00:009-11 was a Tuesday morning.
00:02There was a major incident in Lower Manhattan.
00:04A twin engine, not quite an airliner.
00:06People rushed by my desk saying a plane hit the World Trade Center.
00:11I come out of the subway and a whole crowd of people are looking south with their heads raised to
00:22the sky.
00:22All of a sudden somebody yelled, there it goes, and the building started collapsing.
00:27Everybody broke down in tears on the roof.
00:28It was quite an emotional experience.
00:31I understood that engineers had a role, that we could provide expertise that'll help to keep people safe.
00:38The Structural Engineers Association of New York was organizing, and they wanted to volunteer their services.
00:46We just marched all the way down to the site.
00:49You had the intent of looking for people.
00:52I think everything that was not still had been pulverized.
00:55Someone came up to me and said they're digging there with a backhoe, trying to clear out debris, but the
01:01subway tunnel's immediately below that.
01:03And if they puncture that tunnel, groundwater will rush in, and it will fill the entire New York City subway
01:11system.
01:11We assigned Sione teams to each of those quadrants, you know, whether they could move a particular piece of equipment
01:19into this specific location, whether the rubble seemed stable, whether, you know, there was a better way to tie something
01:28off.
01:28After 9-11, within a few weeks, started the most extensive investigation of any towers collapses or structural collapses ever.
01:40I think it's important to keep the memory of all these events alive because there's so much to learn from
01:47them.
01:47The exact reason to tell this story now is because there were generations of people who have no idea that
01:55this occurred, that there was a group of structural engineers who stood up and put their health on the line
02:04in many cases and contributed to this collective effort to help New York City when the city needed us.
02:14For more information, visit www.fema.org
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