One of the unsung heroes bolstering New York City in the wake of Sept. 11 is Bill DeCota (MBA '81), who runs the city's airports and works for the agency that built the World Trade Center complex

B Y - K E N T - H A N N O N

ill DeCota was in his hotel room in Montreal, rehearsing a joke he planned to use to open a forum on congestion in the nation's airspace, when a hijacked Boeing 767 from Boston slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, opening a jagged hole some 30 floors above DeCota's office on the 65th floor and turning the 110-story building into a real-life towering inferno. DeCota is director of aviation for the New York/New Jersey Port Authority. He runs Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports, which constitute the most crowded airspace on the planet. He's also a fountain of information on the World Trade Center complex, which was built by the Port Authority. But even Bill DeCota was dumbfounded by what he saw on television that morning at the Le Centre Sheraton in Montreal.

"I was trying to rationalize the situation—telling myself it was not that bad," says DeCota (MBA '81), whose first thought, like a lot of Americans, was that a small plane had accidentally struck the north face of 1 World Trade Center. "I remembered that incident, years ago, when a small plane struck the Empire State Building in heavy fog. But then it occurred to me that a small plane would've bounced off the World Trade Center's steel outer shell . . . and then I started visually measuring the size of the hole."

The World Trade Center towers measured 200 feet on a side, and DeCota gauged that the flaming, smoke-filled fissure he was seeing on NBC's live feed had to have been made by a plane with a wingspan of at least 150 feet—which produced a chilling realization: My God, it must have been a commercial airliner!

The phone rang in DeCota's room. It was Joanne Paternoster, a Port Authority colleague who was staying at another hotel in Montreal.

"Are you watching this?" she said.

While they were on the phone, trying to figure out what was happening, they were horrified to see the south tower struck by what DeCota was certain was another commercial airliner. That's when the word terrorism first crept into his mind, merging with images he had retained of the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000. DeCota really began to worry; 2,000 Port Authority staffers were scattered throughout the north tower, including 150 members of his staff on the 65th floor and another 125 in the executive offices on the 67th floor.

"I started to make some phone calls to the building—as stupid as that sounds," says DeCota, "but then I thought, Why would I want to delay anyone escaping from that building?"

eCota had flown to Montreal to discuss congestion in the skies—which were soon empty, owing to a presidential order that shut down the entire U.S. airspace. DeCota needed to get home, but nothing was taking off anywhere.

At 9:30 a.m., not quite 30 minutes after 2 World Trade Center was hit, DeCota and Paternoster hailed a cab to Dorval Airport, which was the only place they could find a one-way rental car to the U.S. After standing in line for what seemed like an eternity, listening to tourists asking the Hertz attendant what sights to see in Montreal, they headed south, crossing from Quebec into upstate New York at 11 a.m.—just minutes before the Canadian border closed. It was then that they heard the unthinkable on the radio.

"They were talking about how the World Trade Center had collapsed," DeCota recalls, "and we're looking at each other and saying, 'How could the towers have collapsed?' You just can't imagine what you're hearing. We thought maybe it was the media sensationalizing things."

In retrospect, after talking to the Port Authority's chief engineer, DeCota says the towers were designed in such a way that they would, in fact, implode, if they lost their structural integrity—but no one ever dreamed that could happen.

"It's very difficult to explode the buildings' foundation because of all the lateral concrete down in the basement," he says. "And if something struck the buildings, the likelihood of them tipping over was nil. Many people still remembered that from the '93 attack."

The '93 attack was carried out by six Middle East terrorists, each of whom received a 240-year sentence for the crime. According to DeCota, the emergency plan in '93 was still in place on Sept. 11:

Don't evacuate.

"In a terrorist attack," says DeCota, "the danger was thought to be outside the building—from explosions, falling debris, perhaps the terrorists themselves."

Clearly, Sept. 11 was a much more catastrophic event, with a completely different scenario. Most of the estimated 20,000 people who were still alive after the initial impacts—the north tower at 8:48 a.m., the south at 9:03—didn't have to be convinced about the need to escape; they knew they were fleeing for their lives. But getting out of two of the tallest buildings in the world after they had been set ablaze was an awful ordeal—and, unbeknownst to everyone involved, the clock was ticking.

