END OF AN ERA

WHEN THE TWIN TOWERS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER COLLAPSED A YEAR AGO, ALAN REISS LOST DOZENS OF FRIENDS—AND THE BUILDINGS HE LOVED.

By Karen Feldscher

itting in a meeting at a ground-floor deli in Tower One, Alan Reiss didn’t hear a thing when the plane hit. After he saw people running through the concourse, he thought maybe someone had pulled out a gun. But once he was outside the World Trade Center, he saw bits of paper fluttering through the air—on fire.

A bomb, he thought. He’d been mentally prepared for that, having been through the 1993 truck bombing that tore through the trade center’s parking garage, killing six people—four of them employees of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, like Reiss—and injuring more than a thousand others.

Immediately after that attack, Reiss, then the World Trade Center’s supervising engineer, began overseeing repairs, instituting new security measures, and just generally pulling the buildings back into shape. Five years later, as a result of his exemplary work, he landed what he still calls his “dream job”: director of the World Trade department at the Port Authority. That meant Reiss managed operations for the 110-story twin towers and two other buildings in the trade center complex.

The towers were his babies. “He loved those buildings,” says Lonnie Reiss, who’s been married to Alan for nearly eighteen years. “He knew every inch of them—electrical systems, elevators, fire alarms, security. You name it, he knew what was going on.”

Now the buildings had been attacked again. Reiss ran to the trade center’s police headquarters, in Building Five. The officers there thought maybe it had been a missile.

“I grab a detective, and the two of us run out to the plaza,” says Reiss. “The whole side of Tower One is ripped apart, and flames are coming out. We said, ‘It’s awful big for a missile.’ There was all this debris on the plaza. Then we saw the wheel and the nose gear of a plane.”


Ace troubleshooter

Alan Reiss (pronounced “Reese”) never expected to be at the helm of the World Trade Center. A business executive had always run the complex; Reiss was an engineer. “But,” he says, “they realized a lot of the stuff going on in the buildings was my doing.”

Reiss, E’75, had joined the Port Authority in 1984. He started as an electrical engineer, responsible for operating and maintaining electrical systems at the World Trade Center, the PATH rail lines, and the airports, tunnels, bridges, and ports managed by the Port Authority.

It was a great position for a guy who’d known since he was a kid tinkering with radios that he wanted to be an engineer. Soon after graduating from Northeastern, he’d worked at the Northport Power Station, run by the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO), where he’d had several co-ops. He moved over to the Port Authority after LILCO ran into financial difficulties.

Reiss quickly gained a reputation at the Port Authority as an ace troubleshooter. In 1988, he became the World Trade Center’s supervising engineer, in charge of the complex’s major systems. After the 1993 bombing, he was named special assistant to the director and put in charge of reconstruction, a job that required him to meet with top brass twice a day. Although the blast had created a hole four stories high and a hundred feet wide, Reiss got the towers reopened in just a month.

In 1998, when the head of the World Trade department retired, Reiss, then forty-six, stepped into the position.

“I loved it,” he says. “The people at work were like a second family. We were addicted to the job. We had people who came into the World Trade department and stayed for thirty years. It was the prestige of working there, one of the world’s tallest buildings. People would look up to you.

“And there were so many innovations we made,” he says. “After the 1993 bombing, we implemented a ten-year redevelopment program. We were spending half a billion dollars on upgrades. It was an engineer’s dream.”

Eighty-hour weeks were typical. Not without reason: The World Trade Center—workplace for 40,000, destination for two million visitors a year, location of Manhattan’s largest indoor mall—was like a city unto itself. Floods, fires, power outages, elevator entrapments—Reiss stayed on top of everything. “I don’t like surprises,” he says simply.


A shocking attack

The 1993 bomb had been shock enough. In its wake, Reiss and his colleagues did their utmost to stop or contain any other attacks, instituting tight security measures and improving fire-safety procedures.

“Outside security consultants and the Feds told us the terrorist weapon of choice was still a car or truck bomb,” says Reiss. “That’s what we were trying to prevent. Even if someone had told me the threat was a missile, I don’t know what I could have done, let alone if someone had told me it was going to be a plane. No one ever thought about a hijacked plane being rammed into a building. And what do you do about it, anyway? There’s no force field.”

