"We Will Never Forget": Board's Solemn Tour Mixes Sorrow with Pride

It was a day of grim sites, tearful and harrowing stories and, ultimately, lifted spirits and union pride.

The CWA Executive Board saw the worst, and then the best, of humanity Oct. 15 when it visited the site of the World Trade Center collapse and met afterwards with CWA local leaders and members who escaped the towers and nearby buildings.

“We are here to let you know that we share the pain and anxiety you experienced, and we will do whatever we can as an organization to assist the families that suffered,” CWA President Morton Bahr told New York City-area members at the luncheon, held during the board’s meeting. “We’re also here to recognize the work that our members are doing to bring New York back. So while we start on a very sad, compassionate note, we want to end on 'Go forward.' We will never forget, but we’re here to rebuild the city.”

One by one, local leaders said how proud they were to be part of the CWA family, and expressed deep gratitude for the union’s support, and the donations, kind thoughts and prayers that have poured in from members across the country since Sept. 11.

“I can’t tell you how buoyed we at the local are by the support from other CWA locals, from the national and the district,” said Jim Marketti, president of Local 1032, which lost two members who worked for the Port Authority at the towers. “What this event has proven to us, by the solidarity shown in the CWA family and in greater America, is that the human spirit will not die.”

Listeners brushed away tears and gave a heartfelt ovation to a young woman from Marketti’s local who cried as she spoke of being rescued from the 46th floor of the towers.

“I’m alive because they came to get me,” Tonya Turner-Roberts said, adding a fervent plea. “The buildings had a name. It was the World Trade Center. It was not only the Port Authority’s home but also the home for companies all over the world. By calling it ground zero, you take away the humanity those buildings stood for. Please, call it by its name. It’s the World Trade Center, and it’s a part of New York and it’s a part of America."

Damage and Repairs
The board’s day began in a 40th-floor conference room at Verizon’s midtown headquarters, where company officials described the damage and ongoing repairs at the company’s building at 140 West St., as well as workers’ around-the-clock effort to restore service to the New York Stock Exchange and downtown offices.

The 32-story 1920s building, once New York Telephone’s headquarters, is across the street from what was the north tower and just west of 7 World Trade Center, which collapsed in the late afternoon Sept. 11. The Verizon building is the telecommunications nerve center of lower Manhattan, serving 300,000 phone lines and 3.5 million data circuits.

The north tower’s collapse blew out windows, ripped holes in walls and bent steel supports on the south side of Verizon’s building. Rubble flooded the seventh floor, home of the mammoth switching system. “There was enough rubble to need a shovel and the machines were coated with dust,” said Dave Rosenzweig, a Verizon vice president for network operations.

Broken water lines turned stairwells into waterfalls and caused flooding, shorting out copper and fiber cables. When 7 World Trade Center collapsed, it sent a steel girder plunging seven stories through thick concrete floors. The girder pierced the city block-wide cable vault in the first of the Verizon building’s five basements, crushing cables.

Employees had been safely evacuated by about 10 a.m. By nightfall, Verizon technicians were back at work on temporary repairs, rerouting telephone traffic to restore service to the mayor’s command center and emergency services.

The stock exchange was the next priority and Verizon pledged to have it up and running by Monday morning, Sept. 17. Working nonstop, teams of technicians got the system going at 6:05 a.m. “It was a tremendous effort,” said Arnie Eckelman, senior vice president for operations. “I can’t begin to tell you the amount of time, effort and creativity involved.”

Since then, technicians — including hundreds brought in from outside New York City — have been working through a priority list, restoring service to businesses as quickly as possible. Verizon said all of its workers in the disaster zone have to take asbestos training and be medically certified to wear respirators.

Even with 800 technicians and support staff working in the area, the timetable for repairs is largely beyond Verizon’s control, officials said. Many manholes, for instance, are still piled with tons of debris, restricting workers’ access.

Initial repairs were temporary as technicians looked for any way to restore connections — tossing exposed cables through windows, for instance, and stringing them along light poles. Officials said permanent repairs are likely to take until the end of 2002.

District 1 Vice President Larry Mancino said the company and others have heaped praise on CWA’s Verizon workers for what they’ve already accomplished.

“All too often we fight with the company, but in this particular instance they have given our members the credit and they’ve told us that the kind of work our members are doing is unbelievable,” Mancino said, noting that even New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani and Gov. George Pataki, as well as the chairman of the Workers’ Compensation Board, have thanked CWA members.

Viewing the Disaster
Verizon arranged for cars and vans to take CWA board members to 140 West Street. The caravan, led by police escort, passed through a security checkpoint before stopping about a hundred yards from the collapsed towers, where dozens of cranes, backhoes and other heavy equipment were moving rubble on a clear, sunny day.