To escape a raging jet-fuel fire that would reach 1,600 degrees and quickly melt the buildings' steel infrastructure, some people jumped to their death from the upper floors. Others were blown out of the buildings on impact. Elevators were no help to those trying to escape; officials believe the central shafts that ran the length of the building became tunnels of fire, ignited by the 14,000 gallons of fuel aboard each of the American Airlines jumbo jets, which were originally bound for the West Coast.

Some of the stairwells remained intact and passable. But smoke was a problem, and it takes a long time for thousands of people to exit a 110-story building without elevators—especially when some are injured, panic-stricken, or confined to wheel chairs.

In a cruel irony, some people trying to evacuate the south tower after the north tower was struck were given the all-clear sign and told to return to their desks because they were thought to be safer there than on the ground. Arturo Domingo, who worked for Morgan Stanley on the 60th floor of the south tower, told The New York Times that a man with a megaphone stopped him on the 44th floor and told him to go back to his desk—which he did. When the second 767 hit his building, Domingo fled again. He was fortunate that the plane struck the south tower well above his office. Other tenants on higher floors weren't as lucky.

The point of impact at the north tower doomed roughly 170 people who were eating breakfast or working at Windows on the World on the 107th floor and another 135 who were attending a financial conference one floor below. None of those people has been heard from since. Located on floors 101 and 103-105 of the north tower, bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald was the hardest hit of all the WTC tenants. Only 350 of the firm's 1,000 employees are alive—and only because they were out of the office on Sept. 11. Everyone who was at work that day at Cantor Fitzgerald perished.

he eight-hour drive from Montreal to New York was slow torture with radio reports painting an ever-worsening picture of the situation at Ground Zero. An hour outside New York City, DeCota pulled off the thruway at a rest stop.

"We had been very philosophical on the drive," he recalls. "Things were never going to be the same . . . fears about how many people might be dead . . . the tragic loss of this graceful set of buildings and our work environment. But through it all, I had remained stoic, pensive, and reflective."

That all vanished when he walked into the lobby of the rest stop, where TVs were tuned to the devastation. "We just stood there with our mouths gaping open," he recalls. "Now it was real."

A little ways down the road, on Route 17, there's a hill that provides southbound travelers with their first unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline. As the rental car crested the hill, DeCota looked for the towers. They weren't there. All he could see was smoke. To make matters worse, news reports were saying that all seven buildings in the 16-acre World Trade Center complex had fallen.

Cell phone calls to a banker friend in midtown and to Joanne Paternoster's family in central New Jersey allayed DeCota's fears to some extent.

"Through a patchwork communication system that we worked out, I learned that Ted Kleiner, my assistant director for capital programs, was able to get out," says DeCota. "He and Lillian Valenti, director of the Port Authority's medical services department, set up a command post in a room at the New York Hilton."

unctioning with the cohesion and team spirit that DeCota tries to instill in all of his employees, those 150 Port Authority staffers who worked on the 65th floor left their offices almost in unison. And, for the most part, they stayed together—including some tense moments when they encountered structural damage and had to switch stairwells. The executive office people on 67 were close behind. On the way down, this mélange of DeCota people—all of whom knew he was in Canada—talked about what their fearless leader would have done in this situation.

"I'm glad Bill wasn't here," said John Toth, manager of ground transportation and customer service, "because he probably would've stayed."

"I probably would have," says DeCota, "because I believe in rules, whether they're religious rules or institutional rules. I also have this high sense of responsibility. When you read my Myers-Briggs temperament type, it says I exist to be of service to the poor, the sick, the indigent, the stupid, and the boss."

Myers-Briggs comes up often in DeCota's rapid-fire monologues on the wonderful world of aviation management. When his boss, Neil Levin, first heard DeCota recite his temperament type, a look of mock sternness creased Levin's face.

"What were those last two words?" he asked.

"The stupid and the boss," said DeCota.

"Aren't they one and the same?" said Levin.

To have that kind of conversation with your boss—with any degree of certainty that you won't be fired for insubordination—you have to a.) be very good at what you do, b.) be married to your job, c.) have a great boss, or d.) all of the above. And the latter definitely applies to Bill DeCota. Still single at 44 and possessed of almost monk-like devotion to duty, he talks about aviation the way people talk about God, country, and the Yankees.

"There is such an incredible passion about the aviation business—like I've never experienced anywhere in my life," he says, "because it has such important social consequences. It impacts so many people on such a scale."

Feeling this way, and wanting those who work for him to share his passion for customer service, DeCota leads by example. Commuting from his home in New Jersey by car, he shows up at one of his five airports—JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, plus Teterboro and the Manhattan Heliport—every morning before dawn. He seldom knocks off before 8:30 at night, holidays included, and he's likely to turn up anywhere on property.

