[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 79 (Friday, June 14, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1047]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E1047]]



 IN HONOR OF PETER RINALDI AND THE ENGINEERS OF THE PORT AUTHORITY OF 
                        NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. JERROLD NADLER

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 13, 2002

  Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, there were many heroes on September 11th, 
and many more in the months that have followed. I rise today to pay 
tribute to the engineers of the Port Authority of New York and New 
Jersey, each of whom could tell you a different story about the 
difficult days and arduous work following September 11th. I would like 
to tell you a little about one Port Authority engineer, Peter Rinaldi, 
who joined his fellow New Yorkers in the tremendous rescue and recovery 
effort at Ground Zero. The following excerpt is from ``American Ground: 
Unbuilding the World Trade Center,'' by William Langewiesche, published 
in the July/August 2002 edition of Atlantic Monthly.

       At age fifty-two, Rinaldi was an inconspicuous olive-
     skinned man with graying hair and a moustache, who observed 
     the world through oversized glasses and had a quirky way of 
     suddenly raising his eyebrows, not in surprise but as a 
     prompt or in suggestion. He had grown up in the Bronx as the 
     son of a New York cop, had gone to college there, and had 
     married a girl he had met in high school. Though he and his 
     wife had moved to the suburbs of Westchester County to raise 
     their three sons, he had never cut his connection to the 
     city, or quite shed his native accent. For twenty-eight years 
     he had commuted to the World Trade Center, to offices in the 
     North Tower, where he worked for the Port Authority of New 
     York and New Jersey, deep within its paternal embrace and 
     completely secure in his existence. There was an early 
     warning in the terrorist bombing of 1993, which caught him in 
     an elevator. Nonetheless, he was wholly unprepared for the 
     destruction that followed in 2001. During the days after the 
     attack, when to New York City officials the Port Authority 
     seemed to have disappeared, it was hunkered down across the 
     river in its New Jersey offices, suffering through a 
     collective emptiness so severe that people themselves felt 
     hollowed out. Peter Rinaldi felt it too, though he was far 
     away at the time of the attack, vacationing with his wife, 
     Audrey, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
       Back in New York . . . Rinaldi was assigned to New York 
     City's recovery team . . . [and] given the job of supervising 
     the consultants who had been brought in for the specialized 
     belowground engineering. The underground, beneath the pile, 
     was a wilderness of ruins, a short walk from the city but as 
     far removed from life there as any place could be. It burned 
     until January, and because it contained voids and weakened 
     structures, it collapsed progressively until the spring. The 
     job of mapping the chaos fell to a small team of about six 
     engineers who did some of the riskiest work at the site, 
     climbing through the crevices of a strange and unstable 
     netherworld, calmly charting its conditions, and returning 
     without complaint after major collapses had occurred.
       By mid-November only one important underground area 
     remained to be explored--a place people called ``the final 
     frontier,'' located deep under the center of the ruins, at 
     the foot of the former North Tower. It was the main chiller 
     plant, one of the world's largest air-conditioning 
     facilities--a two-acre chamber three stories high that 
     contained seven interconnected refrigeration units, each the 
     size of a locomotive and capable of holding up to 24,000 
     pounds of dangerous Freon gas.
       With the huge quantities potentially involved here, a 
     sudden leak would fill the voids underground and spread 
     across the surface of the pile, suffocating perhaps hundreds 
     of workers caught out on the rough terrain and unable to move 
     fast. To make matters worse, if the Freon cloud came into 
     contact with open flames, of which there were plenty here, it 
     would turn into airborne forms of hydrochloric and 
     hydrofluoric acids and also phosgene gas, related to the 
     mustard gas used during World War 1. Then it would go 
     drifting. People accepted the danger. The standard advice, 
     ``Just run like hell,'' was delivered with a little shrug. 
     Everyone knew that if the Freon came hunting for you at the 
     center of the pile, you would succumb.
       Of all the people setting out now for the chiller plant, 
     twenty men redefined by these ruins, the one who would have 
     the greatest influence on the unfolding story was an obscure 
     engineer, a lifelong New Yorker named Peter Rinaldi.

  For twenty-eight years the World Trade Center was a second home to 
Peter Rinaldi. After its destruction, he and his fellow Port Authority 
employees worked ``seven days a week, often fifteen hours a day'' to 
make sure that those involved in the recovery effort would be safe, and 
to restore needed services, such as subway and commuter train service, 
to those returning to live and work in lower Manhattan. His leadership 
in the days following September 11th took him, on that day in November, 
into the debris of the World Trade Center, where it was determined that 
the Freon had vented and the recovery work could continue in relative 
safety.
  Today, nine months after that horrible day, as we celebrate the lives 
of those we have lost and commemorate their heroism and bravery, we 
thank those who have given so much of themselves to the recovery of our 
great city. I would like to extend my thanks to the employees of the 
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, each of whom has come to 
embody the spirit of public service to the city they have served so 
admirably.

                          ____________________