A personal view of '9/11' and the results
3rd Degree Exclusive
Following the attacks on the World Trade Centre another battle was fought below Ground Zero. Armed with breathing respirators, inflatable dinghies, powerful flashlights and cameras, engineers inspected the damage. Among them was Perth resident, Bob Semple.
"On the wider picture there clearly is a problem with fundamentalist religious extremists of all types", says Bob Semple, an engineer who worked for Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers, and was heavily involved in the emergency cleanup of the World Trade Centre.
"You've got to ask yourself the philosophical question: 'Do you really want people in your country who do not fundamentally agree with the basics of how your country operates?'"
Bob Semple is worried, with good reason. He feels that the distinction between Iraq and terrorists has been blurred. He says that protection of the nation is being misused as an excuse to justify an erosion of civil liberties, and people like 'Jihad Jack' are taking the brunt of it.
"Human rights and basic freedoms on the one hand and the threat of people that want to enslave and basically control people on the other, how do you reconcile those two things?"
The first battle at Ground Zero was a human one. Determined to find survivors, firefighters requisitioned earth-moving equipment. Unknown to them, the largely intact surface slab, the six levels below ground, some 25 metres deep, had collapsed leaving an enormous underground cavity. The debris was actually supporting the surrounding slurry wall. Built beneath the level of the Hudson River a mere 100 metres away, the slurry wall the only thing preventing flooding of the entire New York City subway system. The slab could not support such heavy equipment.
Fights broke out amongst police and firefighters, both struggling for authority. Police knew of the potential double disaster, and struggled to stop them, jailing several firefighters. It was inconceivable there would be no survivors.
"There were no injured people, you either survived or you died, you couldn't even recover the bodies because the bodies were mangled in with all the debris, it was impossible," says Bob Semple.
A partner of MRCE, George Tamaro, had originally supervised the engineering of the slurry wall, and immediately went home and prepared himself for the call he knew was coming. The next day he found himself driven to the site by police cars, sirens blaring. The WTC is operated and owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, whose headquarters were destroyed. Knowing all records of the basement had been destroyed, George competently gathered documents he had at home and in storage.
"We became an emergency centre in the first few days and the weeks afterwards, a kind of command centre," said Bob who had politicians, media, military and emergency staff at his office for over a year,
"The immediate concern was to save lives, to try and recover bodies. We had groups of people who basically lived there for the first couple of weeks and worked around the clock going in at great personal hazard to themselves.
"They were making a map of what was down there, this information would come back to a group of us to figure out how to take this stuff apart without making it all collapse. Americans are incredibly proud of America and one thing that came through very strongly was the desire to repair this, the guys that went down there I think had virtually no regard for their own life, they weren't acting foolishly but they knew their life was in danger and it didn't deter them one bit"
Bob Semple says a crack appeared in the road above, signalling wall movement in the slab.
Emergency backfilling was performed in record time to support it. What if the slurry walls had collapsed? Wall Street would have shut for a while, the entire New York City subway for years, and economically the devastation would have been unimaginable. The slurry wall or 'the bathtub' ,as it was known, was literally the wall that saved Manhattan. People come to get their photo taken in front of it and to touch it.
Despite the shock of the attack, Bob remembers the focus of the team. Every single time a body was pulled out of the rubble, everyone stopped working. It was covered with the American Flag and an honour guard of firefighters and police lined the road the body travelled as it was taken off the site. Every single time. A tremendous amount of respect was shown. Bob felt it must have been toughest on the families that lost members, not really knowing whether people had died or not.
"On site you had a feeling of being somewhere special, you had a desire to treat it with respect. You knew thousands of people lost their lives there. The first two times I was there most of the debris was still there, and you knew the bulk of those people, those lives were in the rubble that you were walking through. There might be colleagues who suffer trauma, but I was tremendously helped in that I had a professional role, and you just click into place. We were doing our job.
"It looked like a bomb had hit. It's sobering to see massive steel girders just bent like they were straw. You look at that and realize the force involved. Some things were just staggering. One corner of one of the towers was still standing, like someone had cut a cake and removed the biggest portion. A bar ten stories up, all the mirrors and bottles still on the shelves, chairs and tables laid out. That was surreal"
Alarmed at the Bush Government and it's legacy since '9/11', two years later Bob moved back to Australia to be closer to family, and remarried his first wife. A Manhattanite for twenty years, he never considered himself American.
Originally British, Bob grew up with visible war damage in parts of England, and marvels that, excluding Pearl Harbour, Americans had never been attacked at home before.
"They felt invulnerable, the whole concept of being attacked on their own land was a tremendous shock to them. It was like the sun disappearing one day.
"it turned to anger and vengeance. That was the feeling. There was virtually no disagreement that America should punish whoever did this. There were some voices urging people to think why this had happened, but those voices were hardly heard. America is a country that believes in punishment, it's a far more violent society than we have here in Australia. I was caught up in that initially.
"They were immense times, you felt very much as if you were in the middle of the world, but then New Yorkers, that's their attitude. They are the middle of the world. Whether you want to be in the middle of the Universe when there's people out there looking for targets, I think I'd rather be off the radar screen in Perth"
