As the World Trade Center towers fall, a brother watches and a search ensues

Emily M. Smith
ASME NEWS

For seven long days, Bob Gullickson and two of his younger brothers dug through the remains of the World Trade Center. On the eighth day, all hope that they would recover the body of a fourth brother dissolved.

Gullickson, an ASME member who is the senior mechanical engineer for Turner Construction, which is one of the main construction companies involved in the recovery effort at the site known as Ground Zero, had watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center fall from his office in the SoHo section of New York.

And with the collapse, the timeline was reset for Gullickson's family as well as the members of some 5,000 other families, if not most of America.

"There's before Sept. 11," Gullickson, the oldest of five children, said, "and there's after."

As he watched the smoke from the dual infernos burning within the towers of the World Trade Center, Gullickson said that he knew that his brother Joe, a Staten Island firefighter, had been dispatched. With Ladder Company 101 being so close to Manhattan, Gullickson said, Joe was often sent to New York to assist.

Worry about the brother who was also his best friend, built incrementally, but didn't take over until Gullickson saw the South Tower crumble. Then he called Joe's firehouse to get information on his brother's whereabouts, and the 42-year-old father of two said, "I got the worst answer I could possibly get. He was dispatched. But they hadn't heard from him."

Gullickson called the hospitals. No information. He decided to see for himself. But as soon as he arrived at the city block where the Twin Towers had been, Gullickson understood that his brother, also a father of two young daughters who lived two houses away from his own, had not survived.

"I didn't think anybody could survive that," Gullickson said he thought to himself upon seeing what remained of 220 floors of office space. "It's dust to dust, now," he said he thought.

He came across several hundred firefighters on West Street near Stuyvesant High School who had been inside the towers or were nearby when they fell. "They looked shell-shocked," Gullicksons said, adding that the little they would tell him about Joe only confirmed what he had already concluded.

In a fire department command station set up nearby, Gullickson found many more firefighters who were trying to collect information about the missing. He stayed at the station until early Wednesday.

"There were firefighters missing brothers. Firefighters missing sons," Gullickson said. "It was mass confusion." The chaos was compounded by the time of the attack, a shift change for many firehouses.

In the end, Gullickson said, no one there that night got good news.

As thousands of firefighters, police officers, emergency service units and others continued their pilgrimage to Ground Zero on Sept. 12, Gullickson went home for a few hours to recoup and reassure his wife and children. He returned several hours later with his brothers, Tom, a postal worker in Brooklyn, and Ralph, a Staten Island police officer who had gone to the site earlier, also looking for Joe.

In the eight days the brothers worked at Ground Zero, they cleared debris in the hope of finding survivors, looked for clues to help them understand what happened to their brother, and reported back to the dozens of family members who had gathered with their sister and parents on Staten Island awaiting news.

But the only tangible clue that would be found had already been discovered by Gullickson that Tuesday night, on West Street, not far from where he had talked with the group of shell-shocked firefighters, underneath the pieces of the pedestrian bridge that had connected the two towers.

Enough of the fire truck remained that Gullickson was able to determine it was the one in which Joe, a lieutenant, would have ridden. From the truck's position, Gullickson said, he figured that Joe had gone into the lobby of the Marriott Hotel, a 22-story building that connected the west side of the South Tower to the south side of the North Tower. As a point of deployment, many firefighters had gathered in the hotel lobby and were trapped there when the towers came down.

Little else the brothers found, either of the buildings or the people who were lost that day, was recognizable, Gullickson said.

"In all that time, with all those offices, I didn't see a desk, a chair, a computer, a phone," Gullickson said. "It was nothing but dust and steel. Everything had been pulverized. With all those windows, there wasn't even a piece of glass that you would cut yourself on."

Since those days at Ground Zero, as he picks his way through the fragments of information he has about Joe and the many emotions tied to that day, Gullickson finds himself trying to reconcile his marvel at the engineering design of the towers that saved thousands of lives with a suspicion that, in a sense, the design may have cost the firefighters theirs.

"That was a saving grace, the way it fell," Gullickson said. The time it took the towers to fall allowed many thousands of people to escape. The pancake manner of their collapse also spared the many buildings and their inhabitants in the surrounding area. "But for the firefighters?" he said, "it was like a huge booby trap for them."

Bob Gullickson searched for one of his brothers, a NYC firefighter, at Ground Zero.

As the senior mechanical engineer, Gullickson's job at Turner is to estimate the cost of mechanical and electrical systems in preconstruction. So, he knows about all the money and time that was spent to fortify the World Trade Center since the Ryder truck explosion in 1993, and to ensure safety. Some of that work was done by Turner.

"Who would have thought a plane would drop from the sky," he asks. He also knows that protecting buildings from terrorist-piloted airplane attacks is difficult and expensive, if not impossible.

"The battle was lost when they took over the airplane," he said of the Sept. 11 hijackers. "That means we already didn't do our jobs at the airport."

But if this battle with terrorism was lost, in Gullickson's mind, the war won't ever be. Very quickly, the physical destruction that he saw was overshadowed by the goodness he witnessed in others while working at Ground Zero and since. For Gullickson, Sept. 11 is not just about loss.

People Gullickson hadn't heard from in 20 years sent him notes, showed up at Joe's memorial service, offered to help establish a scholarship. And in collecting stories for Joe's children from the firefighters in Ladder Company 101, Gullickson discovered something about Joe he never thought to look for.

In meeting and talking with the firefighters in 101, Gullickson said many knew of him already from Joe. "They said, 'Oh yeah, the engineer.' I didn't realize he talked about me," Gullickson said. "He was my best friend, and my biggest fan."

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