"I go out as a typical customer to see how my employees are treating people," says DeCota, whose favorite tack is to hand the airport newsstand guy a $20 bill for a pack of Life Savers or $10 for the morning paper and see if he gets a dirty look. DeCota works the short-term parking attendants the same way, hoping to fix problems before they affect the public.

DeCota has been a Port Authority trouble-shooter for 20 years, starting as a junior-level analyst and working his way up, rung-by-rung, 15-hour-day by 15-hour-day.

"I spend so much time at airports," he says, "that some people think I'm a limo driver."

But 15-hour days are pretty much standard operating procedure when you consider what transpires, demographically, at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark in a year's time: 90 million passengers, 1.4 million aircraft movements, 3 million tons of cargo, 63,000 employees, and 130 different airlines.

"To me, those three airports are like three children," says DeCota, "They're all unique."

sually in a hurry to get somewhere or get back, DeCota picked the University of Georgia because it had a one-year MBA program. But his innate grasp of all things cerebral—from the "peregrinations of Aristotle" to the movies of Stanley Kubrick to satellite solutions to airspace congestion—suggests he would have devoured any MBA program in a year.

Born and raised in New Jersey, DeCota was drawn to the South because of his interest in Southern literature. After a brief stint as an architecture major at the University of Virginia, he chose the University of Mississippi for his undergraduate studies in finance mostly because he'd read about the state in the works of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Staying in the South for graduate school seemed like a good idea, and DeCota has particularly fond memories of his days at UGA because he got to experience the emergence of Herschel Walker.

"I had the good fortune to be at Georgia for the 1980 National Championship season," he says, "and I still have visions of No. 34 running the football imbued in my head."

That's what DeCota did for fun at the University. But it was his banking and finance professor, the late Robert Dince, who really kick-started DeCota's interest in becoming a financial analyst when he got out of school.

"Dr. Dince made finance come alive," says DeCota. "When I was a graduate student at the University of Georgia in 1980-81, the banking industry had just been deregulated, meaning the government no longer determined what rates of interest banks could pay or charge. So Dr. Dince tested our business acumen by saying, 'How would you manage a bank in this already difficult environment when you're loaning money on long-term mortgages at 6 percent interest and paying interest to depositors on money market accounts at 14.5 percent?' You really didn't feel like you were in a class. You felt you were living the life of a bank president."

Equally important to what he learned in class, says DeCota, was the way Dince made his students feel about themselves. "I'll never forget the way he and his wife opened their home to us. They had a swimming pool, he would smoke a chicken on the grill—and we were made to feel like real-world colleagues, not students."

fter college, DeCota intended to go to work for Coca-Cola in Atlanta, but his father's death brought him back to New Jersey. He spent a brief period of time at Dun and Bradstreet, then found his true calling at the Port Authority. Part financial analyst, part urban planner, part social worker, part priest, DeCota will actually stop running the macro aspects of his airports to take calls from disgruntled passengers. Oftentimes, those calls come from LaGuardia—where on-time departures are a thing of the distant past. And rather than foist the problem on one of his lieutenants, DeCota will call his operations people to see if he can find the source of the problem for the caller.

For a person obsessed with customer service, the senseless deaths of 4,500 people—some of whom were his closest friends—is particularly hard to swallow.

"Like everyone, I'm disappointed that national intelligence had some information that there could possibly be a terrorist act—but with no ability to get more detailed information to prevent it," he says. "It's understandable that plane one hit the World Trade Center and that plane two hit the World Trade Center. But I can't understand why plane three was allowed to hit the Pentagon . . . it seems like there was enough advance warning. And why was plane four left to the fate of the people on that plane, who said, 'We're not going to take this'?"

evotion to customer service is so ingrained in the people who work for the Port Authority that a number of key personnel elected to remain at their posts even after disaster struck. When the north tower was hit, for example, 14 Port Authority staffers—computer experts, risk management personnel, structural engineers, and tunnel and bridge people—reported for duty at a command center on the 64th floor. Knowing the building was in jeopardy, but also thinking of it as impregnable, those 14 people began functioning like captains of a ship. They directed people to stairwells, assessed the condition of the building, and used cell phones to make status reports to the Port Authority's police headquarters in New Jersey. At 10 a.m., 28 minutes before the north tower collapsed, those 14 people were ordered out of the building. At 10:20, they called in to say they had made it as far as the 20th floor and were doing well.

