Archives: From Floor 91 of the South Tower to an 'Avalanche'

September 13, 2001

From Floor 91 of the South Tower to an 'Avalanche'

When I called home around 11 a.m. Wednesday morning, I
was surprised that the answering machine didn’t pick
up. Instead, it was my father, who had passed on a day
at the office – in White Plains, New York - because
of a 45-minute wait at the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Early Wednesday, the Tappan Zee was the only bridge or
tunnel open across the Hudson. The Lincoln and Holland
tunnels were closed, and at the time of this call, the
George Washington Bridge had just opened its upper
level. In a sense, everything shut down as New York
City picked through the pieces of Tuesday’s
terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

That attack’s death toll is expected to be in the
thousands. Survivors have been pulled from the rubble
– 7 were found Wednesday, and 5 firefighters were
found in a buried SUV Thursday – but the grim
figures filling television news tickers today loom larger. New
York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said 4,763 people were
unaccounted for and the Medical Examiner's office
sought to increase its stock of body bags to 11,000.
The news from home – about 10 miles from the George
Washington Bridge - is that a student who attended my
high school and hailed from my town, River Edge, New
Jersey, is dead.

My father wasn’t in the World Trade Center, but that
was only a matter of timing. For years, he had worked
on the 91st floor of the South Tower for a company
called Ebasco, as a part of an engineering and
construction-consulting group. He left that job
somewhere around 1986-1987 by our phone call
estimation.

Since I didn’t find Ebasco on a list of South Tower
tenants, I wondered if they had moved out of the World
Trade Center. My father indicated that a company
called Raytheon had purchased Ebasco after his
departure.

Raytheon, with business in defense, government and
commercial electronics as well as aviation, purchased
Ebasco in 1993. And it was Raytheon, reported USA
Today and many other media outlets, which occupied
floor 91 of the south tower, alongside an engineering
group, Gibbs & Hill.

At Raytheon’s web site, there was a message that
caused me to pause, somewhat shocked and stricken with
the grief we all sense in the wake of this tragedy –
yet also confused. “Raytheon Company has been
informed that four employees have perished in the national
tragedy of September 11. All four employees were
passengers on flights that crashed into the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.”

At first, my mind had turned towards the buildings –
110 story staples of the New York City skyline – and
the tremendous loss of life with their destruction. If
you were above the planes’ point of impact, as the
91st floor was, I reasoned there was no way out of the
death trap. But I never counted on a tenant of the
downed building sharing in the loss of 266 people
split between 4 hijacked airplanes. To suffer such a
loss goes beyond the path I traced from my father. It
is almost unthinkable.

As it turns out, Raytheon wasn’t technically even a
tenant.

“Actually, it was misreported that we still have
offices in the World Trade Center. We don’t,” said
spokesperson David Polk. “We formerly had a
subsidiary (Raytheon Engineers & Constructors), that subsidiary
had offices in the World Trade Center. We divested
that business over a year ago.”

Raytheon’s former engineering and construction
subsidiary, RE&C, was sold to the Boise, Id.-based
Washington Group International, Inc., in July of 2000.

This is where it gets dizzying.

In early May 2001, the Securities and Exchange
Commission launched an investigation into whether
Raytheon misrepresented the financial status of RE&C.

On May 14, Washington Group International, Inc., and
some of its subsidiaries, filed petitions to
restructure under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

In early August, WGI announced it would seek
authorization from the US Bankruptcy Court to reject
the Stock Purchase Agreement related to the July 2000
acquisition. “We are not asking the Court to unwind
the Purchase Agreement and give the business back to
Raytheon,” explained WGI CEO Stephen G. Hanks in a
press release. “It is our belief that it is not in
the best interest of the company to be burdened by the
obligations contained in this agreement on a
going-forward basis … When we purchased RE&C, we
acquired thousands of talented and hard-working
employees and an operational structure that, if well
managed, will be very successful.”

Last Thursday, court approval authorized Washington to
reject the stock purchase agreement. Raytheon
countered that move, filing a proof of claim to
recover more than $900 million in damages against WGI.

At the heart of this conflict, RE&C strikes me as a
part of my father’s work life lineage – I’m
wondering, hoping, praying that those folks made their way out
safely. But I am also filled with doubt – I pick up
the receiver, with heavy qualms, and call to Boise.

“We actually had 180 employees in our office on the
91st floor of tower two and as of 5 o’clock
yesterday, 90 percent of them have been accounted for,”
said WGI spokesperson Katrina Puett. “Our crisis
management team is in close contact with those
employees who were in the office that morning and the
families of those who are unaccounted for.”

Puett spoke of an eyewitness account stating that
RE&C’s office was evacuated before the second plane
hit the South Tower.

“He said … they were in tower and we could feel
the building shake (from the first plane striking the
North Tower, 8:45 a.m. EST) and we needed very little
convincing to evacuate,” said Puett.

The Idaho Statesman even mentioned a WGI employee being a block away from the towers by the time that
second plane (9:03 a.m. EST) struck their building.

When that happened, my friend Serko was still in the
building. He was in the process of descending the
stairwell from his 44th floor Morgan Stanley office,
about 20 stories down. Power was cut almost
immediately and he fled the building with co-workers,
eventually making his way to the Brooklyn Bridge. That
is where he witnessed his building collapse, producing
a billowing cloud of smoke and debris, a cloud that
eventually encased everything where they stood.

I had a best friend in that South Tower and I am
unbelievably grateful that he is alive. My father used
to work there, as did the employees of RE&C.

Another friend, Jeremy Battles, was two blocks east
when the south tower collapsed – I talked to him
today. His memories convey sheer horror.

“What you see on tv, the huge dust and smoke coming
at you at 30,40 miles per hour with debris and glass
everything flying in it … that’s what we saw,”
he told me. “We ran straight east down John Street at full
speed and it almost caught us. By making a left, we
avoided getting hit.

“We avoided that by a couple seconds by making that
left turn because it was rushing down the street, it
was like an avalanche coming down John Street.”