Finding Hope in the Ruins

Like so many Americans, Hassan Astaneh sat glued to his TV, shocked, as the twin towers burned. Unlike most viewers, he almost immediately sensed a bigger disaster looming.

“I realized the intensity of the fire was really bad when I saw the fire was that white and yellow. I told my wife, ‘That’s not looking good,’ ” the Berkeley civil engineering professor recalled.

“When it collapsed in front of my eyes, I knew I would be involved.”

The soft-spoken Iranian American is one of the nation’s leading experts on structural steel. Today he finds himself a key part of the disaster’s engineering post-mortem, one of only four engineers nationwide armed with emergency grants from the National Science Foundation to study the disaster and its immediate aftermath.

He also finds himself in a painful position--a Muslim angry that his fellow Middle Easterners could cause so much death, an American citizen repeatedly interrogated by federal agents as he tries to keep it from happening again.

He searches the twisted wreckage for clues that could help engineers understand exactly what caused the towers to collapse. More than that, he is determined to use the information to find ways to design safer--and even bombproof--buildings.

“We have to know what happened here,” he said. “It’s like doing an autopsy.”

Astaneh, 53, started his professional life as a civil engineer in Iran. He headed a construction firm for 10 years during the oil boom of the 1970s. In 1982, as the economy soured, he headed to the United States in search of more education. The PhD he earned led to an academic job at the University of Oklahoma and then to Berkeley.

There, Astaneh made his name in the field of seismic engineering, particularly with high-profile work on the safety of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

But the 1995 terrorist attack in Oklahoma City propelled his career in a new direction. When a bomb rocked the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building, Astaneh felt a personal blow. Years earlier, on the building’s seventh floor, he had had his first citizenship interview.

“That was my Ellis Island,” he said. “Every immigrant remembers that day.”

The tragedy sent him back to the engineering literature, seeking ways to protect buildings from bombs. This summer, he began using Berkeley’s cavernous engineering labs to test innovative blast protection techniques.

Then came Sept. 11.

Now, Astaneh crisscrosses the country, trying to keep up with his teaching duties at Berkeley while spending every available minute in New York gingerly picking through more than 300,000 tons of crushed steel.

It is a race to find clues, sometimes frustratingly subtle, before the wreckage is hauled away, its valuable steel recycled.

Engineers believe they understand the broad outlines of what happened that horrible day: The intense heat of fires fed by jet fuel softened the steel columns supporting the building and led to a progressive collapse of all the floors.

But they are far from understanding the details. How much damage was caused by the airplanes? How long did the fireproofing material last? What role did the floor supports play? How hot were the fires? How did they spread? How long did the columns survive?

“It’s really a building performance study,” said Ron Hamburger, a member of an American Society of Civil Engineers disaster response team that is also studying the collapse. The answers are not easy to find. What engineers face is a hodgepodge of twisted steel--some damaged by the planes, some damaged by flames and some pulverized as it crashed to the ground.

“It’s a forensic study, and the engineering profession must do it,” said Priscilla Nelson, director of the National Science Foundation’s division of civil and mechanical systems. “If you understand how the building performed, you can understand how to improve performance.”

Not everyone believes that building performance can be greatly improved. The actions that took out the World Trade Center were so damaging and unexpected that many engineers have said there was no way to protect against them. Bomb-proofing buildings, they argue, would be too expensive, and would allow only forbidding cave-like structures.

Nonsense, says Astaneh. “Are you going to say, ‘If the Sears Tower is attacked, there’s nothing we can do. It’s too bad’? “ Cost-effective ways exist to build stronger buildings and to retrofit the buildings already occupied, he says.

This summer, in a three-story engineering lab on the Berkeley campus, Astaneh began testing clever technologies that could help buildings withstand even massive blasts. Using a full-scale replica of the first floor of a federal courthouse soon to be constructed in Seattle, Astaneh’s team simulated the effects of a blast by removing one of the steel columns supporting the floor and applying 190,000 pounds of pressure.

After a thunderous roar, as bolts popped from the structure and the concrete floor dipped, the test proved a success. The concrete floor had sagged about two feet but held. People would not have been crushed between floors.

The secret: lengths of steel cabling of the type that holds up suspension bridges had been placed in the floors before the concrete had been poured. Even though the concrete shattered, the cables held it in place. Astaneh was so confident in the technology, he held interviews while standing beneath the crushing load.

If the concrete Murrah building--which Astaneh calls “a house of cards”--had contained such technology, he believes, most lives could have been saved.

The engineer also is developing and testing a new shear wall, lightweight concrete bolted to steel, that can absorb much of a bomb’s blast. In tests using extreme force, the concrete crumbled, but columns holding up the building held.

Such technology, Astaneh estimates, would add just 1% to 2% to construction costs and could help buildings withstand major earthquakes and bomb blasts. Such strong shear walls, he said, could prevent planes from entering and delivering massive amounts of fuel into tall buildings as they did at the World Trade Center.

