When Unimaginable Risk Became Reality

• Barbara Bowers
• September 2002
• 

Nelson Chanfrau was just about to leave his Hoboken, N.J., home for work shortly before 9 a.m. on Sept. 11 when his pager went off. The message was chilling: A plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. As risk manager for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey--the agency that developed and owned the World Trade Center--Chanfrau knew the complex well.

His first thought was that the plane was a small Cessna or some kind of trainer. He rushed outside to his Suburban, switched on the lights and siren, and sped to the Holland Tunnel, where police already had cordoned off a traffic lane to allow emergency vehicles through.

During the hurried ride to lower Manhattan, Chanfrau learned from radio reports that the crashed plane was a large, commercial jetliner. He also heard the news that at 9:03 a.m. a second airliner had crashed and exploded into Tower Two. His instincts told him that all this was no accident.

Within minutes, he pulled up to the site and parked on West Street--a wide thoroughfare that runs along the western border of the Trade Center and parallels the Hudson riverfront. Chanfrau reached into the back seat of the car to grab his fire-protective jacket and helmet and immediately put the jacket on. "I don't know why I did that," he said later, shaking his head. "I never wore that thing."

He met up with colleague Gerry Cummiskey and approached Tower One, the North tower. Chanfrau instinctively began counting the floors up to the point of impact at the 94th floor and made a quick mental calculation: This was a sunny, warm morning in early fall; parents were getting children off to school; and New York City was holding a primary election--three factors that argued for fewer people than usual in the buildings at that time. An estimated 50,000 people worked at the World Trade Center, and another 140,000 visited there on a normal weekday.

Chanfrau and Cummiskey went into the lobby of Tower One and began assisting the office workers who were streaming out of the stairwells and elevators. Normally, Chanfrau said, he would have urged them to slow down and take it easy, but he sensed that they were right to move fast. "I really expected bombs in the lobby during that time," he said.

Chanfrau, the deputy director of the Port Authority's operations services department, had been in his World Trade Center office shortly after noon on Feb. 26, 1993, when Tower One was rocked by the explosion of a terrorist car bomb detonated in an underground parking garage. The blast carved a 22-foot-wide, five-story-deep crater under the building. Six people were killed, and more than 1,000 were injured.

This time, Port Authority Police Chief Bill Hall reassured him that police had secured the lobby area. Chanfrau was expecting to go upstairs once his police escort from the Emergency Services Unit arrived. As he continued helping with the evacuation, his cell phone rang. The call was from his good friend, Jean Andrucki, 43, who did risk assessment for the Port Authority. She told him that she and 15 other employees had left their office on the 64th floor and had made it down as far as the 20th floor, where they were staying with an asthmatic female co-worker who couldn't make it any farther. They were waiting for help to arrive. "This goes back to the bombing in '93," Chanfrau said. "What everyone learned then was you should stay there and the firemen would come." This was the first of several calls that Jean made to Chanfrau's cell phone and to his Jersey City, N.J., office, where she left messages on his machine.

During this time, Chanfrau was thinking about his wife, who worked in the Trade Center. "I didn't know at that point where she was," he said. Nor did he know the whereabouts of his son's fiancee, also an employee at a Trade Center business.

Chanfrau and Cummiskey walked to the concourse to see if they could help there. The concourse, a brightly lit commercial area packed with retail stores and eateries, was located between the two towers, its entrance just past the marble lobby of Tower One through a bank of revolving doors. The concourse was the lengthy passageway that thousands of riders of the Port Authority Trans-Hudson--or PATH--trains passed through every workday--a place where these bustling commuters would grab bagels, coffee and newspapers before hitting the lobby elevators to reach their offices far above.

The Towers Collapse

At 9:59 a.m., Chanfrau was standing on the concourse when he heard a loud whistling sound. "It was 'whoosh,' and then all went black," he said. "I went behind a pillar--I don't do well in tight spaces. It was eerie, pitch dark. I thought it was a bomb. I thought a bomb had exploded somewhere." He called out for Cummiskey, but got no answer. Chanfrau wouldn't know until much later that what he had heard and felt was the collapse of the 110-story Tower Two. "I never envisioned a collapse," he said. "Never."

He badly needed a flashlight, but he couldn't find one. He ran over to the Duane Reade drugstore, where some emergency lights were shining. "I remember an FBI man passed me then, and all he said was, 'I've got to get out of here and get those bastards.'"