Ken Greene, DeCota's assistant director for operations/maintenance, was leaving the north tower when he ran into the Port Authority's chief operations officer, Ernesto Butcher.

"What can I do?" said Greene.

"Help get these people out of the building!" said Butcher, who was worried that the hellish state of the plaza might frighten some people into remaining inside the building. Bloody bodies and body parts were strewn everywhere. The air was full of smoke and ash. Debris was raining down from the sky. So Greene stationed himself inside the north tower on the plaza level. He kept the lines of people emerging from the stairwells moving and told them what to do when they reached the plaza, yelling after them: "Just go! Don't look at anything! Just go!"

Greene stayed on duty until the south tower collapsed at 9:59. Dust made it impossible to see, but Butcher remembers a fireman telling Greene to follow him out of the north tower.

Will Jimeno, a New York City policeman and a close friend of DeCota's, was working at the Port Authority bus terminal at 42nd Street when he saw clouds of dark smoke rising from the south end of the island. Concerned for the welfare of his pregnant wife and young daughter should something happen to him—but worried that DeCota was probably in danger—Jimeno hopped a ride to Ground Zero and quickly found himself in harm's way.

DeCota's boss Neil Levin was not ordinarily an early bird. But on Sept. 11, Levin was at Windows on the World for a breakfast meeting. When the person hadn't shown up by 8:45—three minutes before impact—Levin called his secretary, who said his guest had just checked in at the visitors desk in the main lobby.

hen DeCota finally got back to the New York area on Tuesday night, he picked up his car at Newark Airport, where nine hours earlier United Airlines Flight 93 had taken off and subsequently been hijacked. Flight 93 went down south of Pittsburgh, apparently because a group of passengers—who learned of the devastation in New York and at the Pentagon via phone calls to loved ones—fought with the hijackers and caused the plane to crash into a field instead of another skyscraper or government installation.

From the Newark Airport, DeCota drove to the Port Authority's hastily conceived command center in Jersey City, where he worked round the clock before finally collapsing for a few hours on a couch in the wee hours Thursday morning. Living out of the suitcase he'd taken to Montreal, he didn't make it home for a week.

"The toughest thing," he says, "was not knowing who was alive and who was dead."

And, for a while, there was no way to find out, other than to wait for the phone to ring—and hope it was good news. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't. Or wait to see who showed up for work. Some did and some didn't.

Miraculously, all 150 Port Authority employees who worked on the 65th floor got out alive, as did all but two of the 125 people two floors above them—their escape made possible, in part, by the fact that it took the north tower an hour and 40 minutes to fall; the south tower lasted only 56 minutes.

"Some of those people had to go to the hospital," says DeCota, "but none of their injuries was serious."

Ken Greene, the mainstay of the north tower who showed people the way out, lived to tell his story on "48 Hours."

Will Jimeno, the cop with the pregnant wife who went to save DeCota, needed saving himself.

"When tower 2 came down," says DeCota, "Will was trapped under debris for 13 hours. He saw other rescuers die in the rubble, and flames ignite the bullets in policemen's guns."

Around 10 o'clock Tuesday night, rescue workers pulled Jimeno from the wreckage; one of his legs was crushed. But when DeCota visited him at Bellevue Hospital, Jimeno was adamant about returning to the force instead of taking disability retirement. Jimeno told his story on "Sixty Minutes."

Not everyone lived to be profiled on TV. In all, the Port Authority lost 74 people—37 policemen and 37 civilians. Neil Levin didn't make it, and neither did those 14 brave souls who staffed the command center on the 64th floor.

he cruelest part, beyond the loss of life, is that, for people who worked at the World Trade Center—and for the country, as a whole—life will never be the same. In post-Sept. 11 America, it's hard to get up and go to work in the morning—and next-to-impossible to function at pre-Sept. 11 capacity.

And therein lies the double-whammy, says DeCota, who points out that pre-Sept. 11 capacity isn't going to get businesses like Cantor Fitzgerald and public agencies like the Port Authority back on track. Despite their grief, the people who work in those places and others like them are having to press harder than ever just to catch up and restore order.

The Port Authority, for example, does a lot more than run five airports. Its responsibilities include the ports of New York and New Jersey, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the PATH trains that connect New Jersey to New York City—all of which were closed for a time in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Lost revenue is one by-product of the terrorists' attacks, and some of the essential ways and means by which American businesses function were also destroyed on Sept. 11—including a Port Authority headquarters DeCota had to replace almost overnight.

