Q&A with George Schuman: Cape man had close ties to twin towers

George Schuman of Cape Elizabeth.

CAPE ELIZABETH — Lady Luck has smiled at least twice upon George Schuman of Cape Elizabeth, who just missed being present for both terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

A consulting architect for the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey, Schuman was on his way to the building for a meeting on Feb. 26, 1993, and had he been just 20 minutes earlier, he would have been in underground parking garage when a truck bomb went off there in an attempt to topple the buildings. Then, on Sept. 11, 2001, a miscommunication had him in Maine for a doctor’s appointment that was not actually scheduled for that day. Had he realized the error in time, Shuman would have been in his office on the 76^th floor of 1 World Trade Center on the day of the attack, when American Airlines Flight 11 plowed into the building between the 93^rd and 99^th floors.

Schuman rushed down to ground zero two days later and helped to guide rescue crews, given his intimate knowledge of the site design and the toxic chemicals rescuers could expect to encounter.

Recently, Schuman took the time to recount his experiences on that fateful day – the first time, he says, that he has done so for the media.

Q: Tell us about yourself, how did you come to live in Maine while working in New York?

A: I’m from New Jersey, but I had family that lived in Oxford County and I just loved it up here. Once I got my degree at the Pratt Institute I tried to come up to Maine, but the economic picture wasn’t that good. I wound up in Texas instead. But, eventually, I found a way to buy a house in Maine while working as a consulting architect and then senior project manager for the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey. I went down there because I couldn’t make a living here and I had to make enough money to pay for college for my two children. I figured if I could make New York money and bring it to Maine, that would help. So, I worked there during the week and came home to Cape Elizabeth every weekend but one in 11 years.

Q: What did you do for the Port Authority?

A: I worked as only a consultant until the last year, when they finally hired me. At the time, they, like most industry, hired temporarily before they’d hire permanently. Senior project manager was my title. Basically, I had responsibility to organize teams of designers and engineers to deal with the public and all of the codes. I had projects on every one of the facilities. I was headquartered on the 76^th floor of tower one [the North Tower, or 1 World Trade Center].

Q: When did you first hear about the attacks of 9/11?

A: I was getting in my car, getting ready to go to work. I started to go down, but then turned around because, when I called in on an emergency line – one of the main reasons I called was just to see if people were still alive – they said not to come down because of the nature of the chaos and the destruction. I finally went down two days later. In spite of the fact that they said not to, I went down anyway, because I wanted to do something to help.

Q: Did you have any trouble getting to ground zero?

A: I had no trouble getting into the city. I had working relationships and I had the right credentials to pass through the military checkpoints and the police and all of that. 

Q: What was your first impression of the site?

A: The first impression was the militarization. There were 10 city blocks condoned off and every investigative body imaginable was there. It was like a military siege.  Then when I saw the site itself, since I knew every square inch of he building, almost, I was surprised at how uniformly the floors collapsed on each other. It almost looked like what I’ve seen at controlled explosions.

The unbelievable aspect of it was, even though, as we all know there were very few survivors, there really wasn’t a vestige of anything. Furniture, paper, ductwork, it was all pulverized beyond belief. I’ve seen building collapses in my career before, but it was shocking to not even see pieces of paper. I was just pulverized and, of course, on fire. It was on fire for almost a month and a half. Command posts were set up in the adjacent areas, in any building available, and every single day that I was on site, I’d have to get a new pair of shoes, because my shoes would literally melt, because once you were in the building it was just devastatingly hot.

Q: For those whose only memory of 9/11 is seeing it on TV, can you describe the sensation of actually being at ground zero – the smells and sounds?

A: Oh, the smell of it.  There was nothing but black smoke and toxins. It smelled like burning tires, which of course it was, because so many cars had been on fire. It was just intensely hot; you couldn’t even get close to potions of the site. Then there was the smell of the water impregnated with kerosene and who knows what else. It smelled like a chemical cesspool, really.

But one thing, it wasn’t as chaotic as you might think. Maybe that’s because I was not there until two days after it happened, or maybe it was because everyone was united in a common goal. I mean, everyone was there because they wanted to be there and they were tenacious. It was controlled chaos in a way and it was very visceral.

George Schuman, of Cape Elizabeth, worked for the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey in 2001. Following
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he went to ground
zero to assist with the search for survivors and clean-up
 of the site. (Courtesy photo)

Q: What did you do when you first arrived?

A: Because we were so short staffed, I reported directly to the chief engineer who was in charge of all projects in the Port Authority. He needed to know, still, even after three days of looking for survivors, what was going on. So, I went into a tunnel the very first hour after I got there, because it hadn’t been checked out yet and there was concern there might be somebody in there – actually, at first there was word there might be a train trapped in there. There was none, it was in the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) station and had been emptied out.  But anyway, I went in there still dressed in a three-piece suit and I got to the middle of the tunnel and couldn’t go any further because the height of the water was rising to the ledges I was walking on.

Q: What was it like being in that tunnel?

A: Oh, I almost died at that point of asphyxiation. I went in all alone to conduct an examination. It was it was a very dumb thing to do, very dumb, I admit it. But there was word there might be some people there, or some bodies. This is a massive system to examine and nobody had gone in yet to this area.

Q: What did you do after that?

A: Mostly, I advised rescue teams on structural integrity problems, because, obviously, the ceiling structures were down – there was bent steel and flaming cars and all of those things. They didn’t know the best way in and out of the lower levels and, of course, I knew the layout intimately.

Q: What was left of the buildings to go into?

