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By Donna Condida

As children, we begin to mold into a character that will remain throughout our life, a character that will sleep, eat, breath, and function for us until we forever lay aside our tangible goals and take up fishing with our grandchildren.

For Frank Lombardi, chief engineer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the molding began at an early age due to the influence of an uncle who worked as an engineer and a creative handyman father who worked with metal in a factory. Fastforwarding more than three decades, the development of his character received its strongest test, and perhaps most galvanizing experience, when he found himself in his office in the World Trade Center in New York City when the terrorist-hijacked airliners struck.

A native of Italy, Lombardi grew up mostly in New York City. After graduating from high school, he attended Queens College for three years before transferring to the New York University School of Engineering for another two years. He undertook a special five-year program that combined liberal arts with civil engineering, a mix he credits with broadening his views. "You end up appreciating more of the arts, the softer sciences, the psychology, the speeches, the music, much more so than if I had gone to a four-year engineering school," he relates. He went on to receive an M.S. in structures from Columbia University and a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study in Business Management from Pace University in New York.

Early on, Lombardi intended to work for the Port Authority. Unfortunately, right after graduating, the draft for the Vietnam War came, and he had a low number. Opting for the Air National Guard, he joined for a six-year commitment and ended up in the Air Force. "When I came back, I was out of the cycle of hiring from colleges, but I took my application to the Port Authority anyway," Lombardi recalls. However, he needed a job right away, so he went to work for a structural engineering firm that needed him immediately.

Lombardi's brief five-month employment with the firm came to an end when he received a telegram from the Port Authority in the spring of 1971 asking him to work for them. "I always wanted to go with the Port Authority because of the diversity of work they have. I didn't want to be pigeonholed into one particular field of civil or structural engineering," he says. After all these years, he still gets a thrill out of working at the Port Authority because of that diversity.

Controlled by the state governments of New York and New Jersey, the Port Authority came about in 1921 to coordinate regional transportation issues between the New York City area and surrounding parts of New Jersey. The agency oversees the region's three major airports -- John F. Kennedy International, Newark Liberty International, and LaGuardia -- in addition to four bridges and two tunnels, the seaports in the Port of New York and New Jersey, and PATH, a heavy rail system operating between New York and New Jersey.

In 1995, Lombardi's career took a major leap when he took on the position of acting chief engineer for the Port Authority after the prior one retired. The position became permanent in 1996. Engineering activities at the Port Authority indeed run the gamut, as it acts much like a design-oriented engineering firm. It has considerable depth of engineering expertise, including civil, structural, geotechnical, environmental, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC disciplines. On a daily basis, Lombardi directs the agency's engineering department with its staff of 670 employees.

A Seemingly Ordinary Day
But to fully comprehend Lombardi's position and character, you must get to know another side of him, the one that withstood one of the most horrific, memorable, and widely known acts of terror --the World Trade Center events of September 11, 2001.

That day began as any other for Lombardi. "I was sitting in my office on the 72nd of floor Tower II in the southwest corner of the building. I could look out into the lower Bay of Manhattan and see the Statue of Liberty, and to my right, I could see the Hudson River and New Jersey," he recalls.

When the tragedy occurred, "I didn't realize an aircraft had struck us on the north side. The immediate feeling I had was one of motion because the building oscillated in a north-south direction. Sitting in my chair, I could feel the building oscillating several times, back and forth. It immediately stabilized," Lombardi relates. At first, he thought an earthquake had hit. "It wasn't until I saw out the south window a ball of fire coming from above my floor level, falling onto the roof of the Marriott Hotel, that I realized something other than an earthquake had occurred."

"The next event that occurred helped show what had actually happened," Lombardi explains.
"Because it was such a beautiful sunny day, I saw what appeared to be a rain of memorandum falling gently down. These correspondence letters were almost surrealistically being held up longer than they should have, and they came close to the window I was gazing out of. I could actually see the headings and highlighted areas of the memos. At that point, I realized that maybe it wasn't an earthquake, that maybe something had hit the south face, not even realizing that the aircraft had come through the north face of the building, and pieces of it had shattered the south face of the some 20 floors above.

