Section 19.2. The World Trade Center Recovery Effort

19.2. The World Trade Center Recovery Effort

R. Blair Smith's dinner party in 1952 helped catalyze a shift in culture among the business computing community, but it still took two years before it manifested in a concrete project. The terrorist attacks on the morning of September 11, 2001 caused a far more immediate and visceral transformation. The collapse of the World Trade Center not only killed 3,000 people, it also brought fear and uncertainty to the entire United States. Nobody knew who was responsible, how it had happened, or worst of all, what to expect next. The only thing we knew was that there had been an attack and that our lives would never be the same.

That was all the residents of New York needed to know. As soon as the towers collapsed, those who were at the site began a concerted rescue and recovery effort. The impulse to help after such a horrific tragedy was not surprising, but the collaborative process that emerged from this initial impulse was remarkable. William Langewiesche, a correspondent for The Atlantic, was on hand from the beginning, and in his book, American Ground, he described the intense motivation shared among those who participated in the recovery:

Throughout the winter and into the spring the workers rarely forgot the original act of aggression, or the fact that nearly 3,000 people had died there, including the friends and relatives of some who were toiling in the debris. They were reminded of this constantly, not only by the frequent discovery of human remains, and the somber visits from grieving families, but also by the emotional response of America as a whole, and the powerful new iconography that was associated with the disasterthese New York firemen as tragic heroes, these skeletal walls, these smoking ruins as America's hallowed ground. Whether correctly or not, the workers believed that an important piece of history was playing out, and they wanted to participate in itoften fervently, and past the point of fatigue. From the start that was the norm (Langewiesche, 9).

The recovery effort consisted of two parts: recovering the remains of the dead, and restoring the site. This latter task was literally and figuratively enormous. Each tower had stood 110 stories high, almost a quarter of a mile each. The collapse had created a 1.5-million-ton labyrinth of steel and concrete over 17 acres, with hazards hidden everywhere. The six-story-deep foundation and the entire New York subway system was in danger of being flooded by the Hudson River, thanks to a damaged subway tube and a fragile slurry wall protecting the foundation. Most dangerous of all was the underground chiller plant, which had cooled all of the buildings and which the collapse had rendered inaccessible. The plant contained 168,000 gallons of freon, and nobody knew the status of that gas. If the freon containers had somehow survived the collapse and if the workers inadvertently damaged it in the recovery process, the gas would immediately escape, displacing the air and suffocating those working underground. Additionally, if that gas caught fire, it would become a mustard gas-like chemical that would pose a threat to the entire city. As if navigating through the wreckage carefully for their own safety and the safety of the city weren't enough, the workers also had to sift through it carefully for remains of the victims and for potential evidence that could shed light on the tragedy.

Thousands of volunteers had converged onto the scene immediately following the attacks, looking to help in whatever way they could. However, those volunteers could do little, and after the first few days, the vast majority of them were turned away. The only volunteers who were allowed to stay were members of the Red Cross and Salvation Army who fed the workers. The recovery effort required expertise and plenty of heavy machinery. There were national and city plans for responding to disasters of all sorts, including terrorism, that prescribed the procedures and hierarchies for requisitioning the necessary resources. However, those organizational charts were scrapped, and the plans were never executed. Langewiesche explained:

The problems that had to be solved were largely unprecedented. Action and invention were required on every level, often with no need or possibility of asking permission. As a result, within the vital new culture that grew up at the Trade Center site even the lowliest laborers and firemen were given power. Many of them rose to it, and some of them sank. Among those who gained the greatest influence were people without previous rank who discovered balance and ability within themselves, and who in turn were discovered by others (Langewiesche, 11).

Kenneth Holden and Michael Burton, top officials of New York's Department of Design and Construction (DDC), quickly emerged as the leaders of the recovery effort. The afternoon following the collapse, the two met and started enlisting resources within the DDC to help with the rescue effort. Langewiesche wrote:

Holden and Burton responded tactically, with no grand strategy in mind. At the police headquarters they discovered a telephone in a room off the temporary command centera chaotic hall filled with officials struggling to get organizedand they began making calls. No one asked them to do this, or told them to stop. One of the deputy mayors there had formally been given the task of coordinating the construction response, but with little idea of how to proceed, he had so far done nothing at all. Holden and Burton themselves were operating blind, groping forward through the afternoon with only the vaguest concept of the realities on the ground. The DDC's previous experience with emergencies had been limited to a sinking EMS station in Brooklyn, caused by a water-main break, and a structural failure at Yankee Stadium, one week before baseball's opening day (Langewiesche, 88).

The fire and police departments and other government agencies were also frantically coordinating their own efforts, with little communication between each group. It was clear that these groups could not continue working in isolation, and that a collaborative process would be in order. However, the city decided to scrap its emergency response plan in favor of the process that was already emerging. At that point, the DDC had already bypassed the standard emergency response procedure, and Holden and Burton had already in many ways taken charge of the effort. The city made it official, giving the DDC, the fire department, and the police department joint control over the cleanup effort.

As with the PACT project, neutral territory played an important role in defusing traditional politics and allowing new roles to emerge. Burton commandeered a kindergarten classroom at a nearby school and held twice-daily meetings there. Because of the urgency of their task, they did not keep minutes or write memos. Those meetings were the primary nexus of communication, and everyone involvedabout 20 government agencies and several contractorshad representatives there. Recording devices were banned to encourage participants to voice their opinions freely. According to Langewiesche, "Some of the participants were accomplished people with impressive resumes, but within the inner world of the Trade Center site it hardly mattered what they had done before. However temporarily, there was a new social contract here, which everyone seemed to understand. All that counted about anyone was what that person could provide now" (Langewiesche, 113).

The recovery effort was largely complete after six months, although it did not officially end until a few months later. The entire 1.5 million tons of wreckage had been properly examined and transported to a landfill on Staten Island. The site was no longer hazardous, and the city was ready to build something new. Incredibly, despite all of the dangers, not a single person died during the recovery process.

Comparing the World Trade Center recovery to free and open source projects may seem far-fetched at first, but there are important similarities. For instance, most of the recovery effort workers were financially compensated, although the plan for doing so was not predetermined. Once the recovery process became apparent, city officials made sure the appropriate people were paid. Similarly, writing software requires tremendous expertise, and for a project to be sustainable, it must be able to retain its experts. With free and open source projects, the methods of compensation are not always explicit, nor are they always monetary, but they are there.

The most evident pattern from the World Trade Center recovery was an orientation among participants toward action. In the free and open source software community, there is a common saying: "scratch your own itch." That attitude also pervaded the recovery effort. No one waited for instructions from above. People simply did what had to be done. At the same time, the recovery effort was not devoid of process. Not only were the participants action oriented, but they also were well coordinated, thanks to the twice-daily meetings and culture of openness. Similarly, successful free and open source projects employ effective and open lines of communication and coordination.