Moving Sacred Ground: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Oversee Sensitive Mission

Col. John B. O'Dowd was just two months into his new job as the leader of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' New York and New Jersey district. Holding a meeting in his 21st floor office in lower Manhattan, O'Dowd didn't see the first plane. But a colleague did.

"One of our division directors said, 'A plane just flew by, right across Midtown,'" recalls O'Dowd, whose office is lined with north-facing windows. "I said, 'You're crazy. They don't let planes fly over Midtown.'"

When the second plane hit, it was obvious to O'Dowd, a 24-year Army veteran, that the situation was beyond crazy. "More like surreal," says the Bergenfield, N.J. native.

While the building was being evacuated, O'Dowd and a handful of others remained behind to maintain telephone contact with their federal partners, like the U.S. Coast Guard and FEMA.

"One of the first things we heard was that folks were walking across the Brooklyn Bridge," says O'Dowd. "So we directed our Corps boats to start ferrying people. It was a no-brainer. We just said, 'Go.'"

Eleven Corps boats, normally tasked with surveying channels and patrolling harbors, transported more than 3,000 people back to their homes in New Jersey, Brooklyn, and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, O'Dowd was on a satellite phone, mapping a strategy with city, state, and FEMA officials to remove massive amounts of steel and debris from Ground Zero.

"The steel weighed a ton a foot," says O'Dowd. "We knew we couldn't truck it out."

FEMA asked O'Dowd and the Army Corps to oversee a dredging project to lower the East and Hudson rivers between Pier 6 and the navigation channel maintained by the Corps. The purpose was to allow the city barge access to remove debris from Ground Zero.

The bigger role for the Army Corps came on October 1, when FEMA tasked the Corps with establishing an effective process for managing the debris inspection from the World Trade Center at the Staten Island (Fresh Kills) Landfill.

In essence, it was a humanitarian effort.

"Everybody knew what our mission was," says O'Dowd. "We were trying to recover as much as possible: a wedding ring, a driver's license, anything to send back to the families."

As the mission concludes -- under budget and before the projected deadline -- O'Dowd's contractors are examining the dirt that sat under the equipment that sorted through the wreckage.

"It's like wiping every footstep away as you walk out the door," says O'Dowd, who now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children. "Everyone wants to go to sleep at night for the rest of their lives, knowing we did everything we could to find something for the families of those lost."

FEMA assigned the $125 million mission to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to oversee the management of the 160-acre site at the Staten Island landfill, which became the world's largest crime scene. More than 1.6 million tons of debris and steel were processed during the 1.7 million-hour operation, which came in significantly under budget at $72 million.