The Washington Post
NEW YORK – Once upon a time, Malcolm Draper and his colleagues worked in an ordinary office in Lower Manhattan. That was before the terrorist attack of Sept. 11 drove his company out of three buildings, shut off the power and phones, and left 60-foot heaps of smoldering rubble outside the Park Place building housing his firm’s main computer center.
Multex.com Inc. workers have since been able to return to their headquarters at 100 William St., a few blocks from where the World Trade Center towers once stood. But now they step beneath two tons of electrical cables that stretch from a backup computer room, through crudely cut holes in the wall, across the ceiling, out a window and down six floors to a huge generator in the street.
One group of employees is in what used to be a conference room, using improvised workstations jammed together on a fancy table. The room is half the size of the space it replaced and “a little bit tough to get used to,” said Eric Todor, a Multex manager.
Even as the noises and some of the normal rhythms of life return to the streets of Lower Manhattan, small companies such as Multex and giants like Merrill Lynch &Co. continue to cope with the aftermath of the terrorist attack: limited phone service, spotty power, lingering fear, and employees moved by the tens of thousands to makeshift offices.
At Merrill, the huge financial services firm, 9,000 employees have been driven out of Lower Manhattan by the disaster. The lives of many have been whipsawed as whole departments were moved to temporary quarters – and moved again, as far as 40 miles away, as the company has scrounged to find room for everybody.
“We’ve all been scrambling a little bit,” said Jeff Hughes, a Merrill executive. “Basically, you sit in a room and say, ‘We gotta do it and we gotta do it now, and what does that take?’ “
The disruption to business in New York extends well beyond the World Trade Center area. Thousands of nearby businesses are without some essential service such as phones, power or sanitation. New York City estimates that 80,000 to 100,000 employees, as many as a third of those who normally work in Lower Manhattan, have been displaced.
Many employees have found an emotional outlet in helping their companies get back into gear.
“It helps you overcome the tragic event,” said Isaak Karaev, chairman and chief executive of Multex. “You start worrying right away … Are my people okay? How do I get electricity? How do I get phones? How do I get the thousands of clients we have back up and running?”
The challenge of keeping business going has produced folk heroes at many companies. Malcolm Draper, Multex’s vice president of international operations, is one of those – the sort of unflappable fellow you want to have around in a crisis.
When other employees fled Lower Manhattan right after the attacks, he and colleague Thomas D’Ambrosio, chief information officer, stayed. They slept on the floor and scrounged around the office for food.
Multex, with 500 employees, normally supplies financial information to professional investors and other clients via electronic networks, but Draper and D’Ambrosio were forced to shut their systems down when the power and phones went off. They began planning a recovery.
They realized that their main computer center, at 75 Park Place, would likely be out of service for a long time. But they were able to retrieve some equipment from there and add it to backup equipment they had at headquarters.
They found a generator and got it shipped to Manhattan in the days after the attack, but initially couldn’t get permission to move it through the police lines. As the situation dragged on, the trucker hauling the rig parked overnight under a highway overpass near the East River. Afraid the man would leave, Draper spent part of the night sleeping on the bed of the truck next to his precious generator, using his arm as a pillow.
“You get focused on what it is you need to do,” Draper said. “So you just do it.”
Eventually they got the generator through, improvised all manner of technological fixes, and were running their company on emergency power when the stock market reopened.
“It was like “Who cares what your job title is?’ ” said Samantha Topping, a spokeswoman for Multex. “”Here’s a drill. Cut through the wall.’ “
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