And so the $100 million spent beefing up security and fire safety hadn’t prevented the gaping hole in Tower One and the flames spewing out. Looking up from the plaza, Reiss began to take the measure of what he was up against. He and the detective grabbed the plane wheel and dragged it into the police station, figuring it might be important later.

Then he got to work answering the station’s phones, helping to evacuate the complex. Tenants were calling from the upper levels of Tower One, screaming that they were trapped, they couldn’t breathe. Reiss told them to stuff wet towels under doors and sit tight until help arrived. He was relieved to reach some of his colleagues from the 88th floor—where his office was, where he could have been, if not for his early meeting—via a two-way radio. They were on their way down the stairs.

Suddenly, someone on the police radio yelled something about people on fire. A detective, FBI personnel, and a cameraman ran into the station saying Tower Two had been hit. That’s when Reiss knew it was war.

While some people ran over to Tower Two to see what they could do, Reiss continued answering the phones. He tried to call his wife but couldn’t get through, so he called his mother and told her to tell Lonnie he was okay.

Then Reiss heard a sound “like the loudest rumble you could imagine,” he says. “And it kept getting louder. It was like a thousand freight trains. You knew something was really wrong. Then the lights went out.” Reiss dove under the police desk.

“The walls, the ceiling started coming down,” he says. “Everybody in the station said, ‘That’s it. We’re out of here.’ But the front door was blocked with debris. We tried to get out the back doors, but they were also blocked. It never crossed my mind that Tower Two was down, that that’s what the debris was from.”

It did occur to Reiss that he might die. “But I just snapped out of it,” he says, “because I had a family I wanted to get home to.”

Reiss and the others covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs and hacked their way out with an ax. They ran through the first-floor concourse and got outside through an emergency exit in a Borders bookstore. Reiss ran into the post office across the street to catch his breath. Then he and a friend, lawyer John Mauk, headed back outside again.

“There was like an inch of paper and sheet-rock dust on the streets,” says Reiss. “It was like walking through snow. We were at Greenwich and Barclay, and I say to John, ‘Two World Trade Center’s gone.’ John says, ‘No, it’s not gone. You just can’t see it because of the dust.’

“I say, ‘No, it’s f——ing gone.’” Reiss explained to Mauk what they could see lying on the ground: “Those are the steel beams of the World Trade Center. It’s gone.”


Realizing the worst

In a few minutes, Reiss met up with a cadre of Port Authority police and started back to Tower One with a few of them to see if it was okay for emergency personnel to return. A block away, Reiss smelled gas. He looked up: The top of the tower was rocking and twisting. “It’s not safe,” he said. Then the windows started popping out, and the building began to collapse.

Reiss and police captain Tony Whitaker sprinted three and a half blocks, managing to dive behind a chain-link fence before what Reiss calls “the evil black cloud” descended on them. “We just hugged each other for three or four minutes,” Reiss says. “It was pitch-black. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We would just touch each other and say, ‘Okay, I’m alive. You’re alive.’”

After Tower One fell, it was eerily silent, save for the high-pitched “man down” alarms that firefighters wear, which sound if they register no motion after thirty seconds. “We heard them going off all over the place,” says Reiss.

He finally hitched a ride out of Manhattan with Port Authority police chief William Hall, who, after careening through the Holland Tunnel at breakneck speed, dropped Reiss off at a Port Authority building on the other side. It took him an hour to get a call through to his wife, who had pulled their son, Eric, out of school and was sitting by the phone, watching the disaster unfold on television. Later, Reiss caught another ride to the Jersey City building where the Port Authority had set up an emergency command center.

And he got on the phone again, trying to figure out who was accounted for and who was missing, contacting family members of his staff to offer the latest news.

“That night, we began to get a list of the survivors, and a list of who wasn’t around,” Reiss says. “I stayed in New Jersey the first two nights, slept on the floor for a couple of hours. We talked to each other about our experiences—that was one way of relieving the stress.”

“It literally ripped him apart,” recalls Nancy Seliga, who, as One World Trade Center property manager, used to work with Reiss. She caught up with him around two that first afternoon. “As soon as he saw me, his eyes filled up, and we started talking about who we hadn’t heard from. He had some moments where he totally fell apart, and others where he would just do what he had to do.”

“The next morning, that was the worst,” says Reiss. “By then, we knew who was missing. We pretty much knew by Wednesday night that these people were gone.”

