After 9-11: An Engineer's Work at the World Trade Center

by Donald Friedman

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, have forever changed the lives of the individuals and families that were directly affected and have changed history for everyone. Those same events began a 24-hour-per-day, 7-day-per-week effort by structural engineers to investigate the condition of the buildings remaining at the World Trade Center site, to work with the rescue and clean-up crews in evaluating the safety of the towering piles of rubble, and to try to explain what happened to the buildings as they collapsed. After 9-11 describes one engineer’s experiences on site and off as part of that effort. The government agencies responsible for the physical site after the building collapses – the New York City Department of Design and Construction and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – began planning the work assisting the emergency service crews and cleaning the site on September 11. Friedman, as part of the first effort, was on site beginning September 12 and continuing through the fall. His account includes descriptions of the damage to the buildings near the site, the methods used by engineers to assist the rescue and recovery work, and what it was like to be part of the civilian response to the disaster.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2002

About the author

Sometime trial attorney and perennial procrastinator, presently novelist, short story writer, and essayist, I’m the author of the multiply translated The Writer’s Brush, Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers, which The New York Times Sunday Book Review described as “sparkling audaciously on every page,” and which the American Libraries Association called “a grand feat of research and interpretation.” My first novel, The Hand Before the Eye, black comic and shot through with religious themes—praised by Publishers Weekly for “its impassioned finale of spiritual redemption,” was a Vanity Fair Hot Type Recommendation. You’re My Dawg, Dog: A Lexicon of Dog Terms for People, has brought pleasure equally to dog and word lovers.

I was born in Philip Roth’s neighborhood, the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, but did most of my growing up in suburban South Orange. There, at ten, I enrolled in private art classes and began oil painting which continued through high school.

At Washington University, St. Louis, where, apart from occasional cartoon contributions to the college paper and private sketching, my art career came to an end, and my creative impulses were mainly expressed in fiction writing. It was then that I sensed a connection between the urge to draw and paint and to write, but had no idea what it could be. When I ran across a reference to D. H. Lawrence’s paintings it made an impression; as did a book of Henry Miller’s watercolors that someone gave me not long after.

In the years that followed graduation, after I’d gotten my J.D. from Rutgers Law School and an L.L.M. from New York University Law School, had started practicing law, married and raised two children, I continued to make notes about writers who were artists from which The Writer’s Brush eventuated. I also began to study fiction writing and to write in the early morning before going to work. Now I have three novels under my belt and a fourth in the works.