"It's not the records and files we miss—some of those can be replaced," says DeCota. "It's the loss of permanency that we're battling, along with a lot of emotional issues. Some people don't want to come back to work . . . they want to spend more time with their families. A lot of people are physically present, but not mentally present. A lot of people are reassessing their lives, trying to get closer to their own God. I know an economist who has asked to switch to our security planning force. Why? Because he wants to guard our airports and protect people."

The Port Authority's problems are exacerbated by the fact that the airline industry has laid off 120,000 workers, airports are operating at only 75 percent of capacity, and carriers, tenants, and concessionaires are all asking the Port Authority for financial relief.

For DeCota, who frequently spent the night on the couch at his old World Trade Center office, the events of Sept. 11 have made work virtually an around-the-clock endeavor. "About the only time I leave," he says, between meetings in late October, "is to attend memorial services. I've been to 17 already, and there will be a lot more."

efore the attacks on the World Trade Center, one of DeCota's major safety concerns was congestion in the skies above Queens, which is home to both JFK and LaGuardia. A civic association has voiced fears that a collision or aircraft malfunction could turn their borough into a disaster area—fears that became a reality when the American Airlines Airbus crashed in the Far Rockaway section of Queens after takeoff from JFK on Nov. 12.

DeCota also has to ride herd on a $15 million airport renovation plan that includes a new international terminal at JFK, where a new AirTrain will shuttle people from terminal to terminal and out to parking and car rental facilities. Eventually, passengers will be able to take the "A" train to the Howard Beach station in Queens, then hop the AirTrain to JFK.

These concerns and hundreds more fall under DeCota's job description. But in the aftermath of Sept. 11, he's also functioned like a battalion leader, shoring up his airports' perimeters to make them as terrorist-proof as possible, and working with the airlines to implement new FAA regulations regarding curb-side baggage check-in, as well as restrictions that prevent cars from parking within 300 feet of the terminal.

When FAA administrator Jane Garvey flew from Washington to New York on Sept. 25 as a symbolic gesture that it was safe to travel by air again, DeCota stood by her side at the press conference at JFK. Asked for his take on airline safety, DeCota said he would advise his own mother to fly. "It's still the safest way to travel, statistically speaking," he says. "You're in much greater danger in a cab on the way to the airport."

But like most Americans, DeCota is disturbed by the fact that thousands of bags are being stowed in commercial airlines every day without being x-rayed for possible explosives. Indeed, a recent network news report pointed its cameras at $1.3 million CTX-5000 machines sitting unused or under-utilized at LaGuardia.

"The current state of airport security is set by the FAA, which says the airlines are responsible for baggage and who has access to aircraft," says DeCota. "The Port Authority is responsible for securing the perimeter of the airport, so terrorists can't just drive up to a terminal and blow it up. A stronger federal role is needed. I'm not sure we need to create a new federal workforce of 28,000 people, but something has to be done to improve the screening process for airline passengers and carry-on luggage. As things stand right now, there's a whole list of crimes you can be convicted of and still be a security screener."

What DeCota can't talk about—because he has no idea how the cases stand—is what's happening to the suspicious people who were detained at JFK and LaGuardia on Sept. 11 because they fit the profile of the hijackers, right down to the box cutters, Florida flight school training, and tickets to the West Coast. Like everyone else, he wonders if more hijackings were planned.

But beyond all the regulatory action, heightened surveillance, and tighter law enforcement activity that has to happen for America to be more resistant to terrorism—both the airborne and bio-chemical variety—people also need time to heal, says DeCota. And part of that healing process lies in oral history, in the telling of where you were and what happened to you on Sept. 11.

"For weeks now," he says, "we've heard stories of incredible courage and heroism. A woman on the 88th floor of the World Trade Center had her clothes burned right into her skin—but she walked out of the building. She asked someone to please carry her purse."

DeCota has yet to shed tears over what happened. It's not in his Myers-Briggs temperament type, and he says he needs to project strength for his staff's sake. But he feels the pain—America's, New York's, and the Port Authority's—just as acutely as if he'd been in the towers that day. He's visited Ground Zero several times, each time feeling overwhelmed by something that should not have happened.

"I keep thinking this is all a David Copperfield magic trick," he says, "and that, with a wave of his magic wand, the World Trade Center will magically . . . reappear."

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