Wearing hard hats, with air masks and goggles at the ready, the union officers entered the brick building through its ornate marble and gold-plated hallway, now a mess of plywood, duct tape, exposed wires and light bulbs, boxes of cleaning supplies, industrial vacuums and more. The building has no running water yet but is drawing electrical power from the outside. Elevators took the board to the 31st floor.

From windows in what was once New York Telephone’s executive dining room, and from the building’s roof, the board somberly viewed the disaster below. The skeletal remains of one wall from each tower protruded from piles of rubble on one side. The charred remains of 7 World Trade Center were visible from another set of windows.

Officers then toured the cleaned-up switch room and the basement cable vault, which was flooded with four feet of water Sept. 11 and took two days to pump dry.

On a wall inside the vault — where CWA members are working in dark, musty, cramped conditions — Locals 1101, 1102 and 1109 put up a sign with “CWA” in large letters that spelled out a vertical message: “Can’t Whip America.”

As CWA Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Easterling left the vault, she hugged a technician whose co-workers introduced him as a hero. Local 1109 member Nicholas Gerstle had gone to the site Sept. 11 from Brooklyn to volunteer any way he could. “He made his way down that night and was put to work in the line of people,” said Tony Matarazzo, the local’s president. “He was overcome with smoke and was taken to the hospital, and when he got out he went right back and continued to work.”

Noting the many unions working on recovery and restoration, Easterling said “I’ve never been so proud to be a union member than I was down there today.”

Tales of Loss and Heroism
At a luncheon arranged by District 1 several blocks east of the tragedy, local leaders and members took turns at the microphone to say thank you to CWA, share stories and feelings about Sept. 11 and remember CWA’s victims.

At the twin towers, CWA lost Port Authority workers Mary Jones, Lisa Trerotola and Niurka Davila, and NABET-CWA members Don DiFranco and Bill Steckman. NABET-CWA member Tom Pecorelli and CWA retirees Al Marchand, Patricia Cushing and Jane Orth died aboard the hijacked planes. Verizon worker Donna Bowen died at the Pentagon.

Matarazzo said CWA also lost a former 1109 shop steward, Michael Roberts, who left his phone company job in 1997 to follow his dream of becoming a New York firefighter. He died in the towers’ collapse.

Robert Cassar, president of CWA Local 1182, spoke of some of the tragedy’s unsung heroes — the 1,400 traffic enforcement agents his local represents. Some of them were among the first people on the scene.

“These people were heroes. They risked their lives,” Cassar said. “They went back into those buildings to help people get out. Whenever I think about it, I get a little emotional. People look at traffic officers as the bad guys, the guys who give you a ticket. But they weren’t the bad guys on that day.”

Several speakers spoke of the NABET-CWA technicians, DiFranco from WABC and Steckman from WNBC, who worked on the transmitters on the roof of the north tower and were trapped.

Tony Capitano, president of NABET-CWA 51016, also praised the union’s camera operators and technicians who risked their lives to tell the tragic story. “When catastrophe hits, they run to the disaster when most people are running from the disaster,” he said.

Bill Lind, a satellite truck operator for WABC and a Local 51016 member, said he immediately thought of DiFranco, his friend for 30 years, when the first plane hit the tower. Later, he learned of the deaths of firefighters he’d known.

Still, he forged ahead with the story and now fears for his health and that of co-workers who covered the tragedy in a sea of choking dust and asbestos-filled debris. They had no respirators until late Wednesday, and only then because a CWA member with the Port Authority provided them. “The first day, we wrapped T-shirts around our mouths,” he said. “By the end of the day, they were brown.”

Emotionally, he asked if CWA would take care of a baseline medical exam for members who were exposed to the heavy dust in the first days. “You got it,” Bahr said without hesitation. “You got it.”

Other locals represented at the luncheon included 1101, 1102, 1190, 1110 and 1180, whose president, Art Cheliotes, presented a slide show that illustrated five weeks of tragedy and heroism.

“We were fortunate in that we (1180) did not lose any members,” he said. “On the other hand, we had heroes who worked behind the scene in the fire department and police department making sure that the word got out, making sure the response was coordinated, and supporting those who suffered losses.”

Cheliotes’s local donated its union hall a few blocks north of the collapse to the Red Cross for a service center, where anyone affected by the tragedy can call or drop in for help.

Listening to the members’ and officers’ stories, and realizing the pain they still feel weeks later, “was an incredibly moving experience,” CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen said.

“Clearly all New Yorkers and many of the rest of us feel as if we were in those buildings on Sept. 11,” he said. “We will never forget those who lost their lives or the families they left behind. And I know that all of us in CWA will continue to raise funds and provide any assistance necessary for those injured that day and to the families of those who were tragically lost, either in New York City, at the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania.”