Engineers with the General Services Administration, the agency that oversees construction of federal buildings, and many in the private sector have expressed interest in the technologies. If the development of new engineering techniques for seismic protection are any guideline, the new ideas could find their way into construction within a few years, Astaneh said.

Giving up on trying to fortify buildings, he said, is not the American way. It is certainly not the way of engineers, who like nothing more than solving problems.

“In engineering,” he said, “there is nothing you cannot do.”

First, however, you need evidence--the facts that will allow engineers to produce accurate models of how buildings react under extreme stress.

Astaneh got his first break the night he arrived in New York. He was staying at the TriBeCa Grand Hotel, one mile from the site of the twin towers and within the restricted zone. He looked out his window around midnight and saw flatbed trucks parked outside, loaded with wrecked steel.

“I said, ‘My God, this is what I need!’ ” he recalled. He worked into the night, examining the steel.

The information from the beams nearly slipped from the hands of engineers, since the steel was being prepped for recycling and export. Astaneh, undaunted, called one of the recycling firms and got invited over.

Now, clad in a hard hat and gas mask, he is practically a fixture on the site. Finding the pieces that could help the probe is not easy.

“It takes a trained eye,” said Bob Kelman, a senior vice president for Hugo Neu Schnitzer East, a steel recycling firm. “Dr. Astaneh is looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“All the steel you look at is twisted,” Astaneh said. “Ninety-nine percent of the twisting is not important.”

Of the 50,000 tons of steel Astaneh has combed, he’s only found a few pieces of what he terms “gold”--material that offers direct testimony about what occurred.

One is a steel column with a half circle cut from it. This, says Astaneh, is where one of the plane’s engines, or the fuselage, cut through. Confirming his theory, he found a piece of a hydraulic pump from the plane inside the column.

The column remained upright and did not buckle after the plane hit--proof, says Astaneh, that the initial impact of the plane caused relatively little damage.

Until the Berkeley term ends, Astaneh can’t remain on site full time. Instead, he has trained ironworkers to photograph all steel that is recycled and to set aside any interesting pieces. “Those are my research team members,” he said.

By January, when he will take a sabbatical from Berkeley to devote all of his time to the World Trade Center, Astaneh hopes to have accumulated enough evidence to validate computer models that can describe what happened to the building. Engineers will use the models to simulate the disaster and try to pinpoint the buildings’ weakest and strongest points.

Astaneh, outspoken yet affable, has raised some hackles with his blunt views--including his insistence, long before Sept. 11, on raising the issue of terrorism as a potential threat to buildings. He also has raised some eyebrows among fellow engineers with frequent appearances in the media. But outlets from PBS to MSNBC keep turning to Astaneh for his lucid explanations.

He is also known for his unabashed patriotism, something that could seem out of place in the days before Sept. 11.

His office features an oil painting of a soaring bald eagle on the wall over his desk. It was painted by Astaneh in 1993. There is a flag pin on his blazer and underneath, a red, white and blue ribbon pinned to his shirt. There is a flag on his office door and two more on his office walls. Astaneh is a man deeply in love with America.

He and his wife came to this country with one suitcase. (The airline lost the other one.) “You come here and this country gives you everything. Now, I am a tenured professor at the best university in the world,” he said. “What else can one want?”

His current task, walking amid the wreckage of the trade center, has been grueling. But it is particularly hard for someone with Middle Eastern features--a Muslim with a distinctly Arabic last name. He has been interrogated “many, many times by many, many agents” of the FBI, including one session for which he was abruptly pulled from his hotel shower, he said. He sees how nervous flight attendants become when they see his full name, Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, on his boarding pass.

“It is hard now, being an immigrant,” he said. “Being a Muslim is very hard.”

Still, he doesn’t complain. “Here is someone with an Arabic name, born in Iran, walking around ground zero,” he said. “I haven’t had unnecessary interrogation.”

When he first came to America and landed in New York, Astaneh admired the World Trade Center from afar. The towers have long been lauded by engineers for their structural design. The buildings were crafted of closely spaced columns on the exterior, a kind of tubular exoskeleton that gave the towers their strength. Astaneh calls the design “nearly perfect.”

He is impressed, as are many other engineers, that the buildings stood as long as they did when hit by the intense fires. The fact that they stood, one for about an hour, one for nearly two after the planes hit, meant tens of thousands of lives were saved, Astaneh said.

Structural engineers don’t get the name recognition or glory of architects. They usually stay behind the scenes. But these experts in steel and construction are now emerging from the shadow of the World Trade Center disaster. Many who design and build the world’s skyscrapers take the terrorist attack almost personally. “It’s your product, and they used it to kill people,” Astaneh said. “We want to make it right somehow. Make the next buildings stronger.”