A fireman with a light came up and offered to guide Chanfrau and some other people to the Vesey Street exit on the north flank of the Trade Center. "There was debris and glass everywhere," Chanfrau said. "It was hard negotiating your way through. It was hard to breathe-there was still a lot of airborne dust."

To their great relief, debris was not blocking the doors, and they were able to reach the street. Chanfrau found two flashlights in a city police truck and then encountered Port Authority Inspector Timmy Norris. He told Norris that he was going back inside the building, because Cummiskey was still in there, and Norris went with him.

Back on the concourse, they spotted a man half-buried in rubble. They dug him out and determined that he probably had a broken leg. They found a chair, propped him up on it, then carried him in the chair toward the exit. That's where Cummiskey caught up with them, Chanfrau said.

Once they reached street level, shortly before 10:30 a.m., the men heard a roaring noise and looked skyward to see the top of Tower One start to pancake. Horrified, they left the injured man in the chair on the sidewalk and scrambled for cover.

Cummiskey crawled under a fire truck. Chanfrau ran across Vesey Street and braced himself at the front of the police truck, facing the hood. "I kept thinking, 'I've got to get my helmet on,'" he said. "That's all I could think of." The helmet was right there on his arm. Maybe it was the weight of the two flashlights he was carrying like bandoliers or maybe it was sheer nerves, but Chanfrau couldn't manage to lift his helmet to his head in time.

The onslaught of material that struck him didn't come from on high, but at a rushing, sideways slant. "It was everything you could think of--I kept getting hit," he said. "What seemed like an eternity was really very, very quick, which is hard to process, because you're out in the middle of the street."

The air around him was darkened by the massive cloud of dust and debris that had surged from the falling building. Across the street, Chanfrau could make out a Suburban that had been picked up and hurled by the explosive forces. He walked over to the fire truck, but Cummiskey was gone. He looked to the spot where they had left the injured man and saw no sign of him. Then, some damaged cars began exploding on the streets.

It took Chanfrau a while to realize that he had been injured. "I had a pretty bad cut in the head," he said. "There was a lot of blood, but I didn't even know I was bleeding. It didn't hurt."

Finding Clear Air

Cummiskey turned up, and the two of them tried to figure out what to do next. At that point, they were near the Federal Post Office. They walked eastward and soon reached West Broadway, where, to Chanfrau's amazement, the air was perfectly clear. "That was when I could see the blood," he said.

He was picked up by a Holland Tunnel maintenance vehicle and driven to the entrance of the tunnel, which by then was blocked to regular traffic. In a few minutes, Port Authority Police Officer Alicia Johnson pulled up in a Jeep and took Chanfrau and some other employees over to the Jersey side.

At St. Francis Hospital in Jersey City, "doctors kept coming over and saying, 'ooh, ah,' which didn't seem too good to me," Chanfrau said. "But there really was no big deal." (Maybe he saw it that way, but doctors had to remove shards of glass from his head and used 60 stitches to close the wounds. He also had two broken ribs, a big gash on his foot and bruises covering the entire back of his body, from head to foot.)

Sometime during the suturing, two fellow workers who were keeping Chanfrau company at the hospital got word to him that his wife, Betty, had escaped from the Trade Center and was safe in Greenwich Village.

"So, I knew she was OK," he said. "After that, things were a lot better." He would learn later that his son's fiancee was safe, too. Because she had worked until 8:30 the night before, she had left for work a little later than usual that morning. In fact, she heard about the attack as she rode the train into the city.

At the hospital, doctors wanted to keep Chanfrau overnight, but he refused. Instead, he had his co-workers drive him to his Jersey City office to pick up a shirt. "I'd had a shirt and T-shirt on, and at the hospital they cut that off," he said.

After his staff found him a T-shirt, he told them to find him a car with lights and a siren. They located a police Suburban, and one woman drove Chanfrau the several blocks to the temporary command center that the Port Authority had set up at its Journal Square offices.

"I checked in, and they took my name off the 'Killed' list," Chanfrau said. Norris had reported him dead, because he couldn't find Chanfrau after Tower One's collapse.

He went home to shower and change, then headed back to work. For the next 10 days or so, Chanfrau would divide his time between the command center and the disaster site.

The First Great Hope

Like so many others, he held out great hope for days that survivors would be pulled from the huge mounds of twisted steel and shattered concrete. After all, he had thought, the subgrade of the complex did stretch down six levels. "I was positive that there were people down there, particularly some of our people who knew the buildings," he said.

