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9-11  One Year Later: Inside, looking out

Naples retiree 'grew up' as an engineer in the skeleton of the World Trade Center towers

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

By RALF KIRCHER, rekircher@naplesnews.com

Millions of eyes watched millions of screens as thousands lost lives when the hundreds of stories of the tall Twin Towers came crumbling down in the single worst terrorist attack the world has ever seen. Bernard Panto, a retired engineer and contractor who lives in Naples, is no different in that regard.





Bernard Panto says he felt personally violated after he watched the collapse of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers. Panto spent seven years helping build the World Trade Center. Dan Wagner/Staff

"No biggie," he said to himself. "Can't knock that building down."

He knew this because he helped build the towers.

From 1966 to 1973, Panto worked in various positions as an engineer on the World Trade Center construction project. He worked mainly on the foundation  called the "bathtub" by those who worked on the project for its unique construction method  and when the towers collapsed, the sight hit him especially hard.

"The shock of the World Trade Center collapsing was very personal to me," said the Brooklyn native whose job kept him in the New York area the length of his career. "It was very personal, and I felt personally violated and felt that way in fact until I visited New York."

In 1966, Panto was an electrical engineer fresh out of school. When offered the chance to work as basically a gofer for the senior engineers and supervisors on the largest project in the New York Port Authority's history, he jumped at it.

The challenge, he recalled, was how to dig a big hole through the fill dirt to the bedrock while not compromising the integrity of surrounding buildings.

"That area of Manhattan, a couple of hundred years ago, didn't exist," Panto said.

"Because this was such a unique area, we recovered a lot of interesting materials," he said, noting they'd found remains of pirate ships that had gone aground and skeletal remains of Indians. "Probably the guy Peter Stuyvesant bought the island from," he joked.

Utilizing techniques seen only in Europe, contractors basically poured a concrete wall down to the stable bedrock and dug out the million-and-a-half cubic yards of dirt the wall surrounded  thus forming the bathtub, as they called it.

In digging the foundation, they had to move miles of sewer, telephone and electrical lines. They even had to figure out a way to support the 16-foot tubes containing the PATH trains to New Jersey without interrupting service.

But Panto's memories of the World Trade Center Project don't center on the mechanics or the engineering or the construction so much. This was his first real job. the place he cut his teeth, and he remembers it for the experience and for the people who helped teach him enough that he was promoted to superintendent by the time he left in 1973.

"One of the things I marveled about was the camaraderie there. The people loved going to work  so much so that we were like a family," Panto said. "I always say, who built this job? We were always having fun. I say it was some hunchbacked guy while we were off partying."

He says he didn't appreciate the World Trade Center as a building, however, until it was gone.

"I never really appreciated when people went to the World Trade Center and said, 'Wow!' I had grown with it," he said. "Even later when I went back to Windows on the World, I had been there; I'd drunk champagne on top of the World Trade Center."

Panto first went to see Ground Zero in March. He didn't want to go, but a friend encouraged him to take a look.

"I saw primarily what we saw when we were building it," he said. It was emotional to look at what by that point was a nearly empty pit, he said, but somehow it helped him. "I'll go up next month and take a look at my handiwork  because the foundation is still there."

As New York looks ahead and considers plans for the World Trade Center site, Panto is definite on what he thinks should be a memorial.

"Forget the monuments," he said. "The monuments are the buildings themselves. What needs to be put in place is the Twin Towers and thumb our nose at the terrorists."

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