ENR editor Tom Sawyer traveled extensively to project sites, disaster areas and war zones far afield and close to home. As the last entry in ENR's 150th anniversary coverage, he offers some thoughts on how disaster responses can bring out the best in people.

Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and wars destroy infrastructure and put lives at risk. They call for urgent correction. Most of those calls go directly to construction, which is expected to get to work and set things right. 

ENR’s mission is to report the successes, failures, lessons-learned and innovations achieved by resourceful and sometimes heroic people driving construction. Sharing that knowledge is the key to advance and improve the business of building—and the bottom line. Some of ENR's most compelling stories are about designers, engineers, contractors, tradespeople and laborers mobilizing during disasters to restore equilibrium. 

Reporting like that is best done by eyewitnesses. People who report should stand out of the way but be in the place where the story is going on to hear the noise, smell the air and watch and listen closely to people facing up to the challenges.

New York City, 2001 

This was driven home to me when two hijacked planes turned the twin towers of the World Trade Center into a mountain of burning debris on Sept. 11, 2001. By that afternoon, heavy equipment operators and their machines, contractors, steelworkers and others were streaming by the thousands toward the disaster to staunch the wound and, hopefully, rescue survivors. 

When ENR’s editors convened the next morning to break down our tasks for covering the attacks in New York City, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and in Shanksville, Pa., I claimed the angle of reporting the response of construction workers at Ground Zero. I set out in my construction boots and hardhat to go down to what was already being called “the hole” —wanting to bring back stories and photos of construction’s people at work, while the rest of the news industry focused on firefighters, ambulance crews, rescue squads, soldiers, cops and survivors.

Police barricades had locked down lower Manhattan because it was a dangerous crime scene and the number of would-be volunteers trying to get there was overwhelming. Volunteers were told to muster at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, where we stood in long lines and signed registers. Some of us even boarded buses to clear debris and search for survivors and bodies, only to be turned back at the end of the day and told to report to a given street corner the next morning. There simply were too many of us, and there was no responsible way for crisis managers to use so many people in such a dangerous place.

Meanwhile, the normal process of contracting for services was taking hold, even as the lists of volunteers and their skillsets continued to grow. The registrations were diligently catalogued, and assembly points assigned by crisis managers and other volunteers, but it was a sham of social engineering whose purpose was to contain and calm the army of volunteers so they would gradually give up and drift away, while the growing lists of their proffered services were taken into back rooms and discarded. I know this because months later I was called by one of those volunteer crisis managers who rescued the list from the garbage and used it to put together an organization to better manage volunteer responders in future crises. 

I realized it was a dead end on the morning of my second day, so I started to walk downtown. I hitchhiked a ride with a police tow-truck operator shuttling in and out to drag away crushed firetrucks, ambulances and police cars. That got me through the barricades. 

I advanced discretely as reporters were being detained by police and boxed up in a room at city hall. But ultimately, in my hardhat and boots—which most ENR editors keep at hand for site visits and ordinary reporting—I managed to get to what remained of the World Trade Center and capture photos of construction workers as they tested the stability of the compromised plaza upon which we stood. The surface thrummed like the head of a drum as tiny Bobcat machines opened passages around the burning mountains of debris and began the year-long task of cutting up and removing mangled steel. Rows and rows of unused stretchers built from two-by-fours and plywood stood ready to receive survivors or bodies. 

A national guardsman with his rifle challenged me and demanded my credentials. I began to say “Engineering News-Record,” but only got the first word out—“Engineering…”—before he waved me on my way. 

I went to the hole many times over the ensuing months, always looking for stories about the people serving to restore infrastructure so it could resume its service and support safety and equilibrium.

Sawyer in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, following the 2010 earthquake.
Photo by Tom Sawyer

After that, my approach to crisis reporting has since taken me to observe the work of construction’s disaster responders in other ravaged places, including:

• The drowned city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, where I flew in a helicopter with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers colonel making his first assessment of the situation after being ordered to get the water out of the city. This led to many, many subsequent stories about dewatering New Orleans and analyzing the disaster.

• The post-earthquake-ruins of Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2010 to report on the conditions that would be faced by U.S. contractors aching to come and help. This set up many subsequent reports about why the earthquake caused such vast destruction and loss of life, and how the adoption and enforcement of better structural and seismic engineering codes could protect the lives and property of Haitians in the future.

• The vast tsunami-razed expanses of Japan’s Tohoku coast in 2011 with engineers dispatched by the American Society of Civil Engineers who were searching for clues in the wreckage to validate ongoing modeling and research on tsunami loads. Their goal was to create design guidelines for tsunami-resistant facilities and shelters. The data collected on this trip accelerated the group's addition of a new chapter on Tsunami Loads and Effects In ASCE 7 -16., Standard, Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures. It is the first national, consensus-based standard for tsunami resilience for use in the states of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii. 

It has always been my goal to tell the stories of construction’s people at work in very challenging environments, but it doesn’t always have to be in response to disaster. Sometimes just normal construction projects are amazingly difficult and call for extreme measures of planning, creativity and more than a little courage.

Norway, 2005

I recall riding in a little Toyota pickup truck down a tunnel being bored a mile under the North Sea for a cooling water inlet at a natural gas processing plant on the west coast of Norway. 