Because the search-and-rescue operation at the surface was taking time to come together, Chanfrau asked the Port Authority bridge painters, who know how to repel, if they could check the Trade Center's refrigeration plant five levels below ground. The refrigeration plant could be accessed from the PATH tracks, Chanfrau said.

With a set of construction plans and advice from engineers, the bridge painters repelled down to the fifth level, making them probably the first crew to survey the PATH station following the attacks, Chanfrau said. They found the area flooded and deserted. And when they opened the roll-up door to the refrigeration plant, all they saw was a smoldering field of rubble.

"I think at that point the hope of finding people--at least for me--just wasn't there," Chanfrau said. "This was probably the fourth day."

Of its 2,300 employees at the World Trade Center, the Port Authority lost 75 on Sept. 11. One of them was Chanfrau's friend Jean Andrucki. Only one person in her group made it out safely before Tower One collapsed. The victims' faces, many vibrant and smiling, peer out from a memorial photo poster that hangs over Chanfrau's desk in his Jersey City office. In the months after the tragedy, he and co-workers attended dozens of funerals and memorial services for their fallen colleagues. "We are still doing that," he said. "We have 27 whose remains have not been identified yet."

Psychological Effects Remain

Chanfrau was particularly concerned about the psychological impact of Sept. 11 on Port Authority police working at ground zero, because they found themselves doing a grim job that was worlds away from their normal duties. So once the operation changed from rescue and recovery to simply recovery, the Port Authority pulled these officers out. Those who appeared to need help--a number were diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder--were brought in to meet with therapists. "We're still monitoring these people," Chanfrau said. "We have counselors here. Some people go to see them once a week or whenever they need it."

Other Port Authority employees, including Chanfrau, are seeking out private therapists. "I'm still going to counseling--I'm not embarrassed by it," he said. "And I never believed in counseling. I thought it was a crock." But he admits that it is helping him cope with the events and aftermath of that terrible day.

As more time passes, the World Trade Center devastation is receiving less coverage in the media, Chanfrau said. "For most people, life is going back to normal-otherwise, everybody'd go nuts," he said. "But here, you face it every day. So help is important-it's extremely important."

The agency's memorial service on Oct. 4, 2001, was "very difficult," Chanfrau said. Then on June 11, 2002, the Port Authority conducted an awards ceremony to bestow posthumous medals of honor: 37 police officers and commanders, and 38 civilians were honored. Awards also went to employees who had taken extraordinary actions to save lives on Sept. 11. Attending those commemorative events "is not an easy thing, but it's something that you have to do, that you need to do," Chanfrau said.

He isn't sure how he'll react to the one-year anniversary of the catastrophe. "I don't know--it's certainly going to be difficult. But I think life is going to be difficult for a long, long time," he said. One thing he won't do is stay away. Months ago, he signed up for a vacation cruise starting Sept. 7. Then it dawned on him that he couldn't possibly leave on that date because Sept. 11 fell right in the middle of that trip. He changed his reservations.

Appreciation for Life

Chanfrau--who described his youth as a "very serious kid: It was always school, work, home; school, work, home"--started out as a subway car cleaner at PATH. He attended classes while holding down that job, and eventually he was able to go into risk management for the Port Authority as a safety engineer in 1981.

But when a friend died suddenly at age 39, Chanfrau began to reassess his outlook, realizing that life is fragile, and the time to enjoy it is now. The events of Sept. 11 only reinforced that conviction, he added.

After his friend's death, Chanfrau bought a new motorcycle. His wife had made him sell his old one before they married, but she relented this time. Being a risk manager and riding a motorcycle are not incompatible, he emphasized. "Remember: The name of the game is risk management," he said. "I take refresher safety courses; I'm very careful; I'm not reckless."

Years later, another of Chanfrau's buddies, Maurice Barry, a Port Authority police officer, bought himself a motorcycle. He was in line to train last spring for the Port Authority motorcycle unit. And he suggested to Chanfrau that the two of them ride cross-country some time. Barry hoped to make the trip last summer, but it didn't work out.

"The idea was, we would bike one way and then fly back, or vice versa, but we never got to do it," Chanfrau said. And Barry, his close friend of 28 years, never will; he was one of those killed at the World Trade Center.

"So now," Chanfrau said, looking at Barry's beaming face in the top row of the poster, "I have to go and do this."

by Barbara Bowers