I went outside the office and immediately talked to my colleagues and asked them to make sure the entire floor was vacated and told them we would head down shortly. I went back to the window, and then you could hear the fire engines outside, and you could still see this rain of correspondence coming down. I answered three phone calls; one was the husband of my secretary, and I told him she was okay. Another was a friend of a friend who wanted to know if everything was okay; I said 'Yes, he's on his way down'. And the third one was from a contractor I know very well. He's from New Jersey, and I guess he got a gander as to what was going on. He said, 'Frank, do you need any help?' and I asked what happened because I didn't know what I needed help for. He was the one that first told me something big hit us."

That left Lombardi and many others with only that shred of information as they started down the many stairs to safety. Upon hearing screams from an elevator, Lombardi and his colleagues fled to the 71st floor to help free employees stuck in the elevator cab. As he made the descent to the ground level, firemen passed him by on their way to floors above.

As Lombardi and 11 others from the Port Authority made it to the lobby of the Marriott Hotel next door, Tower II came down on them. Amazingly, they all escaped death because of a structural steel girder they had previously installed in the hotel (then called Vista Hotel) after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He recalls, "We placed the girder there when we were remodernizing the hotel and converting it to a more open lobby. We were underneath or near the umbrella of this tremendous seven-foot deep girder." Other structural engineers kidded Lombardi about its size back in 1994 when it was erected, but today it saved their lives.

As Lombardi tells it, "All of us were picked up by the wind whipping around the hotel. As I walked, I felt myself being picked up and thrust forward, as if I was doing a belly flop into a pool. But, at the time, I still didn't know what was happening. I didn't know that Tower II was collapsing. I thought I had bought it there." He found it amazing to feel his body and sense that everything was intact, except that ash falling all around made it extremely difficult to breath and see in the hotel. As Lombardi and the others made it out onto Liberty Street, they could barely make out the streetscape with all the ash, soot, and clouds. He assumed they had been hit by a truck bomb.

Safely Out of the Woods
Once he got his bearings, Lombardi made his way towards water; this is when he slowly began to figure out what was going on. Tower I still stood, pouring out flames and smoke, but Tower II was not there. While Lombardi stood shaking his head in disbelief, a friend approached him. "Greg came over to find out how I was. He was on his way to work when he was diverted." Lombardi says, "Many of us were trying to use our cell phones to call loved ones, but they weren't working. When Greg realized I couldn't use mine, he took down the numbers so he could call my family from his office once he got there. The time was around 11:00 or 11:30 am; this is when my family finally received information on my well-being." He would eventually make it home to his wife Christine and their two grown children, who had kept a vigil watching in horror as television networks broadcast the overwhelming news about the Twin Towers.

Since the infamous day, Lombardi has attended various society functions to present what he calls "the report from ground zero." He reflects, "It gave me an opportunity to talk. That's why I can speak about the events so openly and freely without breaking down. I convinced myself that if I could talk without a crack in my voice or breaking down, I was starting to heal. At every opportunity, I brought my wife with me to these professional presentations. I also went into the role of the engineer in terms of what those from the design and construction communities were doing at ground zero. That was the central focus, to give a personal account and then put the role of the engineer in a proper perspective as to what we did in response to the events and what needs to be done as a result."

Not surprisingly, the effects of the tragic event have given Lombardi a new outlook on life. "You tend to look at your role and purpose in life and what you want to do with the rest of your life having been given what I consider a second chance," he says. He now takes every little event, every decision, as a means of bettering the world. His positive outlook and reexamination of his life have left him with the capability to speak freely about his incredible experience. Because of the horrible event he lived through, he can now focus his energies on developing more stable and longer lasting relationships. And this translates to building better structures as an engineer -- his way of improving the world.

Donna Condida is a freelance writer/photographer from northeast Pennsylvania. Visit her website at www.CondidasCreativeWorks.com.

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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©2004 Progressive Engineer