one of the panels completely opened up, we would basically be opening up a floodgate into the tub. The tub, as you know, is a nine-acre area which goes anywhere from seventy to eighty some odd feet deep, completely surrounded by groundwater on the southwest and part of the north side. If that would have opened up, we would have had even more of a catastrophe on our hands as far as trying to aid in any of the recovery. We would have actually had a bathtub, seventy feet deep full of water. It was very important that we got the assessment from the engineers and we got the plan from the engineers on what to do. It, therefore, led to the beginning of a tieback installation procedure and they got some of the biggest tieback installers in the world to come over here and do an assessment.

We decided that Nicholson was the contractor who could mobilize immediately, bringing in as many machines and as many men as he could get. We ended up bringing guys in from all over the country to assist in the installation of the tiebacks. And when that happened, it basically set the precedent for the excavation along the perimeter adjacent to the slurry wall on the interior side of the tub. We were kind of held back from going straight to the bottom alongside of the slurry wall until the tiebacks could be installed and stabilize the wall and insure that there was not going to be a collapse of the wall and have a flood condition out there.

CV: Nobody could say for certain how fast and furiously the tub would fill up with water had there been a major collapse, say, if one of the panels had opened up to the full depth, to the buttress which is about seventy feet down. There would have been major water infiltration. At that time, there were no dewatering systems installed, so that if we did have a flood we could control it -- pumping out the water as it came in.

Nobody had the formula for how many gallons a minute could come in if you opened up a twenty-foot section of wall by seventy feet high. So the first thing was to get a drilling operating going to install wells around the perimeter of the site on the south end of the site on Liberty Street and on West Street where we knew there was a lot of concentration of water behind the wall. So even before we actually started to install the tiebacks, we had a drilling operation going to install wells. We put the wells twenty-five feet apart for the full length of Liberty Street and we started running them about twenty-five feet apart all the way from the corner of West and Liberty, up West Street north to as far as the north projection, which is almost three-quarters of the distance of the tub.

We began pumping water out to relieve the head pressure that was up against the wall. And one of the obstacles that we ran into was discharging this water. Where does it go? There were outfall locations that we found through the as-built and through the Port Authority Engineers who know this place like the back of their hand. They would make recommendations that we remove this debris that was still laying across West Street and open up and locate the outfall locations. In doing that, we found the outfall locations had been impaled from the steel that came down from the tower. We couldn't jump right into there with the discharge and get rid of the water and flow it directly out into the river. So we started investigating the infrastructure around the area to locate existing sewer mains and existing outfalls that were a little further south. We hooked out discharge systems up initially into the regular street curbside, rain gutters that were on the curbs. We took care of getting rid of the water. We had to have somewhere to pump it when we got it out and then that was a problem. But everybody got together and we found everything that we could possibly find to utilize as a discharge system.

Eventually as the program grew, we reconstructed the outfall. We reconstructed a lot of the sewers that had been damaged. I mean, you have to realize that there were anywhere forty to sixty ton pieces of box beams that came out of the towers, landed outside of the tub and actually impaled the street and went with anywhere thirty to forty feet into the ground and disrupted all of the services that were running underground. Everything from communications cabling, sewer lines, gas lines, and steam lines. And the city had already come in through, Con-Ed, Verizon, all of their vendors and subcontractors and capped everything off north and south of the site and east and west of the site so that we at least knew that we were moving forward with no active infrastructure around the site. That was a very important thing because nobody had been able to answer that question among all of the chaos going on. If I pull this beam out, am I going to suddenly have a steam explosion -- nobody knew. But that came together very quick. I can't emphasize enough that the team of engineers that we had here and the guys that were supplied to the DDC had the knowledge of the site, which was a very, very great help.

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