9/11 Memorial Staff Member Remembers Ground Zero Recovery

Lou Mendes is the Executive Vice President of Design, Construction and Facilities at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Mendes is one of three 9/11 Memorial Museum staff members who worked on both the recovery effort at Ground Zero and the construction and operation of the Memorial and Museum.  Below is a recount from Mendes. 

On 9/11, I was the Assistant Commissioner for Special Projects with the New York City Department of Design and Construction.  

After the towers collapsed, I got a call from the commissioner of the DDC telling me to come down and bring as much logistics personnel as possible so we could put a plan together to start moving forward. It was a spectacle when I saw what was happening. I kind of thought the world was ending with all the people running out of Manhattan. We all met at 1 Police Plaza, and I thought I was in the middle of a movie. It was just unbelievable.  

It was an evolving situation that became a very mechanized operation. I ran the field operations for the DDC.

At the beginning, no one understood what was taking place. It  was kind of surreal for everyone. The first days were about saving people. Unfortunately after the first month, we realized that we had to move on to another phase of the operation and put together a plan to remove everything out of the World Trade Center complex in a way that it was safe, that was feasible from an engineering standpoint, and protected various other pieces of the structure such as the slurry wall. 

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By 9/11 Memorial Staff