

A netherworld of compressed debris, gloom

Little left intact in levels below trade center site





E-mail this story

Printer-friendly format

Search archives



New York Times News Service





NEW YORK -- A descent beneath the World Trade Center is a passage into a grotesque landscape of stalagmites formed by dripping metal, entire office floors compressed into a space of 6 inches, and train cars smashed all the way down to the tracks by collapsed concrete ceilings.



The trade center's basement was once a six-level shopping center, parking ramp and underground train terminal spreading over more than 2 million square feet. Now it has become a place where the horror of the aboveground devastation is amplified by the gloom of the debris-strewn, claustrophobic space--a hazy darkness pierced only by flashlights and an occasional crater that lets dim sunlight filter through from above.















A rare journey to the bottom of the trade center's basement this week revealed a few places with only superficial damage, like the Commuter's Cafe, five levels below the trade center's plaza, where dust-encrusted bottles of liquor sit on the shelves.



Smoldering wreckage



But most of the basement has become an underground quagmire where muddy pools of water, cinder blocks, travertine facing from collapsed walls and half-melted ventilation ducts spread crazily over floors that end suddenly, at sheer drops into the darkness. The confined air is acrid because of the fine dust that is everywhere and the fires that continue to burn deep in the debris.



"It's still cooking," said Thomas O'Connor, who manages the construction and engineering work at the site for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the buildings and arranged for the tour through the basement.



In the days after the collapse of the towers two months ago, the tangled steel was still so hot that it glowed like charcoal briquettes in the unlighted basement, O'Connor said, adding, "For seven weeks it was surreal down here."



Now, it has become the unreal city of T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land," a place where dread lurks in the shadows and terrible things emerge by gleam of light. Even so, it is a city that the construction crews removing the debris have come to understand, and as they continue clearing the site--for now, using grapplers, cranes and wrecking balls aboveground--they believe the site is structurally stable.



Like exploring a cave



In particular, the submerged wall, nicknamed the bathtub, that holds back the waters of the Hudson River seems to be sound.



The trip--which felt more like spelunking through caves or archeological ruins than touring an urban structure--began at the opening of a downward-sloping truck ramp on Barclay Street, one block north of the trade center site, where all freight was once delivered to the trade center.



Beginning at the site's northern boundary--at the western edge of the L-shaped 5 World Trade Center, which burned but did not collapse--the trip was constrained by several elements of the smashed topography created by the collapse of the twin towers.



To the west, a giant hole punched through the middle of the U.S. Customs House by falling debris from the north tower continues to the bottom of the basement. Steel beams dangle from the edges of the hole like ragged tapestry and form a wildly chaotic pile in the center. To the southwest is packed debris from the north tower itself, and to the south, many basement floors have been crushed by debris hurled from the south tower.



As solemn as it is, the passage below is not just a study in destruction. As respirators dangled from the necks of everyone else in the small group, John O'Connell, a rescue worker with the Fire Department, smoked a big cigar.



"It's my respirator, it's my oxygen indicator and it's my explosion indicator," O'Connell said. "The only problem, the explosion indicator, it works only once."



After a walk southward down the truck ramps and a dogleg right, to the west, the dancing flashlights illuminate the edge of the debris that fell nearly straight down through the north tower. At first the mind simply refuses to accept what the eyes see--the recognizable traces of 20 floors, much like geologic strata, over a 10-foot vertical span.



In one place, the steel decks of a half-dozen floors protrude like tattered wallpaper, almost touching where they are bent downward at the edge. "You're looking at roughly 60 feet of the building, smashed into about 3 feet," O'Connell said.



A 3-foot stalagmite of steel, which looks for all the world like a drip candle, sits next to one of the immense steel columns that held up the north face of the tower. The column has a sort of compound fracture--the top has been pushed a foot south of the piece it is resting on.



Spot frozen in time



Down two more floors to the mezzanine, and the Commuter's Cafe seems to wait for customers next to dozens of turnstiles and a partly smashed bank of escalators leading down to the train station. "Hey, Eddie, why don't you go sit on your regular stool?" someone yells in the darkness.



A few feet south of the cafe, the floor abruptly ends, as if something had bitten it off, but a stairway near the escalators leads down to the train station, at the bottom of the basement.



Among the sodden chaos of fallen steel and cracked walls, the ceiling slopes downward on the south end of the platform at about a 20-degree angle and ultimately meets the train tracks. Half a train car emerges from the nothingness between floor and ceiling and connects to a string of four more cars to the north.



Signs of evacuation



No one was killed here. But signs of a hasty evacuation are all around. An unopened 8-ounce can of Arizona Iced Tea sits upright on a bench at the center of the platform a few feet from the crushed car. A newspaper, just legible through a layer of fine dust, is opened to a Thomas L. Friedman column of Sept. 11. It is eerily titled "Walls."



Near a tear where the steel-reinforced guts are spilling out of the slumping ceiling, Ed Smith, a Port Authority police officer, says mournfully: "I poured that concrete out of high school."



On the way back up, the mottled and apparently charred wall of the bathtub appears in a few places. Construction crews are working to preserve the wall so that it can encircle any new buildings that rise at the site, as it did the trade towers, keeping out the Hudson River.



"From the fire and whatever else happened, it's been through hell," said Frank Lombardi, chief engineer at the Port Authority, pointing to part of the bathtub wall. But so far, he says, the wall is entirely stable.



The group emerges into the light like miners at the freight entrance. O'Connell is still smoking his cigar.



Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune

