Audio: Tornadoes, Twin Towers, and Hurricanes: 20 Years of Urban Disaster Clean-up

Roughly every five years since 1992, the United States has experienced major urban destruction, both natural and man-made. Even before the shock has passed, dealing with trash and rubble is a critical part of post-disaster response. How do cities clean up?

Tornadoes, Twin Towers, and Hurricanes: 20 Years of Urban Disaster Clean-up

Trash Talk Lecture

Ben R. Turner, President of Phillips and Jordan, Inc., and Patrick McMullen, Executive Vice President, CFO, & Treasurer

This lecture explores how cities have managed urban waste streams following man-made and natural disasters over the past two decades. Speakers Ben R. Turner and Patrick McMullen have a unique perspective; they’ve been hired to manage the resulting debris at several major disaster sites in the US over the past 25 years. They will discuss the evolution and challenges of urban disaster debris management in the United States.

Miami was the largest metropolitan area to withstand the ill effects of a land-falling, Category 5 hurricane in modern times (Hurricane Andrew, 1992). More urban destruction followed with the destruction of Raleigh, North Carolina in 1996 (Hurricane Fran), the urban terrorist attack of 9/11/2001 on New York’s World Trade Center, the flood-borne devastation of New Orleans in 2005 (Hurricane Katrina), and the 2011 tornados that ripped through Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Joplin, Missouri.

Every disaster event creates unique debris management challenges. By drawing on knowledge gained from past experience and using—or developing from scratch—new technologies and techniques, modern debris stream management is an evolving process, improving with each iteration.

Recorded April 19, 2012

Transcript

0:00  
Good evening. Thank you for coming. My name is Pamela Gerardi and I'm director of external relations for the Peabody Museum. Welcome to our final talk in the Trash Talk series. Over the course of the series, we've explored many aspects of trash, its history, its growth, its spread the types, aspects of its nature, a problem or an opportunity removal methods. Tonight we explore the ultimate trash situation, disaster. When disaster strikes, whether manmade or natural news organizations fill our screens with images of debris fields, but focus our attention on the immediate aftermath, personal sorrow and loss and official grim determination to rebuild. It's something critical has to happen between loss and rebuilding. Someone has to deal with the debris, destroyed homes and personal belongings. Yes, but also trees, vehicles, animals, steel, concrete, asphalt, and especially dose and other types of toxic waste, and of course, forensic recovery. In large scale disasters, Katrina Joplin, Missouri or 911. This involves dozens of federal, state and local agencies, dozens of private contractors, thousands of individuals, millions of tons of debris and toxic waste. So how does this happen? Exactly? Tonight's speakers are Ben Turner president and J. Patrick McMullen vice president of the firm Phillips and Jordan. Phillips and Jordan is a general and specialty contractor that counts among its core activities, debris Management. That rather bland sounding sounding phrase, however, belies the scope and intensity of the work they're called on to do. For example, at the World Trade Center forensic recovery project, a 321 day project required over 1.7 million man hours processing up to 17,000 tons of debris each day. This job that they conducted, was actually honored by the Army Corps of Engineers as the 2002 contractor of the year. In this capacity, Jordan Phillips and Jordan has taken part in the debris management of numerous significant disasters in the past 20 years, including hurricanes Andrew, and Katrina and recently Joplin, Missouri, to tell us exactly what's involved in such an operation on such a scale. Please join me in welcoming Ben Turner and Patrick McMullen.

I've been asked to make one statement and that is to say that in dealing with images of disaster, all sorts of things may be built visible, but they have carefully excluded anything to do with human remains.

2:59  Ben Turner
Thank you, Pamela. And thanks for including us in this last of what I understand from Dr. Nagle has been a very exciting series of debris for you. My heart--For the past 20 years, Philips and Jordan has been involved in some of the most prolific events that this country has had the misfortune to experience. As Pamela said, from natural disasters resulting from tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wind blowing dirt, debris, rock slides, to the couple of manmade disasters, coal disaster down in Kentucky and of course of World Trade Center disaster, as senior managers Patrick and I have had the pleasure or misfortune of being at the center of the strategic planning and the execution for these debris recovery missions. This evening, we want to walk you through some case studies on a series of hurricanes and tornadoes. We're going to I'm gonna tell stories. That'll include lies and embellishments. Patrick will rehabilitate those at the end. And we'll give you some of the lessons we've learned from these. A trust we have is we know there's in any audience there's people who will eventually touch some of these and if we can impart any of the challenges and experiences we've had toward making more effective policy for dealing with these you'll see where policy gaps and a lot of what we do could have yielded a better outcome. Following these case studies, I'm going to show the World Trade Center event. It's a very unusual event. The others are similar in a lot of nature's in it is very unusual as you can expect. Our goal is to acquaint you with what goes on behind the scenes and what goes into the strategic planning and execution. First of all, I want to acquaint you some with Philips and Jordan and how we got into the disaster business. We're 60-plus-year, heavy civil contractor. Our roots are in Smoky Mountain regions of western North Carolina. We run a lot of yellow iron, we we run Caterpillar, bulldozers and Earthmovers all over the country. The tools and techniques that we've developed in those applications are the same tools and techniques that are in high demand during times of disaster recovery. That coupled with the fact we thrive on chaos. We're pioneers, we're the first people in on some of these larger projects. I want to show you both some things that we do, and some of the work that we've worked on. We're a coast to coast contractor. We work from Alaska to Puerto Rico. This picture taken right here, oh Dr. David Bronner, with the retirement systems of Alabama, we built the golf course for him. He said it hiring P &J is kind of like taking the chainsaw to a knife fight. We do a lot of utility work. We build highways, we build airports, we build railroads, we do locks and dams, we do canals, we did ports with the landfills, we did plant sites. This is Disney Celebration Village, we did the first three phases of it. We do a lot of resort work in the Florida area. While we don't build buildings, these are some of the more iconic things that that we worked on. This is Disney's Dolphin and Swan hotels. We stamped the guitar the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal Studios and we built Disney's Blizzard Beach Mountain for them. As I said earlier, we were involved in the largest golf construction project in the world. These are 18 golf courses built in seven cities simultaneously in 30 months for the state of Alabama. It was Robert Trent Jones, Sr.'s last significant work. We're an ice road trucker in Alaska. We run quarries in Florida and North Carolina. We've unfortunately been in the dredging business part of our life. In disasters we we cover all fronts. This is the the the brown you see here the dead and dying pine trees around Lake Arrowhead, California. We were hired by Southern Cal Edison to go into among these houses and take out trees the size of what you're looking at there to keep them from being fire hazards if they were to when they died if they fell into the powerlines--very exotic work, very hard work. Um, Hurricane Floyd produced a terrible field of animal carcasses of 400,000 pigs and over a million turkeys. That's marinating barbecue there and then we barbecue them once we get them marinated.

7:58  
This is a mine disaster that we did in Kentucky that happened in the year 2000. The latest manmade disaster was Tennessee TVA's Ash Pond dike failure in Tennessee. We took the ash to a landfill that we own and operate in the state of Alabama and disposed of it there. Now you can see it as residing in its proper formation in its proper place, well engineered, shouldn't leave that zip cut. Unfortunately, this is I-40 outside of our hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. Every few years, the mountains turn loose. You can see here the the lines up the side of where we're having to tie a mountain back. And the process of tying the mountain back is a series of drilling holes putting tendons in, all of this from aerial platforms have hung up several 100 feet above the interstate. Patrick's going to walk you through for the next few minutes the disasters that we've been involved in. Those we're going to profile and give you some overview of the terminologies that we use. So when I start giving you the case studies, they'll make little more sense to you.

9:14  
1992 Ben and I responded to Hurricane Andrew. I was, had just come to work for the company and Ben invited me to come along, didn't really assign me to do anything. He just let me observe. And from that first experience, as you can see, over the last 20 years, we've been involved in almost every major disaster in the United States. Each of those events or milestones in his in my life. Missed birthdays, missed anniversaries, they're long events, they're hard work. They're each uniquely complex. Since 1998, we have continuously responded to disaster in some form. They're not all up on the screen, obviously. Disaster response is a business. It operates, it's a multi billion dollar business on an annual basis. This is the National Hurricane conference in Orlando, Florida that took place about 45 days ago. Throughout that building, there's a variety of services. There's debris removal, you see our booth prominently in the front. There's engineers there that help plan and design the responses. There's ice and water people there. There's power people there. There's temporary housing people there, but it's a big business. As we go through each of the case studies today, they also share some similar attributes. The disaster response industry is very diverse, but we've picked several that are share some similar attributes. All of the projects we were involved in were federally funded. They all involve debris management is the primary scope of services. They were extreme oversight, high profile, multi jurisdictional, everyone was watching us. You had to get there quick, you had to get up to a peak response fast. There were unrealistic expectations of what would be done, how quick it would be done. There was a diverse scope, and every one of them they were complex, took a lot of money. Hurricane Katrina, we had $100 million on the street before we got paid. And as long hours, I've left home and certain times where I thought I'd be gone for a week, came back 90 days later for my first day off, and that's consistent with our entire workforce. All of the disasters have a similar cast of characters involved. The President declares a disaster declaration which makes public assistance grants available. FEMA administers those grants, the state emergency management agencies coordinate at the state level. The applicants or the impacted entities, the towns and cities are the, are the entities eligible for grants that have the need for the cleanup. In all of the instances we're showing, the Corps of Engineers was the contracting agency. The regulators. you soon learn and working for the government, it's a series of acronyms: defense contract audit agency, EPA, Department of Labor, small businesses administration and unfortunately the Department of Justice. There's a lot of fraud in this business. P & J was the contractor at risk to complete the work. And then we hired literally hundreds of subcontractors to help us finish the project who brought resources. No one company has the total resources to do this work. The process on these jobs of debris management begins with a waste characterization and planning the mission. Now, in the early stages of the timeline I showed you before and Hurricane Andrew, the focus was more on debris removal, and disposal. Over the years, the other steps of the process have become more refined and more sophisticated. We begin with segregating the waste and breaking it down into a variety of waste streams. We have to dispose of, we have to pick that waste up and take it where it needs to go. Depending upon the character of the waste, we have to in certain instances, we stage it before final disposal, we reduce it. There's a number of ways to do that: burning, grinding. We separate the recyclables to the extent it's cost effective and then finally you get rid of it. I'm going to give you some of the terminology that will come out through the discussion here. These are this is the lingo. This is the disaster lingo. Public right of way. Typically that's what's eligible for reimbursement for the grant. If it's in private property, insurance is supposed to respond to it.

13:57  
As I said, eligible debris is what can be picked up and that's both type and location of the debris. A cubic yard is how you get paid. Everything's measured by cubic yards. The government inspectors are instructed that a cubic yard is approximately a refrigerator, size of a refrigerator. A monitor is a government inspector who determines what's eligible what we can do. They score loads. Everything's hauled by a dump truck to a disposal site and they estimate what percentage full that dump truck is. A TDSR is a staging area, temporary staging area for debris. PPDR: in certain instances, for instance, in New Orleans, we were allowed to go on private property and help clean up. You need a right of entry to go on private property, that's basically a hold-harmless agreement by the property owner. Tiers. This--tiers refers to the number of layers of companies below our prime contract. Further you are away from us, the less likely you are to get paid. Locals: locals are in our term the locals are the businesses that are in the area of the disaster declaration C&D: a type of dirt, debris. Construction and Demolition debris. Most of the materials in your house would be considered C & D. Vegetative debris or trees, bushes, brush, things of that nature. Household hazardous waste are typically the things under your sink, your kitchen sink, your drain, know your your your stuff in your garage, propane tanks, paint, things of that nature. White goods are all of your appliances. Small motorized equipment, your motor, your lawn mowers, your weed eaters, your hedgers, things of that nature. ACM is asbestos. E-waste are your computers, your stereos, your TVs. Mixed debris is all of the above in one pile. Over the years, through lessons learned, there's there's basically two categories of contracting that takes place in disaster response. Post event means something happens and they need to rush out and hire someone, there's no plan. The scope of work is going to be specific to that event, it's going to be competitively bid driven primarily by price. And generally there's no planning. Over the years, the concept of the preposition contract has evolved, which says it makes more sense to vet someone's qualifications on a blue sky day, identify what you want the emergency response to look like, how you want to pay from it, set the qualifications for who you want to hire, take proposals, evaluate them on a best value and make an award. And then if something happens, that company will be activated. Most of the contracts that we're involved today are pre event contracts. It's the scope. It contemplates a bunch of different scenarios. It's not limited to one type of event. We usually have annual planning workshops with the emergency coordinator for the various entities that we're contracting with. And preposition contracts are issued at all levels. At the local level, at states for instance, with the DOT, departments of transportation and the federal levels with the typically the Corps of Engineers, EPA, and FEMA has some preposition contracts. These are the three regions we held pursuant to the Corps of Engineers pre event or preposition contract. It was referred to as the Advanced Contracting Initiative. Much of that scope of services that were used to put that solution  together were developed, was developed from work plans that Ben and I had written on previous missions. World Trade Center, we responded to the Region One event. Hurricane--you don't have it here. And it's not one of our case studies. But Hurricane Ivan and the tornadoes we responded in Region Two, and we've never responded in Region Five.

18:17  
I want to give you a little background for noise that we have to deal with on every every disaster that doesn't have a lot to do with getting the work done. It's just part of the process. We're always feel a tremendous amount of pressure and legislatively, it's mandated under the Stafford Act, which is the primary legislation that funds the cleanup efforts that we hire local businesses. The local businesses all feel entitled, but in many instances, they're not qualified to do the work. And they're, they're injured. They're part of the population that's recovering, and they show up late. What I mean by that is after the first 30 days of the mission, we've hired all local businesses, they're ready to go to work. And we're right at that stage in the job. We're we're cutting back resources and it's a constant tension on projects. There's tremendous socio economic goals on our projects, minority businesses, women owned businesses, small businesses, HUB Zone businesses, and we have to put small business coordinators on the job and work with these businesses to figure out where they can fit in on the cleanup effort. Inevitably, they want a lot bigger piece of the project than we're able to give them. Regulatory agencies, all the acronyms I showed you a minute, a minute ago, they're not there in the first 30 days,. They show up and all of a sudden they're there to tell you everything you should have done when things were out of control. 

18:24  
Quick first and cheap versus correct. That's another tension we constantly have on the job and the unrealistic expectations. category. Everyone wants it done fast. And they're willing to kind of turn an eye to what's the right way to do it. Environmentally that is, and we've got to, we've got to develop the culture upfront that we're not going to back away from the correct way of managing or project. Conventional bias. And what I mean by that is when the Corps of Engineers come in, they bring people from all over the country to manage the work and they think it's a it's a construction contract, and they try and apply the same practices that they do in their everyday life, and it just doesn't work. So we spend a tremendous amount of time educating actually the contracting entity we're working for on how to manage the work, how to manage us. There's a tremendous amount of information demands every day. Throughout the day, what are we doing? Where are we doing it? Where are we going next? Who did it? How much have you done? When are you going to be finished?

20:55  
The media? We don't talk to them, because it just is never reported correctly, what we say to them, and it becomes a tremendous amount of noise in the cleanup. Federal and state immunity versus private sector liability; we have insurance. They don't have to have insurance. It kind of ties back into the quick, quick and cheap versus correct. If we don't do it correct, we're gonna pay for it in the long run. And then finally, congressional inquires in Hurricane Katrina: I spent a couple hours every day or every other day or so dealing with congressional inquiries. Why not? Why are you not working this local business? Why haven't you paid this guy? Most of the answers were, well, we're not working this local guy because he doesn't have any equipment and he wants to broker equipment from out of the area. Why hasn't this guy been paid? He doesn't have a contract. So I mean, it's a lot of frivolous work, but that's all noise. Every disaster, it's in every one of them. This is the first case study Hurricane Andrew. I'll turn it over to you, Ben.

22:01  
Hurricane Andrew was, came on board, came ashore as a Cat Five, the third-most devastating storm to hit the United States, Camille being number two. [inaudible] back in the middle 30s being the first. It laid waste to a wide swath of Dade County south to Miami. First reports because none of the skyscrapers were blown down, none of the glass was blown out, Miami was spared. Until we got in a helicopter went there and looked at it and it was anything but spared, a widespread devastating feel. And Patrick and I put this presentation together we went through the different projects to profile you know, what was the significant event around each one of them. Rat bit a child here. Rat ran out of a debris pile in Liberty City, bit a child or so it was reported, got into the newspaper and might have fallen in what Patrick said, little inaccurate reporting. But it started up hornet's nest in in Miami and Dade County. Corps of Engineers flew into action. They already had the army in there, the army was ill equipped to do anything other than just pick up the old stuff that what we call push back and open. You go down the streets, you open up the thoroughfares where you can get to the hospitals and the critical infrastructure. But everything's just pushed back to the curb. Corps of Engineers let a contract. They let it to a local. We bid on the contract, our price was was quite a bit cheaper than the local. But he lied about the amount of equipment he had. We told the truth. I wasn't around to tell a lie. So we got caught with an inadequate proposal. He lasted about one day and the colonel realized he'd made a mistake. And he says I'm going to let a contract to national companies. My owner's a little about a five foot two Scotsman and he'd been in the colonel's face. He was about six foot two and thumping him in the chest telling him what a mistake he'd made. So he said well, oh man, if you want to bid on [inaudible], show up tomorrow and we'll let you bid on this. Well, we caught the proverbial bus. We were the runt in the litter of six contractors picked. The contractors were Brown & Root, Peter Kiewit Sons, J.A. Jones, some of the more iconic construction firms in America at that time. The Corps assigned each one of us an area. They said we're gonna let you start performing. You got two days to sign a contract and give us a work plan. You got seven days to mobilize and you got 30 days to make your first pass through your area. If you fail, we're gonna take work away from you and give it to other contractors. The fee that you're going to get, where it's the cost reimbursable contract, fee will be determined at the end on how well you perform in several different areas. We had to do cost estimates higher for where we were, we had to do time estimates higher for where we were and it's generally viewed in the eye of the beholder, how good it is in the public persona. We pulled a trick in that being a runt and not knowing any better, we took a chance we would get one of these and we marshaled a large workforce to the Broward-Dade County line. And 10 o'clock on Friday morning, I go into the oral presentation to the government and 11 o'clock that night, they award us the hardest area of Miami. We showed up the next morning 10 o'clock and went to work. The other contractor showed up the next morning, went to finding office locations the next morning, getting telephones run into those office. Seven days later, when they were fully mobilized, we owned every dump truck in South Florida. There was not a loader to be had. There was not a dump truck to be had. We owned Dade County. Our work zone is the lower block. The first block above it was added to our work zone, into the block above that was added knowledge about taking work away from others. We went from 32 square miles to about 63 square miles.

26:02  
The hardest hit area of Miami were the trailer parks. And when you get south to Miami or into large agriculture, a lot of single family house, but huge agricultural community. And these are migrant worker camps. The Corps would come to us in the morning, handed us a task order, we had 24 hours to do the site assessment to give them a cost estimate of how much it would take to clean it up. And how long it would take us to do that. Remember, these are all fee bearing things were turning into. They also had a recipe to clean it up back which would not work. I asked the colonel, I said back to [inaudible] do you want speed or cost? And he said yes. So we wrote our proposals that said in the recipe that says you cannot go into the trailer parks with track equipment, track back hoes, track bulldozers, you can only go in with hand labor and [inaudible] equipment. We knew we couldn't clean it up in the timeframe. So we went in with large grapple excavators. We told him in the proposal, we're going to do this we gave him an opportunity to reject it, they failed to. So we went in and went to ripping it apart and loading it. That's some of the C and D mix debris that you'll see.

27:18  
No segregation,

27:19  
No segregation, no time to. It's hard to see the date. But we're less than a month after we've started this that we've gotten these sites clean. We were cleaning up two and 300 space trailer parks in three and four days. Oh, and knowing that if we fail, we're gonna penalize ourselves on the fee. We got through it. We cleaned up about 11 of them. We had some problems that weren't expected. One [inaudible] was reporting an anthrax outbreak, that was merely to keep the government out of there. They knew if they told him there was anthrax there and they you would have thought they had a herd of billy goats in there, that could have been. Where you go to the debris? I was telling Larry Mitiga, one gentleman in the audience, that the hardest thing about the first out of the first gaining, where are you going to carry the debris. And then they don't know and they generally carry their own place. This case here. This is a Coast Guard Station. This is the satellite array that services the State Department for Central and South America. The array had been totally destroyed. The Commandant of the Coast Guard was on vacation that week. His first lieutenant was a very nice guy and a lab-- we told him we're gonna have to be there for a few days and we'll promise you we'll get it out of there. First light. It's there much lighter. Unfortunately it cost him his job and his career. But without us having this debris pile to go to we could have never gotten the effort underway because it was literally weeks before the government turns the property over to us and we did. This is what we finally got to. They gave us some big tracts of land in the agricultural areas that we were able to go develop some large size. These next few pictures show you some of the mixed debris that gets caught up in these piles. Segregation was known about but was not strictly adhered to. Open burning was allowed but we knew it would be tricky so we being in the land clearing business had all these appliances. This is a forced air burner, called an air curtain destructor. It puts a layer of air over the fire which keeps the smoke from coming through. It takes a few minutes to get it hot. Once it gets hot, you won't see any smoke escape above it. Unfortunately, Metro Dade went up on top of their land field, set a big pile of wood on fire and EPA came in shut down every burning operation in the state of Florida. When Patrick came down, Patrick was working for an affiliated company, a business owned by the wife of the person of the gentleman who owns Phillips and Jordan. She was in the contract division in the environmental world, working at Oak Ridge. We did no environmental work so there's a good firewall between the two businesses. When I saw what was going on here, I said Patrick, you got an environmental background working. Go figure out what we need to do in segregating. These are too, way too many dangerous elements, others. Transformers you'll see in the power here. Gas cylinders, propane cylinders, all kinds of toxins. Your, the underneath of your sink is just a cesspool of toxic chemicals that we don't really think about until they're all wadded up in a pile. At the end of the first week, we had put about 658 people to work, we'd brought in 257 dump trucks, established our offices. Into the second week, we doubled it to a little over 1000 people, 455 dump trucks. On one Sunday, the colonel gave us 55 schools to locate, clean up and have ready for school Monday morning. In one day, he didn't give us a chance to propose it. He just said do it. Into the third week we've got nearly 1500 people, we maxed out at close to 700 dump trucks. We got additional square footage, square miles. At the end, we did about 63 square miles, we're awarded the highest fee, we received an outstanding performance evaluation. We're nominated for contractor the year; we didn't get it. Total contract 62 and a half million dollars. Lessons learned: where do you take the debris. We went around asking, one of the first stops was at the University of Miami zoo. We went in there and asked him. We knew they had a lot of vacant land. When we asked the director, do you have a place we can put it, he says all I'm interested in finding those 37 monkeys that have got out here we have an HIV test program. We quickly got out of his space and never went back.

31:51  
Rules laws and regulations do not take a holiday. You have to abide by every law on the book. You cannot go violate EPA clean air, clean water regulations. The government didn't know that, at the level we're operating in. But we found out and we informed them and it runs price up, it slows the the time down. But it's absolutely the right thing to do. segregating the toxic element from the non toxic. We had to identify what was, what wasn't and how best to when to get hold of it. How to get healthy. How do you dispose of the debris? Burning was working, burning will work to this day. But if you don't know how to burn, you're going to end up polluting the air and EPA is gonna shut you down and clean air. All of the debris that was collected in Miami ultimately was hauled 62 miles north to Pompano Beach. We have one of the contracts to haul it north. Should have never been hauled [inaudible]. Cost us hundreds of millions of dollars to taxpayers to do that. Is recycling an option? Sometimes it is, sometimes you got to develop outlet markets for recycling. You can't just sell more recycling, you got to have somewhere to go with it. Cost plus ain't as good as it sounded like. You take that in connection with the second thing, who's the insurance company? When we went down the trailer parks we earned about a $6.3 million fee on $63 million worth of work. We gave back four and a half million dollars for insurance company, to the trailer park operator. Why? US Attorney had an indemnification from the park operators. It says if you will turn your parks over to us to clean up, we'll clean them up at our expense. You let us put tenants in there. Problem is they would not let the Corps of Engineers come to the defense table with us and bring that indemnification. We told our insurance companies just keep resisting, we'll eventually win. They say here we're gonna give you four and a half million dollars, you resist it. And if you lose any more, then you pay for it. We settled. We learned our first big lesson in risk management. Risk does not take a holiday when you go into a disaster just cause it's a disaster. Few years later, 1996 Hurricane Fran comes onshore as Cat 3. The hurricane aspect of it wasn't what did the damage. It's all the tornadoes it spawned that worked their way up through the central part of the state. Raleigh was totally devastated. But it was having Rush Week. Unfortunately we sat down our marshalling area or right where everybody parks for North Carolina State football. We had eggs thrown at us, we had people screaming at us, guys will have their parking spaces where they tailgated for centuries. Uh, life went on. This is unlike Miami which was under military control. Raleigh is life is everyday usually rush parties, Florida, UNC football.

34:52  
The colonel in Wilmington called his counterpart in Jacksonville when he was given the declaration. He said, "Who was your top performer coming out of Andrew?" We were identified, phone call came into us one night, we were already in Raleigh working for a customer of ours. We built the land field there for Wake County. We were helping them set up burn centers. Got the call, went to Wilmington, signed a cost reimbursable contract for the state of North Carolina. Later [inaudible] an election year and Governor Hunt says I want to clean up the city of Raleigh. We'll worry about the rest of the state later. We had a cost reimbursable contract 30 days we transformed it into a negotiated firm fixed price contract. If you sat and looked at the difference between Miami and Fran's we start, Miami was a concentrated urban dwelling with large agricultural community migrant worker camps. Huge mixed debris [inaudible]. Raleigh was an urban forest, had not had any devastation forever. You had a very mature tree canopy there. There was very little household damage other than trees falling on roofs but it was a huge it's just like a force had been laid down on top of Raleigh. Miami was blacked out under military control. Raleigh is open for business. Learning from what we did and Andrew, we tell Wake County, get you some disposal sites and get them quick and get them scattered out. Don't get them concentrated. You can see here this is the type of debris that we're pulling out of Raleigh, we had ended up with seven centers looked just like this. We immediately set in to identifying outlets for this wood. One of the great tragedies of this mission is we didn't learn fast enough how to preserve some of the exotic trees that were in, I mean if any of the woodworkers see some of these black walnuts and white maples and all that are out there are white oaks. Tremendous loss of hugely valuable wood. We did open up what we call the hog fuel market 150 miles away, that we went to grinding the wood instead of burning it, shipping it to the [inaudible] plants. It didn't save any money, probably cost money. It felt like the right thing to do. This was the first place that we employed watch bed spread tub grinding. This is more forced air burning. Set up multiple pits. At the end, we take the ash out of the pits, let it cool down, then we would haul the ash to the subtitled [inaudible] land field. At the end of the first day, we're up to about 250 pieces of equipment, 350 dump trucks, about 750 people. By the end of 30 days we had brought in over 500 dump trucks, employed nearly over 1300 people and had completed first pass in Day 17 and second pass in Day 27. Final results were seven passes through 853 miles from Raleigh streets, over 77,000 loads 6.6 million yards of debris 1.8 6 million man hours, one lost time accident, another outstanding performance evaluation $63 million contract. Lessons learned: we knew Miami burning was shut down prematurely and artificially. So we employ we told the governor we need to put air quality monitoring around these burn sites to where we're gathering data that we can share with the government to show that we're not negatively impacting. Make haste slowly. When a city is alive like Raleigh, you have to stop at red lights. When we're in Miami, we own the streets. We had military officers in the intersections, they gave right away to the dump truck. In Raleigh, the right of ways were to the bicycles and pedestrians and we come into an intersection we'd see but dump trucks backed up for a mile trying to get to the dump site. And these truckers are getting paid on a cycle cost. So these delays caused him to leave to go other places. Recycling takes planning and patience. It does not happen quick. Here's what to say: involve the locals early and often. The Corps of Engineers usually goes into an area and they want to take over and the locals know that. We went and got the mayor and the assistant mayor and we made them a part of the process and we forced the court to make them a part of the process. We would not have formative meetings unless the mayor or her assistant showed up there. Doing so, we had a great relationship all the way through, a matter of fact, five or six years I guess statute of limitations has run, and I guess I can tell this story. Mayor calls me one day and said I gotta tell you something, just in a laughing manner. Said you remember that great disposal site we had on US-70. Comes to light we didn't own that property after all. And you store, you [inaudible] 70 acres on property wasn't even ours but that was their problem, not ours.

39:43  
Audits: The DCAA had an audit function in Durham right outside of Raleigh. We went through seven audits on this project. It's a constant, when they're nearby, they're gonna constantly spend time with you. That's great. We got to New York later on. We forced the DCAA to occupy space in our office where they could watch. If you going to be a book critic sitting here while I'm writing it, correct me while I'm putting words on paper. Don't wait till I get through with chapter one then come criticize me for what I did. They didn't like it. But it was necessary in New York. Hurricane Katrina and Rita, late summer 2005. This storm sat off the Mississippi coast for three days and spun up as a Cat 5. It came on shore as a Cat 3, weak Cat 3, but it brought Cat 5 water with it. Emergency Management Director state of Mississippi told me that there's a 33 foot wall of water came on shore [inaudible] of Mississippi. That's Cat 5 water. It's hugely devastating. Corps of Engineers immediately came out with a request for proposal. 22 companies responded to it. It's a best value solicitation which meant you had to disclose pricing for element. But you also had to give them plans, you had to give them experiences. There was a whole host of qualifiers that they scored you own. We ended up with the highest rank proposal. They awarded six contracts. We got the hardest hit areas. We were awarded 71 square miles of Orleans Parish. We had it from the Superdome down to Lake Pontchartrain. It was a $500 million base contract with a $500 million option to expand. No one's home. I'm going to show you the next several slides to show, this is our workshop. If you see heart in the background right in the middle top is the Superdome. So under 13 feet of water is all about--Orleans Parish it is a big saucer and it is 22 feet in elevation down to the river but it goes down about 18 feet when you hit, go across the [inaudible]. These are the rooftops of the houses we've got to go in and clean debris from. Automobiles, boats. First time we've cleared a Learjet out of a debris field. Small airplanes too. Bad boating. Automobiles. How did that house and up in the middle of the street? And that one. Cars cars are huge problem because they're private property. We cannot touch, we have to get the the government to deal with them. They're just literally thousands of them waiting on insurance companies to come and deal with claims that was in the area. The levee breaches, some more of the debris field. Operational frustration nowadays is while Katrina was an urban flood, rather than a windblown flood, we didn't have a lot of trees down. We cleaned up all the wooded vegetation we could get that was in the public right of way in about eight days. We've brought in I mean, when when Philips and Jordan shows up on an event, we got a database of 25,000 subcontractors. And they all know, they all know we're going to be there. We don't call them, they don't call us, they just start showing up. They bring their three or four dump trucks or their 20 dump trucks. So we've got just massive report sources, flooding in to New Orleans, going to work, having to tell them to stop. Because we don't have anything to pick up. We don't have the authority to go on private property, and no one's home. The residents, we were allowed to bring the debris to the street. Within took a few weeks to get a right of entry program approved by the government, where we had to go house to house knocking on the doors. If someone was home, we'd ask them for permission to go into their yards. They said no, we put a red mark on the street out front, it says no route of entry here. Go to the next one. If they said yes, our folks would go around and photograph from the four corners and from the center of the street to where we could see the debris field. If no one was home, we post ROE notice that what we're trying to do gave him a few days to contact us, we they would either put it back out there and we'd revisit or they'd mail it into us. We use GPS enabled cameras and videos for the first time. So every time that we took a picture, it was GPS enabled. We went, we divided the city into two parts: the moderately impacted areas where we took pictures and severely impacted areas where we took video. If you can see this well enough, you see the red dots, those are places where people said they didn't want us in their yard. This is what the videos look like. These serve a great purpose, an unintended consequence to the claimants. But we use this for clients management. Once whatever project, they just come in, you tore up my mailbox. We probably won 95 plus percent of our clients because we had picture to show them that it wasn't there to begin with.

44:38  
We're going to move into the rest of the presentation up to New York. I left New Orleans about this time, Patrick unfortunately had to stay for the full 25 months. He's gonna walk you through all the different things we did in New Orleans. New Orleans was a place where we got to take all the things we've done before and do them in one location. [Inaudible] you have come and finish it, I'm gonna come back and do New York.

45:05  
In New Orleans, we went through great effort to segregate the waste. As you remember from the Miami pictures, we basically push it up in a wad and got rid of it. In New Orleans, we painstakingly split the debris stream into a number of different ways. That's what we got. That's what we encountered when we come to the curb. And then we'd initially have a pass through where people would pull various types of waste out. All of these people were trained to what needed to come out of the pile before the dump trucks came through. We hired about 1500 local individuals from New Orleans to assist us in this. We would pull the household hazardous waste out, we'd flip the piles over, we break out the various items that we wanted to treat differently. We'd send trailers by with bins. We'd bin the waste up according to type. We would send, when the truck, dump trucks would go into the landfills they'd have one last look to see if there was anything in the truck that shouldn't be there. If it was we set it to the side.

46:15  
We had environmental specialists at the landfills so something didn't make it into the landfill. It could be pulled out the bottom right to containment area bermed and lined with liner where we separate the various chemicals and, and household hazardous waste. EPA set up a collection center. We haul all the waste we had pulled out of the piles, take to DPA's collection center and they would take it take it from there for final disposal. There's a tremendous amount of asbestos in New Orleans, in the shingles, in the flooring of the some of the older homes. We'd find piles like this where a guy had gone to remodel a home, take an asbestos shingles off and just dump it in the middle of the street. We would send people through that would ribbon it off. We knew it was a special pile and we'd special send specially trained crews through to pick it up. You can see this piles marked that it has ACM in it, they would go through and break the pile into various categories of waste some that could go to a traditional landfill, some that would have to go to a special landfill. This is an interesting picture for a couple of reasons. There was a lot of ACM in that pile. But we probably passed that pile 20 or 30 times over a two year time period. Because of the sign you see in the upper left. That was a commercial property. FEMA grants are very rigid that they won't allow you to pick up a business's waste. So a lot of what you guys probably saw on the slow part of cleaning up New Orleans was you were seeing commercial waste that no one would let us touch. We made 60 passes through New Orleans before we were finally done. In the last pass we may get may get a full load every three or four blocks. Another commercial site that we passed for two or three years. Same exercise. Church, we're not supposed to pick up debris on churches. Passed the church for 20 or 30 times before someone from FEMA finally said okay, go get it. E-waste, we grab all the [inaudible] I mean you can imagine the number of houses what comes out of a house we grab all the e-waste, pull it out of the piles, haul it to a central staging area. We would palletize it, shrink wrap it and send it to a recycling facility. I think there was what, Ben, a couple 100,000

48:45  
there's a number there you'll see here in a minute.

48:50  
widescreen TVs, just piles and piles of it. That's the staging area for the E-waste. Ready to go. Small motorized equipment. We pick up hundreds and thousands of lawn mowers every day. We pull the oil out of it. We throw it in the bins and we'd send it off for steel recycling. Stumps. Stumps were a special waste that had to be handled differently because it usually takes a larger piece of equipment to extract it, dig it out, put it in the truck, fill the hole back in. We'd have to do utility locates to make sure that when we pulled the stump out we didn't rip out a gas line or water line. More stumps. Leaners and hangers were trees that have been partially uprooted, hanging over we'd have to send in special tree crews to cut cut them out. Municipal solid waste, anything that was in a black bag was considered garbage and had it be treated differently whether in that garbage there was in some rolls of insulation or whatever, we had to assume it was garbage and pay the higher tip fee and municipal solid waste landfill. This is the white good staging area where we brought in all the refrigerators and the appliances. This operation was profiled in America's Dirtiest Job.

50:18  
Yeah. We'd pick all the appliances up curbside there again. We'd bring them to the centralized area, we'd extract the freon. We take all the spoiled food out, wrap it up in plastic. Throw it in a bin, haul it off. Then we we had a baler, portable baler on site. We crushed the appliances, hauled it off to the recycler, realized a couple million dollars in salvage value off of that. Gentilly landfill was the only landfill available to us when we started. It was right on the edge of the Mississippi, wasn't it Ben?

51:01  
The intercoast, the intercoastal.

51:02  
We came in, that's what the site looked like when we got there. This is where all the segregated waste went to, the C&D, the nonveg--the vegetative waste went to another site where it was ground. We created, built in a loop road, and we had a series of dumping operations in that site. All of that waste is still there today. That was the permanent disposal spot. I believe 15 million cubic yards went into that site from us and other contractors. Now while that waste looks commingled to you, if you remember back to the Miami pile that's much different than what we were dealing with in Miami. Miami, you would have seen trees in there the household hazardous waste would have been there, everything that was inside the trailers would be there. That's what's left over. You see a mattress there, the C&D debris that was the remnants of a house, bricks, concrete things of that nature. This was the [inaudible] largest mission we ever have completed. It was a 24 mission, 25 month mission that should have been done in six months. That's primarily a function of private property issues and commercial property issues where we just we could not work the project efficiently. We had to kind of do it cookie cutter, we trained 37,000. Our workers check them in, we ran 21,000 asbestos samples. You can see the rest of the samples there. Extensive sampling program on the project. We wrote 20 or 30 work plans for every imaginal waste stream you could you could think of on the project. Many of these work plans have been adopted by the Corps of Engineers are now part of their specifications. When we were done, we got an outstanding performance evaluation and we had earned 726 million in two years. Challenge challenges: wet C&D debris. We'd never really dealt with flood debris. Typically our prior missions have been wind-based. We had one disposal site that multiple contractors were using. The commingled waste was extremely challenging, required a huge workforce. There was no residents to move the debris from their backyards to the street. Typically in all disasters, everyone comes home after it's over. They go buy a chainsaw at Lowe's, they take a couple days off and they move everything to the curb for us. This took place literally over two years and probably 80% of the people didn't come back while we were there. It overwhelmed the government. We had life support issues. For the first 90 days in the job. We had a man camp and food service on site to support our people, security. In the first two weeks we had to stop what we're doing, evacuate while Hurricane Rita hit and come back after that. When they're not home, it's harder. The average resident does a lot of the work to get this stuff to the curb. Flood debris is harder than wind debris. If you could ever get it where the private property and public property debris removal occurs simultaneously, you will get over quicker. There's a concept now called clean sweep, which involves taking a block or series of blocks and making one pass through the public and private property and getting it all done at once. But the various municipalities and state agencies and federal agencies can't get past the liability issues associated with. The FEMA grant process doesn't accommodate commercial properties. It has to be more flexible if it becomes a public hazard and in the case of New Orleans, it took them too long to figure out how to deal with the commercial properties. The longer it takes, the more cost. Sounds self-explanatory or or self evident. But if we could have done it all at once, it would have cost one third of the cost that it cost us to do the work, Reduce tiers: we had five or six levels of subcontractors underneath us. Two or three of those levels we didn't often know they were there. We tried to get visibility. It brought tremendous payment issues, labor issues, employees not being paid. It was a huge administrative and policing function for us. Multiple data sets become unmanageable. Everything we do is measured by a ticket. Well if the Corps counting the ticket, we're counting the ticket and the subcontractors are counting the tickets. Their total is going to be different than ours. Ours is going to be different than theirs and then you have to reconcile and and that's a pain in the ass while you're trying to sort through this.

52:38  
2011 Alabama and Joplin tornadoes. I have to say we're probably the most efficient disaster response we had ever had. We took everything we'd learned over the last 20 years and it really it really worked. We had a great group of Corps of Engineer officials on the project. And we were, we were able to put put to work everything we had learned. That's the Alabama work zone, the red zones, where there are where the tornado impact zones. That was a 24 hour impact zone. 62 tornadoes in Alabama five [inaudible] 234 modalities. Set all kinds of records. It was, the state was extremely devastated from the southwest corner to the northeast, no one was left unscathed. And the debris streams and tornadoes are a lot different than a hurricane. It's hard to explain. I don't have a lot of pictures here because we've seen a lot already but we'll go through a couple of them here. You just find streets totally devastated. One house on one side of the street may be unscathed, the other one on the other side, totally gone. There were a tremendous amount of difficult tree tree removal aspects of this project. Trees were broken, twisted, we had to bring in specialty arborists to help us get the stuff down safely. We had lakes that we had to extract debris from. This is an example of a vegetative disposal site. The equipment's evolved over the years where it's primarily self loading equipment, and unloading equipment as opposed to dump trucks and loaders. That's a grinding site at I believe the same facility as the other slide. That's C&D  debris that was segregated from the veg debris and is going to a permanent disposal site. We moved 5 million cubic yards of debris in 120 days. We were operating at 21 counties. We had both public property and private property debris removal. We hired 6000 workers statewide, had 2000 unique trucks, operated 35 temporary disposal sites, worked almost 2 million man hours without a lost time accident and we earned $175 million. The Joplin Missouri tornadoes is the worst disaster impact I've ever seen. And it was in a very concentrated zone in the middle of the city. EF 5 tornado, 160 fatalities, over 1000 injured, single deadliest tornado in modern history. One mile wide, 22 miles long, 7000 properties destroyed, 3 million cubic yards of debris. Tremendous devastation. Houses completely taken off their foundation, similar to Katrina. Complex debris segregation issues. But having had the plans already developed and implemented in Louisiana, it was just a lot easier for us. Our our crews knew what to do. A lot of concrete, where people brought in bulldozers and pushed up foundations. Concrete makes heavy loads. We had a tremendous number of trucks tip over in the landfills as they're trying to dump their loads. Lots of asbestos, worker monitoring, air monitoring issues. We'd wet the piles down before we removed them to keep the dust settled and keep the asbestos in place. Cat 3 ACM we'd line dump trucks or roll off containers. We dumped them in the line containers. Seal them off and haul them to a special facility. 1.2 million cubic yards in 30 days. Virtually the exact same mission as Katrina, I mean, excuse me as Alabama. This contract was pyramid-- prematurely ended in 30 days, they broke us midstream, they re-procured the effort and limited it to local contractors. Needless to say that the remaining portion of the work was not as efficient as what we did on the front end.

1:00:29  
I want to focus a bit on something that I've spent 20 years of my career trying to figure out and that is how to eliminate the paper ticket on a disaster storm, and make the information that we're gathering in the field intelligence shared by all the stakeholders in a project. This is this is a typical disaster effort, you get hundreds of thousands of tickets, you take them to a data center, you key them in, and that forms the basis for invoicing. Well, when you do that this data doesn't isn't really useful for anything but invoicing. We came up with a system where we captured where a load was loaded out. In the field, we grabbed a GPS coordinate, we tracked it to the landfill, we connected it to a truck, we determined the type of waste that was in the load. We stored a geo reference of the data, posted it to the Internet and made it available to everyone. That happened not once a day, but as each time a load was posted. The difficulty that we've had over the years were were two groups of people: truckers and and the Corps of Engineers. And we we overcame that challenge and I can't help but think Alabama and Joplin were were much more successful because of this process. We eliminated the paper tickets. We we we had real time data that spoke to the information requirements I talked to you about before it removed a lot of the noise and allowed us to better manage the projects. They're just simple devices. We had a waste, waste-side printer at the load out  location feeding to a cell phone that contained all the information regarding the trucks that were in the project. You printed out a ticket caught the GPS location. When they got to the landfill they were given--the paper ticket here is purely for the trucker, for him to have a record that he did something. And from there, we could tell every load we picked up when it was picked up, who picked it up. The public works directors had this date on their desktop, if someone called in and said when someone's going to be on my street, he could say well, they're two streets over they should be there tomorrow. They were at your house two months ago. And it really made the work workflow much more efficient. in Joplin, this is a GIS map that we track streets as we completed them with the data that we captured with our Debris Management System.

1:03:09  
First pass, we passed each we passed every street five times before completing a first pass. Second pass, we did another two and a half sweeps. We use this to coordinate where we sent resources on a daily basis. The benefits are pretty self explanatory. When you've got one data set with multiple stakeholders using it, you focus on what the data means as opposed to how do you process the data?

1:03:13  
Alright, Ben.

1:03:30  
Well, if you didn't pick it up from what Patrick was saying, I'm a trained civil engineer. His background is finance and accounting. So it's a good yin and yang of what you just saw in Joplin, as he said it was 20 years a culmination of all the practices that he had observed and was a vocal critic of, rightfully so. We got the Joplin primary because we had the ball, the Corps saw it in Alabama, so how well it was used. They wanted that in Joplin. That's how we got to Joplin. World Trade Center is broken into two parts. Pamela, we're an hour in--just about 15 more minutes. So we'll keep plowing. Okay, Patrick, I got the call the night of the event. Corps of Engineers, as Patrick said earlier, we were pre-positioned in New England. We had about two months left in our contract. It expired in November of that year. We said we got it. We'll never go to the New England. They won't understand a word we're saying. But we got a call that night and said we're going to task you to New York for strategic planning meeting. We're gonna drop in the the crew that was calling us was teaching a course in St. Croix. They said, well, we're gonna stop and pick you up. We're gon in a plane. Next morning says we can't get in to get you. Carry--you've got your own airplane and he said, Well, we can't fly it. We're a no fly zone. So we set out driving. I was in Florida, Patrick was in Knoxville. We drove all night to New York. Got in on the morning of the 14th, assembled in New Jersey. And what you see in the next several pictures, and we'll go pretty fast, this is a debris field. I shot all these pictures that you're gonna see for the next few minutes. Patrick walked alongside. We were asked to observe--what the government's wanting our input on how we're going to start moving this debris.

1:05:54  
This is building seven. Building seven was a federal building, 33 stories. It housed the city of New York's emergency management operations, it was totally lost. It also housed every federal agency in New York City, Secret Service, CIA presidential vehicles were in the basement, walking Walker ever large numbers of evidence lockers that were lost. That was a Customs House. You can imagine the compactness and compressions of the debris field. This date is nine days after the event. The city and the Corps or FEMA commandeered two of the cruise ship terminals, turned them into command post. This is a city occupying I think it's Pier Six. We were on Pier Five with the Corps. This is a Public School 15. they This is second grade what you can't see it a lot of these guys sitting in in in desks designed for for six years olds. What you can also see is Patrick's in front of this group teaching a reimbursement class. He's saying guys, as horrific as this is, somebody going to get reimbursed one day and the government has sent us in here to teach you. You've got to document this thing or you're going to short somebody the money. The complex, very unusual 325 firms and organizations, 15 restaurants and food service, one police precinct, jails, seven TV stations, 2 subway stations, 250 elevators, 71 escalators, largest shopping mall in that part of New York, largest air conditioning refrigeration unit in the world. There's a mini theme park on the South Tower, over 12 million square feet of room space. Had this event happened a little bit later this population would have been a lot different than what was in there. We were asked to prepare an estimate of the volume in the debris field. This was the initial estimate. The freon in the in the largest air conditioning system in the world. We didn't know where the freon was still intact or not. The problem with the freon, had it come in contact with the air or water changes into something very deadly, in case of getting near these waters, mustard gas. All of these, imagine all of the computers and printers and monitors that ran all the offices brominated flame retardants, very toxic lead, very toxic mercury, PVC, the valuables were, just an untold amount of artwork that was lost in the event. A lot of it we [inaudible]. The bullion didn't come through the debris field but a whole lot of the currency and a whole lot of the drugs did come through the debris field. Remember that a lot of evidence lockers in there, it all came through the debris field at some stage. These are steel beams that weigh in excess of 4400 pounds a linear foot, that's two tons per linear foot. You can imagine the forces it took to warp that piece of steel. Each of these members, these were the vertical main support members, each had a serial number. Unfortunately, these beams were removed early in the project and were recycled to India. They got away. This is some of the most exotic steel that has ever come out of Japan. These are some of the Rodin artwork that was in the Cantor Fitzgerald building. Behind it you can see one of the engines from one of the airliners. That's the artwork that was in the plaza. Engine off one of the airliners. Landing gear off one of the airliners. This is some of the elevator cables and escalator cables, the TV tower that was on the North Tower. These are some of the prep methods of getting this debris in bite sized pieces. These are city streets, it won't stand two tons a linear foot of steel, some of the steel wouldn't cut. Some of the exotic torches they had to bring in would would reach temperatures of 6000 degrees Fahrenheit. These were special pickers. That machine, the orange machine, had just come up out of Philadelphia from the one of the restorations done down there where they can go up several stories and reach into a building and retrieve stuff, it's just like extracting teeth. The grapple excavators became the tool of choice. Um, you can look here we're late in October, we're still got 1800 2300 degree temperatures coming out of the debris pile. It would actually temper I mean, we were losing, they were losing grapples down there in two or three weeks, all the steel had been tempered from the temperatures. Finally got it work to where they put smaller excavators up on top of the debris field worked it down to larger excavators loaded into off road vehicles like this routed up to the top trains loaded on to road vehicles. The recyclable steel went out in tractor trailer trucks like this.