At the end of the tunnel, workers were carefully setting a spiraling ring of dynamite charges in the ceiling that would soon be fired off sequentially, starting at the center, to make a gradually expanding hole through which the sea would rush in with enough force to wash the ceiling debris out of the way. If they simply blew it all at once, the workers told me, the end of the tunnel would collapse and seal it. (ENR Aug. 22/29, 2005, p 28)

Iraq, 2003 and 2004

But the ultimate construction disaster volunteers may be combat engineers of the U.S. armed services who plan and execute construction tasks that protect and advance the missions of their fellow warriors during peace, in battle and through post-conflict reconstruction. Unlike my high school peers who were compelled by law to serve in Vietnam or the kids of my father’s generation who died in Korea and World War II, none of the soldiers around me in Iraq were hauled away from civilian life and forced to be there. They chose to enlist and serve the military needs of our country. I have enormous respect and gratitude for anyone who steps forward and volunteers to do that because it is necessary to have brave, well-trained and well-equipped people in military service if our country is to survive.

The combat engineers work with courage, knowledge, skill and care, even while under enemy fire. My boots and I spent time with them, too, so I could report to ENR readers what they did and how they did it by observing them at work during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

It started after I had spent months in 2002 and 2003 fruitlessly asking the U.S. Dept. of Defense for permission to go “down range” and report on the troops building up in the desert of Kuwait for what I was sure was going to turn into a war. It seemed only logical to me that the Army could not set 125,000 soldiers down in the desert for months and months without considerable engineering support. Then the journalists embed program was authorized late in 2002 and I was assigned a choice berth with a unit of the U.S. Army’s 130^th Engineer Brigade. The brigade’s leaders had been planning, and now were assigned, to execute the army’s engineer support for the invasion.

Sawyer with his mobile office while embedded with combat engineers during the Iraq War.
Photo courtesy Tom Sawyer

On the day before the invasion launched, I was with a small group of combat engineers who were monitoring and supporting a bulldozer operator filling in a section of a tank-trap ditch on the Iraqi side of the electrified border fence, under the watchful eyes of machine gunners and soldiers back on the Kuwaiti side. After we pulled back, U.S. rockets and projectiles began roaring overhead. By dawn, tanks and infantry were pouring through the lane I had seen the engineers prepare the day before—as well as at 17 other similar lanes along the front.

The soldiers and officers I listened to did not evaluate the wisdom or justifications given for the invasion, although many were quite critical about what they saw as a lack of planning for the days, weeks and years of reconstruction that would follow. They simply stepped up each day to accomplish their missions with amazing energy, thoughtfulness, discipline and courage—no matter the obstacles. 

The engineers had a process for getting into, and out of, threatening situations quickly to deprive the enemy time to organize an attack. I went with a squad to assess the carrying capacity of a partially destroyed bridge on the way to Baghdad. The engineers parked their convoy of vehicles in a “herringbone” pattern to facilitate a quick getaway if the growing crowd of tough-looking young men gathering around us became aggressive. 

The underside of the bridge was still packed with explosive bundles, all wired together. Only a portion of them had gone off in the demolition attempt. They had blown out sections of the tops of pillars, but that had just dropped the beams and deck supports down onto the stumps, where they still bore and had good capacity. The engineers cleared the bridge for tanks and trucks to cross. 

Gunfire, missiles, rocket propelled grenades, mortars, roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices and chemical, biological and nuclear warfare were constant concerns. We fully expected to “get slimed” by chemical or biological agents during the first weeks of the campaign. At times the noise of machine guns and explosions nearby was like the soundtrack of a war movie. 

Sometimes in the first weeks of the invasion, we had to take shelter when warned of incoming missiles targeting our location. The radios would crackle with the code words “Lightning … Lightning ..,” followed by map coordinates. When those coordinates were ours, everyone donned nuclear, chemical and biological warfare suits—which can be done with amazing speed under the right motivation—and then took what shelter we could while listening hopefully for the boom of Patriots taking the incoming missiles out.

Sawyer (left) seen here with fellow ENR editor Andrew Wright while embedded with the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq.
Photo courtesy of Tom Sawyer

We grew very well practiced at getting into our protective gear because gas alarms went off frequently. The NBC [nuclear, biological and chemical] suits came with injectors of anti-nerve gas agents that we were advised to jam into our thighs if we got slimed and leave it there, or to bend the needle and hang it on our suits before we passed out so someone discovering us later would better understand our state. 

The engineers never seemed to do much more than pause their work when the gas alarms went off; sometimes they just donned their protective gear and worked right through it.

The combat engineers went about constantly armed to the teeth in “battle rattle” and were prepared to do whatever was required to pursue their missions, which always were about clearing mines and explosives, removing obstacles and building protections for maneuvering forces whenever they paused. They built missile shelters, encircling berms, checkpoints, forward operation bases, roads, bridges, airfields and anything else required.

Sometimes engineers had to fight to protect themselves, and sometimes they died. Their comrades-in-arms took time to honor the dead, then regrouped and went back to work. 

During my years at ENR my commitment to its readers was to tell the personal side of construction’s response to extreme challenges by joining those who were stepping up wherever I could. I wanted to stand beside them, see what they saw and live what they lived as much as I could without interfering—and tell their stories. 

ENR was a great ride.