May, 2002

 

After weeks of tense negotiations and bureaucratic roadblocks, we were finally allowed to film the government-funded investigative team studying the precise reasons for the collapse of the Twin Towers.  The investigation had been ongoing for about a month  since the attack, and we were losing valuable time if we were truly meant to track the team’s progress and discoveries.  With clearances finally in hand, we left on a beautiful clear day to film at Ground Zero and at a scrap yard in New Jersey.  The scrap yard is where the steel from Ground Zero is taken and then cut into two-to-three-foot blocks for shipping to “re-smelters” overseas.  When I asked what this meant, I was told that one day soon, the World Trade Center would come back to America, only this time, we would be driving it or sipping a Coke from it or screwing it into a wall.  Recycled World Trade Center metal.  Wow!  The knowledge was somehow arresting, as if all this mangled steel now piled into mini-mountains next to the Hudson was actually the bones of a deceased loved one being picked over by vultures.

 

More disturbing, there was no visual relationship between these huge metal mounds and the once-famous New York skyline landmark that has made so many cameo appearances in movies, television programs and print ads; nothing that would let a casual observer know what the piles had been and what had happened to them.  Later that day, we went to Ground Zero, and I was again struck by the anonymity of it all.  There was not a discernable piece of furniture anywhere.  No computers or books or anything that would identify this massive wreckage field as having once been several million square feet of office space.  There was only steel of various lengths and thicknesses twisted into bizarre, pretzel-like shapes and an interlacing gray-brown matter enveloping everything.  I didn’t need anyone to tell me that that gray-brown matter was the contents and insides of the World Trade Center vaporized by the collapse.

 

The difficulty with finding any reliable information in all this mess seemed daunting.  Yet watching the American Society of Civil Engineers investigative team scour the debris fields, gathering samples or measuring and photographing steel fragments, was impressive.  These forensic engineers were looking for pieces of steel from areas of the buildings where the planes had hit.  When I asked how on earth they could know where a piece of steel actually resided in two 110-story buildings that were now just countless tons of rubble, I was shown numbers etched on the surface of a beam.  The builders of the Twin Towers had marked every piece of steel as to its floor and exact location in the buildings.  Like good crime detectives, these engineers came to the scene knowing what to look for, and over the next several months they found all the evidence they needed.

 

The NOVA program I helped produce is the first official public presentation of the results of this unprecedented investigation.  The investigation by the American Society of Civil Engineers was commissioned by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), and the fully written report, called a Building Performance Study, was released May 1, 2002.

 

Larry Klein

Producer