1:10:43  
You can't talk about the recovery at Ground Zero without mentioning the slurry wall. These this crane, so the 1000 ton crane, the fire department brought in they knew they had some department personnel in the northern stairwell, the North Tower. They were I went into a Saturday morning meeting where they were having a lift meeting to determine where to position this machine to maximize its lift effect. And there's a guy on the phone from London telling, said you've got to get within 20 feet of that tower and lift it straight up. There's a structural engineer sitting in there that had built the World Trade Center. And he said there's a slurry wall 10 feet in front of that crane. If it crosses that slurry wall you're subject to collapse. Slurry wall was was built when they built Ground Zero. It was the Hudson River ran through the real estate occupied by the World Trade Center. They built the slurry wall, tied it back, kept the Hudson River out while they dug the foundations. Once the foundations went in the slurry wall was held by the foundation. We got into removing the debris, the debris was propping up the slurry wall. They went to removing the debris the slurry wall went to move and you can see here where it moved about 12 or 14 inches, went to cracking. They immediately stopped the operation put in a de-watering system to relieve the hydrostatic pressure from it. And then they had to bring the debris down in a circular fashion and go behind it and put tiebacks in because when they had a when the foundations went in for the World Trade Center, they opened up the parking garage, the Hudson River was leaking into the garages with a putrid smell. They figured out it was coming through the tieback coves. So they went in, cut all the tiebacks and grouted and waterproofed the basement. Well now this doesn't hold in the wall. So when the debris comes away from it, the walls gonna go to that open space and collapse. Huge complication for removing the debris. If the slurry wall had failed, the Hudson River pours into the site, drowns everybody in there. That's the PATH tube that goes back to New Jersey. The water will get into the PATH tube, go back to New Jersey, at which point it gets into the subway system and work its way as far north as Central Park. That's how devastating the slurry wall could have been had it collapsed. It was estimated that all the surrounding buildings around the World Trade Center would have collapsed but a lot of them had, the foundation has nothing there to hold it back. We said a little while ago about where are you going with the debris? The city talked two or three different options. Ultimately, they chose Fresh Kills landfill. It had been shut down in March of that year. It was going through a final cover, still had some permit left. And that's where they decided to take the debris. We were tasked out there in mid September to observe the debris handling operation and to write a work plan to manage the debris. Our mission, this is what you see, the agents going through, New York Police Departments looking for potential human remains. The FBI, Secret Service, CIA, they're looking for evidence of another attack. So you got people going through scratching the ground looking for debris very hard to see. The debris coming out of Ground Zero when they put it on conventional dump trucks would go first to a marine transfer station, where it'd be weighed. They dump it into garbage scows that they still had--Department of Sanitation had not sold yet. Those garbage scows would tug to Fresh Kills about five miles away. By the way early in the process, they change the name from Fresh Kills to the Staten Island landfill when they read the first translation of the Arabic press of Fresh Kills just really doesn't resonate very well. So they changed the name for the duration of the mission.

1:14:47  
Fortunately, the Department of Sanitation still have all the assets they had not sold. They had an auction coming up later that year to sell all the equipment that they had including these unloading cranes down at the docks. City was very fortunate to have have a huge amount of assets in place. They'd all float the barges put it onto a truck, haul it up to the top of the hill. This is where we would take control of it. We've got somebody sitting right there. When that truck makes a left hand turn, he's looking in the back of the truck, and then he's directing where it goes. If it's got HHW in it, we're gonna strip it out and get it put into a lined facility. If it's heavy metal, there's a heavy metal field that it dumps in there. There's agents going through the heavy metals sorting out evidence. If it's mixed debris, it goes to the shaker areas. Where are they dumped on the ground, excavator would take and put it over those those are inclined vibrating shakers, the large debris above four inches slides off the front, it's picked up, scattered out over an inspection field. Agents go through it, looking for evidence. Human remains gathered up, give it back to the Department of Sanitation. The fines that fall through the four inch opening, then go to two other sifting devices. This is what's called an Erin finger screen. And there was a CEC screen. Excavators would feed the hoppers. Now we got the evidence belts laying up at waist level instead of them having to bend over and look at it down on the ground. Now we brought the debris up to where the agents can look at it. They can slow that belt down, they can stop that belt, they can reverse that belt. It's a lot easier job they had, the debris process pace picked up tremendously when we got these [inaudible]. This was coming from our quarry background when we went in wrote the work plan we wrote we will put picking stations and these are picking stations. The debris got put back together given back to the department of sanitation, put into a separate part of the land field, covered, it sits there today. Once we closed the field down, when when we investigated building seven debris separate than the other buildings cause it was federal building had a lot of stuff in it they they're only their people were authorized to go into this inspection field. Once they finished, the police department brought out that graduating class from the academy, 40 something officers and they made them walk shoulder to shoulder, left to right, right to left, north south, south to north, four times. On this day I took this picture shortly after I took it, they found a Port Authority officer's badge on the fourth pass walking through the debris field. Once it was investigated, we closed it off, we put a cover over it, never used it again. We recycled what could be recycled. We brought in electromagnets the department will say we brought in Department of Sanitation managed to recycling effort we support them. This is some aerial views of all of the compound there you can see all the fire department equipment is yet to be gone through, we left all the vehicles to the end because of private insurance concerns. And just the we felt like that they had already been going through with cadaver dogs and humans looking for PHR but as far as looking at it for any other evidence we left that to late. It's an awkward triangle of is it debris with human remains, it's evidence. and you know everybody was acclimated to you treat human remains remains with respect but and the urgency are we trying to see if there's another attack we got to quickly go through this it became a huge challenge a huge tension of how do you respectfully treat debris that potentially contains human remains same time get the job done look for evidence and get it done stuff hopefully won't be faced with the evidence we removed short into two large category human remains other physical evidence. first stop was at an anthropologist looking to see are these human remains or animal remains remembers 15 restaurants in the World Trade Center so there was a large amount of animal carcasses in those food, feedlot food lockers. This is where the anthropologist worked. If it was human remains were detected. They went into a refrigeration unit here the medical examiner retrieved those every day. This is where the FBI took the physical evidence. They cleaned it up, put it through a septic bath, dried it out, went through it. categorized it by tenant tenants would come out periodically clean out theirs and sit me interviewed for who this might be.

