As a manager in Gilbane Building Co.’s Catastrophic Response division, Kevin D’Angiolillo has witnessed buildings devastated by floods, fires and explosions.
But what he saw when he reported to work Sept. 21, at an office building just a block from the site of the World Trade Center, was an assault on the senses.
"The hardest thing to comprehend was how there could be no discernible elements of a building left, other than steel," D’Angiolillo said. "No computer equipment, no furniture, nothing. It was just dust, granular, like sand."
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
Over the past decade, Providence-based Gilbane – among the largest commercial construction firms in the country – has carved out a small niche providing building expertise to insurance firms whose property has been hit by disaster. In the immediate days after terrorists flew commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center towers, several such calls began trickling in to Gilbane’s small office in Lawrenceville, N.J., which is home to its "Cat" Response unit.
Within a week, Gilbane had pulled together a team of nearly a dozen high-level project managers, superintendents and structural engineers from offices around the country. Their assignment: to assess the aftermath and oversee rebuilding efforts at 12 buildings near Ground Zero that had been damaged by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.
Most team members are still there.
The properties range from a 50-story, two-million-square-foot office building adjacent to the World Trade Center site to a four-story retail store a few blocks away. In all, Gilbane has monitored rebuilding efforts at a combined 5 million square feet of office and retail space in lower Manhattan.
Gilbane officials, bound by confidentiality agreements with clients, declined to specify the buildings during interviews. Though some rebuilding jobs are complete, others will continue at least through the end of the year, and Gilbane still has eight managers stationed in Manhattan to see the projects through.
Scott Eckartz, a project manager in Gilbane’s Atlanta office, is one of them. Just days after Sept. 11, Eckartz received an e-mail message from Gilbane CEO Paul J. Choquette, Jr., letting employees know that the company would be sending some workers to the World Trade Center site.
Eckartz, who in the past has made missionary trips to Africa, Panama and Honduras, had already been contemplating the trek to Manhattan on his own, hoping to somehow volunteer his construction skills. He fired back an affirmative e-mail response immediately.
"My wife and I had talked about it and prayed about it, and at that point in time it became a spiritual thing for me," said Eckartz, who also has three kids.
He picked up and moved to Manhattan, joining nearly a dozen other Gilbane employees at a Marriott in midtown, where they stayed for about five months until moving in February to a condominium in Battery Park City.
The team members have served as hands-on consultants to insurers in their attempt to peg accurate reconstruction costs and make sure jobs are done effectively and cost efficiently.
During the first several weeks, the Gilbane managers assessed exterior walls, floor slabs and mechanical systems, providing a detailed assessment of the cost, scope and timetable for the work to be done on each building. For the past several months, they have tediously monitored the construction work.
In the two-million-square-foot office building that stands adjacent to the World Trade Center site, roughly 5 percent of the building was sheared off when debris from the north tower crashed down on top of one section.
In other portions of the same building, the thick cloud of pressurized ashen dust created by the tower’s collapse caused windows to implode. Dust and debris penetrated as far as 100 feet into the building, enveloping everything with a toxic coating of granular residue.
Although most of the building remained structurally sound, everything on the floors that faced the Trade Center site – furniture, carpeting, ceiling tiles, windows, drywall – had to be removed and replaced.
For a few of the buildings, D’Angiolillo said Gilbane devised multiple rebuilding proposals to present to clients.
"We ran various scenarios on some buildings, providing detailed documentation of the repairs necessary to get the building back into shape," D’Angiolillo said. "Each plan was assigned a dollar value and provided to the insurance company to give them an idea of their options."
Eckartz recalled the eerie scene inside one office building his first day on the job, in late September. Computer screens glowed in front of empty desks. Inside a corporate workout room, the red lights on a treadmill’s console were still flashing dimly through a thin layer of debris.
"The people just kept coming to my mind constantly," Eckartz said. "What did those people go through?"
Yet, there was another reaction: "Seeing the extent of the damage, I thought ‘we’re gonna be here for years trying to put this thing back together.’"
At another building Gilbane surveyed, a 20,000-square-foot retail clothing store a few blocks from Ground Zero, a piece of one of the Boeing 767 airplanes had crashed through the roof and tore through several floors, rupturing pipes and fire sprinklers. Water ran for several days, causing extensive flooding before firefighters finally made their way to the site.
After the first few 60-to-70-hour weeks on the job, D’Angiolillo said the Gilbane employees grew more accustomed to the extensive devastation, the emotionally charged atmosphere, the drum-tight security. But, because their arrivals were staggered, each came to terms with the experience uniquely.
"There was such a huge emotional impact, it was hard coming to grips with what had actually happened," D’Angiolillo said. "We had a big guy from New England working with us, a Vietnam vet, and he just wasn’t himself for a long time."
Eckartz said the personal relationships he has forged by spending months working and living alongside his colleagues – many of whom had been complete strangers – have been one of the most rewarding aspects of his time spent in lower Manhattan.
"The first time you took somebody down to the site, you’d see a side of people that I guarantee you would never see on any other construction project," he said.