All told, the Port Authority lost 75 of its 2,000 employees on September 11. Reiss knew more than half of them. Sixteen had worked for him.


The aftermath

Reiss finally got home to Long Island late Thursday night. “He came in, then he lost it,” says Lonnie. “We were crying, and hugging, and kissing. The whole family was here.

“It’s not funny,” she says, “but when he went upstairs to wash up, he stuck his hand in his pocket and found all his keys to the World Trade Center. He said, ‘I guess I don’t need these any more,’ and tossed them down the stairs. My son took them, and now he sleeps with them every night.”

Even if September 11 had never happened, Reiss would have given up his keys shortly. He was about to take another position within the Port Authority—as deputy director of aviation, helping run one of the world’s most complex airport systems, encompassing LaGuardia, Kennedy, Newark, and Teterboro Airports, as well as a downtown Manhattan heliport.

The Port Authority had decided to lease the World Trade Center property to a developer; staying on at the trade center would have meant leaving the Port Authority, which Reiss didn’t want to do. In fact, Reiss’s breakfast meeting the morning of the 11th had been called to discuss the transition.

After September 11, Reiss didn’t take a day off for nearly two months. There was so much to do: Help with the rescue and recovery. Keep the World Trade department operating. Talk with reporters. Keep in touch with staff through phone calls and e-mail. Get paychecks out. Reassign staff. Re-create lost documents.

He worked a 6 a.m.–to–7 p.m. schedule in addition to commuting six hours each day between his house and the temporary office in New Jersey.

It wasn’t until November that he got his whole department together again, in an emotional meeting at the McGraw-Hill Building on the Avenue of the Americas. “That was the last staff meeting,” he says.


Living with loss

Aside from all the work, the magnitude of the loss has carved a wide swath through Reiss’s life. Every time a Port Authority employee’s remains were identified, Reiss and his managers would pick whoever had been closest to the deceased to inform the family. There have been dozens of memorial services and funerals; Reiss has attended more than fifty.

“The stress is just unbelievable,” he says. “They have nineteen thousand body parts, and they’re still doing DNA matches. It’s nerve-wracking crazy.

“I went to a service for one of my people around Thanksgiving,” Reiss says. “Then, the week before Easter, the wife gets a call from a cop at the [site] saying her husband has just been found. They’d found his driver’s license. She’s screaming at me, ‘How can this be? I already buried the guy!’ The medical examiner backtracks and finds they’d mislabeled a toothbrush and given her the wrong body. When I found out, I just walked out of the office, crying.”

All in all, Reiss seems to have dealt with the trauma remarkably well. He didn’t panic the day of the attack, maybe because he’s been trained as an emergency medical technician. Lonnie says her husband has always been clearheaded in a crisis. “He’s able to take control, to focus, to know—a, b, c—what needs to be done,” she says. “That’s just him, God bless him.”

Reiss did have some nightmares. Saw a counselor a couple of times. Having been through the 1993 bombing, he says he knew “it was important to talk it out, not keep it inside.”

“We look at life a little bit differently now,” says Lonnie. “We know how much you can lose very quickly. What’s important is your family, and that everybody is healthy, and that you let everybody know you love them. We just watched the video from Eric’s bar mitzvah in January, and it was great to see Alan dancing and happy, to see that he could laugh and have a good time.”

At work, Reiss is concentrating on airport security, investigating new technologies such as fingerprint readers and facial-recognition devices, and exploring better ways to handle passenger screening and background checks.

In late May, when the cleanup of the World Trade Center site was officially over, Reiss was one of those who helped remove the last beam, draped in an American flag, carrying it like a coffin in a solemn procession through lower Manhattan. “It was pretty difficult,” he says. “I said to myself, ‘I’m carrying out one of my people who hasn’t been found yet.’ I couldn’t make eye contact with anybody because I thought I would lose it.”

He likes the work he’s doing now, but sometimes he misses the old days. “They were amazing buildings,” he says. “For the people who ran them, they became our lives. We all still stay in touch. We worked hard, but we also partied. We did nutty things like have a barbecue in the parking lot, or roast a pig, or have a clambake.”

He’s been back to the site only a handful of times. “In my mind, I’ve accepted what happened—I was there that day—but it’s still a surprise to see that empty space.

“It’s a hole in the ground now,” he adds. “I want to remember it the way it was.”