The sub-levels, where the PATH train was. And, while it’s true the building was reduced to only about 12 floors of heaped material, there were areas, caverns, so you could actually get into the areas below the mezzanine, which was the first area above [ground]. A lot of inspection had been done in the two days before I got there, looking for people, and they had marked vehicles. But there will so many doors and places and mechanical rooms. 

Q: And you advised rescue crews of what to look for?

A: Yes. The buildings, as you know, had all kinds of hazardous materials. There were three of four hundred pounds of air conditioning refrigerant and, when that’s heated, it turns to poisonous gas. What I was able to do, because I had worked in what they called the materials laboratory for two years there, was to help access and work particularly with the fire department to let them know what to expect. Obviously, they are savvy people, but they did not know what was where.

Q: And you actually led rescue crews into the sub-levels of the World Trade Center? What was that like?

A: How can I describe it? Frankly, I thought I’d be scared to death, but I wasn’t. Maybe I was in shock, or something like that, because the one thing I could think about was to use my skills and knowledge to do something. The fire department, the rescue agencies, FEMA, in a way, I was able to lend them my personal knowledge of the building itself. But it was frightening, with the heat, the smell, the stress, not knowing if something above you was going to collapse. When we had to walk into water the first time through a PATH tunnel, there was concern of it having become highly corrosive from the chemicals dumped into it, so we had to suit up in hazmat suits and breathing apparatus.

Q: Where you ever able to lead a team to a rescue?

A: I never did. I never even saw a body there. It was just too devastating. It was what you would expect to see in a war. But I did not go in all that often. A lot of what I did was just to give information to the command structure, to relay to the rescue teams who were looking for groups of survivors.

But I did go into the tunnels quite often under the Hudson River. The whole basement, which was like eight stories down, was filling with water from the river. The walls were these great, thick slurry walls 24-feet thick, and they had cracks. So, one of the primary things, just to keep other buildings and other streets around it [the World Trade Center] from being undermined was to stabilize that, so a lot of effort when into determining the condition.

On the other end, in New Jersey, it was felt that if there was a catastrophic collapse of one of those tunnels, it would be like squishing water through a straw and it would come out the other end and inundate New Jersey buildings and the PATH systems. So, we built an 8-foot-thick cement wall to seal off the tunnel. That was considered a high-priority job at the time, so I was the manager for that, to make sure it got done.

Q: Have you experienced any ill effects of your exposure to ground zero?

A: I did for the first couple of years. Like many people who were in and around the area, I had skin lesions. I went to one of the foremost doctors in New York, because I was concerned about it, obviously. I don’t know if he played dumb about it or not, but he was like, I don’t know what’s going on. I had trouble getting really getting information about really the health effects. They did go away, eventually.

Q: How long did you remain at ground zero?

A: I was there for two months and then I cashed it in – got out of town. I wanted to be home with my family, so I opened my own business up here.

Q: Did you know any of the people killed in the attack?

A: Oh, yes, I spent two months going to one and two funerals every day, because I knew these people on a professional basis. There were 10,000 people who worked for the Port Authority and there were something like almost 1,000 architects and engineers located in the general area where I worked. Many of them got out, but I’d say 10 to 20 percent didn’t.

Q: Not to ask an insensitive question, but do you ever experience post-traumatic stress?

A: Constantly. And I didn’t experience anything in comparison even close to what so many other people did. But I constantly think about it. I’ll never forget it.

Q: What are the indelible images that stick with you?

A: Probably one I never experienced personally, but one that seems too real from how it was described to me. Many of my closest friends who were making their exit talk of the firemen struggling with their hoses – going up, and up, and up – while they were going down, and they just knew, these people tell me, they just knew that those lives were in a tenuous position, that they probably would not make it back down. And from the looks on the faces of those firefighters, they knew it, too, but on they went. Many of my friends tell me the one remaining thing they think about is those firemen and other rescue workers.

But I want to tell you about the best part of it all.

Q: Please, what was that?

A: The best part – I have never felt such a feeling of community, of nationalism I guess you’d call it, but in the best sense of the word – of people driving in truckloads and truckloads of protective clothing, of people from the south coming up with their barbeque trucks and staying there for two months, feeding people for free. There was so much support, so much harmony. I had never felt anything quite like it. My words fail me because it was such a strong, positive response to such a hideous action. It was like brothers and sisters, like the best part of the ‘60s feeling of, “Hey man, were all in this together.”

I’m not a religious person, but that was the most spiritual moment I’ve ever experienced in my life, to feel that sense of interconnectivity.

Q: What do you think are the great lessons of 9/11?

A: Well, I think we learned some things from the first attack on the World Trade Center. After that we installed positive pressure units in the stairwells that cleared them of smoke and, I think, saved a lot of lives on 9/11. I mean, in that first attack, people were just passing out in the stairwells from the fumes. But what have we learned from 9/11. Well, we’ve infringed on a lot of personal liberties with the Patriot Act and the like, that’s as bad now as it ever was, but, meanwhile, all of our critical facilities – our nuclear reactors, chemical plants, train stations, refineries – nothing was done about that, they’re still as vulnerable as they’ve always been.

Q: And on Sept. 11, what would you like people to think about, during the moment of silence certain to occur at memorial services across the nation?

A: I can easily sum that up and say personal responsibility. For a while there, people were kind of on the lookout for suspicious characters and all. It’s taking that and going one step further and realizing that we really are a global village, that by looking out for you I’m looking out for me. There’s no stronger defense against any terror problem.

If only people would put side the pettiness and remember the days after 9/11, when we really looked out for each other and cared about each other instead of being so egocentric and concerned about material goods.