The following day, Sept. 12, many companies from our area arrived at Ground Zero with an arsenal of equipment, management knowhow and labor personnel offering supplies and expertise. In those early hours, companies—many that are members of the regional trade associations, volunteered their idle inventories of dump trucks, runoff containers, cranes, excavators and bulldozers. Among the crucial equipment called for and sent to the site were cutoff saws and blades, cutting torches with oxygen and acetylene tanks.

The Mount Vernon-based firm Granite/Halmar Construction Co. reassigned 50 of its workers who were pulled from other jobs and transported to the disaster area. Other companies, such as Yonkers Contracting Co. sent in crews and executives to help assess the damage and participate in the coordinated recovery program that would be announced days later.

Within a week of September 11, the New York City Department of Design and Construction had devised a plan to coordinate the recovery and debris removal. The site was divided to four parcels, with a lead contractor managing the cleanup work for its particular quadrant. The teams, all of which were based or had major offices in Manhattan, were Turner Construction, Plaza Construction, AMEC Construction Management, Bovis Lend Lease, and Tully Construction Inc.

Many demolition firms, engineering and subcontractors, assisted the team leaders and provided specialty personnel in the form of PEs, safety experts, and ironworkers, as well as heavy equipment taken from other projects around the city.

In the early days, the mission was to aid the fire department and the search and rescue because it was still considered a crime scene. Peter Tully of Tully Construction said that during the actual moments of the attack his crews were working only a few hundred yards away, completing roadwork on the West Side Highway in lower Manhattan. He said his company’s involvement began with 15 pieces of equipment it reassigned within hours after the catastrophe. That quickly swelled to 75 trucks a day entering and leaving the site. The firm also had more than 300 people on site working around the clock in two 12-hour shifts.

As the relief efforts shifted from rescue to recovery, the Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to develop an overall debris-removal plan for the site. It dispatched at least 164 employees to New York City to coordinate the campaign.

“The early descriptions of the despair and conditions we heard from our contractors and partners in labor were hard to comprehend,” said Ross J. Pepe, quoted at the time. Then president of the Construction Industry Council Westchester & Hudson Valley, Inc., Mr. Pepe pledged the support of his 650-member trade association to the relief efforts. Many contractors brought specialty skills to the recovery. Among them was William “Billy” Harris of Rockland County, who eventually directed debris transport from Ground Zero to the Staten Island Fresh Kills Landfill via heavy duty dump trucks and marine barges.

“I think more than any other industry, construction contractors and workers realize the enormity of the task at hand,” Mr. Pepe added at the time. “We understand the magnitude of what it takes to create such magnificent structures. Everyone in our industry has a deep and new-found appreciation of the Iron Workers, Operating Engineers, the Laborers, the Teamsters and other union workers at the site. Through TV and newspaper photos, the world watched these guys doing a job that nobody would ever want to do.”

Editor’s note: this article is reprinted and slightly revised from Sept. 2001 edition of CONSTRUCTION NEWS.