Journalist Documents Journey From Ruin to Recovery at Ground Zero

William Langewiesche was in Europe writing a meticulously reported narrative about the crash of Egypt Air Flight 990 when his editor at the Atlantic Monthly called. Turn on the TV, he said.

The World Trade Center had been hit. The United States was under attack.

Langewiesche was on the first plane headed for New York. He turned the Egypt Air piece around in three days, after grappling with it for six months. (It later won the prestigious 2002 National Magazine Award for reporting.) Langewiesche, a seasoned foreign correspondent who has spent time in the world’s hell holes reporting for the Atlantic, initially didn’t know if the story was in Afghanistan or New York. Ground zero was preferable, but to get that story, he needed unfettered access to the site. He went to the police station where press credentials were distributed, but he didn’t feel comfortable in the herd of newspaper and TV reporters. Getting lumped in with them meant minimal access to the site.

He left the police station, figuring he was headed for Afghanistan. As he was walking away, he noticed a sign on the heavy equipment for the city Department of Design and Construction. On a whim, he faxed its commissioner a letter asking for access to the site.

It was granted. Langewiesche subsequently turned nine months of reporting at Ground zero into a three-part series for the Atlantic about the psychology of the site. The second installment of “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center” arrived at newsstands Tuesday.

This series, which will be turned into a book, is an extraordinary feat of journalism. Langewiesche chronicles the painstaking cleanup process and the unexpected figures who became leaders there. He spent every day at the site for six months, living in a dingy hotel in Greenwich Village; the last three months he visited it occasionally. He had access to private meetings, people and paperwork.

“I’m not a photographer, and I’m not even a daily newspaper writer,” says Langewiesche. “Going in one time meant nothing. During the [initial] walk I took there, it was very obvious to me that the volunteer efforts underway ... were of no particular help to the situation, as much as they were heartfelt. It was obvious to me that heavy equipment was the story.”

Even for someone who has established a reputation for exhaustively researched narratives, this one rises to a new level. With excruciating detail, Langewiesche deconstructs the site and the cleanup. In one account, he describes the PATH system (a commuter line from New Jersey) and the possibility that the destruction of the World Trader Center, which sat above one of the train stations, could have led to flooding of much of the city’s subway system. He takes readers underground as he accompanies a crew through a treacherous obstacle course to see if Freon is leaking into the city.

Throughout, Langewiesche’s superb writing is evident: “For 30 years the Twin Towers had stood above the streets as all tall buildings do, as a bomb of sorts, a repository for the prodigious energy originally required to raise so much weight so high,” Langewiesche writes. “Now, in a single morning, in twin 10-second pulses, the towers released that energy back into New York.”

Part Two, “The Rush to Recover,” describes the early weeks and people who took over the cleanup and recovery. The final installment, “The Dance of Dinosaurs,” examines the conflicts that erupted and the effect of the word “hero.” It’s due to hit newsstands in mid-September.

Tara Weiss is a reporter for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.