1:19:39  
Here you can see a pistol, a baseball, watches. Remember all the shopping malls that were there the you know these could either belong to some police officer or it could have been on display in one of the trades cabinets. A lot of jewelry was found. We set up a system with the city to where we photographed all the jewelry with the digital camera. And then we put on a website to where victims' families could go looking and see it and then they had to go through a process of proving that it was theirs. The automobiles, we got to late using jaws of life, we cut them all open. Once they were all cut open, we took in, bled fluids out of them, then sent those to the recycler. Near the end we took all 69 of the barges that were used to bring the debris, the debris over to Fresh Kills. We washed it down, we put bobcats in there to scrape it up, they were put in roll off containers. We lifted out. That was sent to the screening plant. We then brought in vacuum trucks, sucked out the remains, sent those to the screening plant, returned to the barges to service. We had a goal that said we're going to finish the investigation at Fresh Kills within 30 days of them stopping operations at Ground Zero. 10 days after they finished the operations at Ground Zero, we were done until somebody went in the Deutsche Bank Building next door and found a pair of teeth in the drywall. So then they strip the Deutsche Bank Building down and they brought all of it to us. That's what's in these bags here. They were all torn open, run through the screening devices. Looking again for human remains. Toward the end of Ground Zero of the removal. The fire department brought in timber mats. We're down to ashes. Now this is the finest particles of what's left the residual from the cleanup, all the heavy stuffs been gone. They scattered the debris out over these timber mats. Looking for the same time we're looking for at Fresh Kills. Then they brought us all the timber matts. We had to split them open, clean them up, put them through a tub grinder, and we took and investigated all of that debris. Final step. We plowed the land field up down to the garbage that was brought there, took all of that debris that came out and ran it through the screening plant. So 100% of all the ground that was touched it Fresh Kills was investigated several times. I forgot to say all this is being done on the largest methane gas field in the world. We knocked over either 11 or 13. These are wells out there that they're putting into commercial operation at the time we're there. We knocked over either 11 or 13 of them. These are some of the support facilities. We turned this into a year round operation. We put greenhouses over the screening devices. Got laughed off the hill just about for this, but they worked, put sunscreens over them. Fortunately, we have won the mildest winters on record in New York. Only a few days of snow. But now you can see how the agents in air conditioned or heated space sitting with their cigars close by and belts that they can control, made the evidence inspection a lot easier than it was when they were scratching around on the ground. Final statistics from this: over 55,000 discrete pieces of evidence, 4200 body parts, only 239 people were identified, there there there was a huge void of donor DNA. A lot of of the victims families just did not want to give up the tooth brushes and combs for the city to compare the collected DNA so we had no donor DNA to compare. 15,000 workers were processed through the PPE system. 40,000 cops went through there. There was only a handful of cops that did not walk those fields and those guys didn't walk the fields code. We didn't medically pass them. They they were not fit to wear respirators. 17 of 1.7 million man hours, one last time accident. Huge OSHA good, nearly a perfect OSHA score. Those are the metrics. We missed the estimate about a half a million-400,000 tons. We went from 1750 tons a day to 17 and a half thousand tons a day by mid October. We brought organization to it. We tenfold the throughput. Fortunately on this when we got the government put enough money up front, they gave us $125 million dollars to work with, we gave you half of it back to them. We got another outstanding performance evaluation in, we won contractor of the Year for the year 2002.

1:24:41  
Then in October 2006 Con Edison opened up some manholes in Ground Zero reconstruct and found the body parts. So Mayor Bloomberg said the following: we're going to go through every one of manholes there, there's 34-3200 of them and until the World Trade Center is completed and ready for occupancy, any debris that comes from any highway project in there any building demolition, you're going to collect the debris and we're going to screen for it. So we went up in November December of 2006. We devised a program for the city to go into a building under the Brooklyn Bridge. This is a de-watering screw, another mining application. We built a platform over it. We built a conveyer system and an outside hopper where the debris comes in and roll off roll off containers. They loaded into the hopper goes up the conveyor. We built these two deck screening stations for them that's like a half inch screen on top and a quarter inch screen it flips up. What flips up falls right into that hole you saw which goes down into the de-watering screw and it's all hydraulic. It just sits there and turns and carries the solids out into the alleyway where it goes into a roll off container. From concept to startup is 21 days. We ran it 13 months for the city 100% of time, the city liked it so much they said we want you to take that and make it mobile. So we pulled the screws out we went and bought trailers, we fabricated decks, we kept the same screening stations we'd had, by the time we started with 12 we ended up with 22. The criteria was when that unit pulls up to a site, we want you to have it to where we can have it ready for operation within four hours. So this is what it looked like when we finished it.

1:26:43  
That's what it looks like fully popped out. what it looks like when it's ready to run. From stop to start. We can set it up in 22 minutes.

1:26:56  
We brought it to New York, it's in New York now. We've screened some they're stockpiling parts. Now. We'll go back next month. We do annual maintenance on it. We can't put the greenhouse on in 22 minutes. It takes a few days to get the greenhouse I don't know but they can run it down here, Ryan. We hired 150 forensic anthropologists or maybe some of you sitting in the room because we write it, every university up in the northeast to get students that wanted it to put this on the resume. This is what the operation was like you dump it on it, wash it down, flip it out. End of story. 20 minutes. Any questions?

1:27:52  
Well, we didn't get to see any of it. There is a story and the cops tell me it's true. That when they finally got into the vaults, there's a vault inside the vault at the Bank of Nova Scotia, and World Trade Center complex. When they finally got to the outer doors, they found a lot of scratch marks where somebody had come in through the PATH tunnels, and he got into the vaults but couldn't get through the outer doors. When they got into the vaults, all the bullion still in the box. All the gold still there. Now, there are a lot of valuables came through a lot of money, a lot of drugs, a lot of different things. But we saw it did get caught in the debris field went over to the agencies and we didn't get our cut. Yes. Well, it never failed. So what happened is during the process of taking the debris out of there, right behind it, there would be an operation tying the wall back in so where they'd gone in and cut the tendons. After they opened up the World Trade Center. The government went back in and reinstalled those tendons. So now as you keep spiraling down that above is being held back. They also, buttressed the wall with some about 150,000 tons of sand they brought in from New Jersey to hold part of the wall or on West Avenue up. But it's still intact. Never failed.

1:29:40  
When we had a robust construction economy that ended in 2008, we wrote about 1250. We went down to about 250 

1:29:50  
No, no,no,

1:29:52  
We're about 400-500. 

1:29:54  
We're about 700 800. Right.

1:29:56  
Well, we went down to Chloe, we

1:29:59  
didn't go down to 200

1:30:05  
Still is

1:30:10  
This type of project as opposed to our construction

1:30:17  
Very few on a blue sky day do we have I'm gonna guess not over a dozen and assigned to disaster work on blue sky day.

1:30:27  
Alabama we would have had 100 when the no

1:30:29  
No no routine.

1:30:31  
What I'm saying, oh, today,

1:30:34  
No activity going on.

1:30:36  
We're working in Kentucky doing some tornado work. we maybe have 15 folks up there, but only

1:30:41  
We have no missions going, we going to have 10 or 12 people. No. Now New York, another interesting part here, there were five union contractors helping the city and one non union contractor. Rules of engagement, Phillips Jordan, you cannot bring but 12 of your people. They have to all be managers and supervisors. The only equipment you can bring is their vehicles. And you got to keep every one of those contracts. We said we can't work union and non union contract, they said figure it out. The Federal presence with wrap around sunglasses has a very chilling effect on a union guy. And we told him keep wearing those sunglasses, we point out every one of them there's CID guy right there, you better watch what you're doing. Yes,

1:31:23  
I'm just curious. Were you consulted or involved in any way and things like advising the Japanese

1:31:34  
We were contacted. We've had contact with them but that's as far as it's...They're, they're some there's some the best in the world in Japan for dealing with that there's we offered services to you know, teach them lessons. Now. One thing we did do that a lot. Two or three months into our screening Operation New York, the the Royal Mounted Canadian police visit with us. If you're remember the prostitute field they had in Vancouver. We went up there and consulted with them and devising a system to put the screen plants in there, ultimately did and screen that whole pig farm looking for potential human remains from the dead prostitute. Yes. They're getting better. The biggest problem with the government agency, when we go to a mission, we stay with it. They rotate in and out over 30 days. So you lose that operational continuity that FEMA guys will come and do a 30 day stint. There are, there is a cadre of Corps guys that stay longer but never more than 60 or 90 days. You may see them again later in the mission. About that time they've lost any operational continuity from the beginning

1:32:56  
They rotate after six weeks. Yes.

1:33:05  
Not enough. We have when when you saw a minute ago we got California Long Beach is is an area that early when we were first awarded that area there was some light discussion but there's just really nothing you can do for, there's no planning you can do is just it's like a World Trade Center. You're just going to deal with it best you can when it happens.