In fulfilling a call to civic duty, the life of an ASME member is spared, again

Emily M. Smith
ASME NEWS

Tuesday, Sept. 11, was election day in New York City, and Edwin Monteverde was running late to his office on the 86th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower because he stopped to vote.

He hadn't expected to arrive more than 30 minutes late to the complex he helped design and where he had worked for more than three decades, most recently as the Port Authority's general property manager of the South Tower until the buildings were leased in July, making sure that the facilities were operating smoothly for visitors as well as tenants.

FORESHADOW — The collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, as seen from Grundy Park in Jersey City, N.J., on Sept. 11. The monument was erected in the 1990s to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, in which 4,250 Polish officers were executed by Soviet troops on Stalin's orders during World War II.

As his car crept along in heavy morning traffic and the Twin Towers gradually came into view, Monteverde saw dense, black smoke cascading ominously from the North Tower and began to sense that something beyond his imagination had occurred.

"It didn't seem like an electrical fire," Monteverde said, from what has become his office in the Port Authority's Command Center located near the Holland Tunnel. "It never crossed my mind that it was a plane." Then, he turned on the radio.

"I was stunned, and I cried," Monteverde said of hearing the news that an airplane had been piloted into each of the towers. He thought of all the people inside; of those employed by the buildings' tenants; of his Port Authority colleagues.

Overcome by emotion, he pulled over to the side of the road until he regained his composure. Then, Monteverde continued his drive.

Worried about the building and its occupants, knowing that his knowledge of the towers would be valuable, Monteverde talked to firefighters on a passing truck about how to get closer to the towers. They had little information.

He stopped at a firehouse. No one was there.

Then he heard on the radio that both towers had collapsed. And he stopped driving.

"It was almost like H.G. Wells making the announcement about the end of the world," he recalled.

Hired by the Port Authority in 1963, Monteverde added the World Trade Center to his responsibilities a few years later when he began working on the design of the buildings' pump stations. He moved to the Twin Towers in October 1970.

Like most of the Port Authority employees who worked in the WTC, the complex was not just a structure to Monteverde.

"We're like a city within a city," he said of the community that had developed among the facilities' employees. Whenever they talked about the WTC, Monteverde explained, "It was always 'my building' or 'our building.' It was never 'the building.' "

That personal connection to the World Trade Center wasn't altered when the towers were leased to Silverstein Properties Inc. in late July. Monteverde had continued working in the South Tower in his role as a member of the Port Authority's wrapup team. Nor was that connection severed when the planes struck.

Watching his building in the aftermath of the attack, Monteverde, a father of four with grandchildren, said, "It was like seeing a child born and grow and go through all kinds of different changes, and then, he or she goes off to war, and you don't see them again."

Since the first plane hit, thoughts of another morning have drifted through his mind. In 1993, as Monteverde had sat in a morning meeting that day, only a cinderblock wall separated him from the Ryder truck in the parking lot that was set to explode.

He wasn't there when the bomb went off that time because some Port Authority employees wanted to eat lunch in the room. So, Monteverde took a break from the meeting and went to the 35th floor to order a sandwich. He felt the explosion a little later. Everyone eating lunch in the room that day died.

Now, as he did then, Monteverde said he tries not to ask, "Why them? Why not me?"

Instead, he and his PA colleagues work 12-hour shifts in the Command Center to help tenants. To help colleagues. To help city, state and federal agencies working in the recovery effort. And, as a mechanical engineer, to consider what will need to happen in the future when rebuilding begins.

"New thinking will have to take place when designing any new building," Monteverde said. "We will learn a lot from this. With new technology, we will take measures to limit the damage. We will consider new materials to withstand great heat. We will have to come up with materials that will lend themselves to new parameters of protection."

Monteverde never made it to the site of the World Trade Center on that Tuesday. Two months later, he has no immediate plans to go back. Co-workers who have, advised him to think twice before going.

For now, he said, he is taking their advice, "I think I would like to remember the World Trade Center the way it was."

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