2012 Webby Honoree
https://www.webbyawards.com/winners/2012/web/general-website/radio-podcasts/september-11-project/

Produced and edited by Michael O’Reilly

Immediately after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, search and rescue teams deployed around the site to provide all sorts of assistance. Among them was a group of communication  technology specialists who were  trying to capture cell phone signals from the ruins.

WHYY media  producer and writer Michael O’Reilly gathered members of the team for an informal conversation. He captured it on tape and created this audio essay.

The producer would like to thank these individuals for their participation in this project:

Larry Dodds, Vice President of Product Line Management
Rob Anderson, Executive Vice President and CTO
Ted Boinske, Principal Software Architect
Bill Townsend, Senior Director of Embedded Hardware and Software Development
Rash Mia, Vice President and Chief Scientist
John Jarvis, Manager

SEPTEMBER 11 project   |  Michael O’Reilly     |  Script	 |  	Sept 5, 2011

I am sitting a boardroom with a bunch of guys looking at pictures from 10 years ago. The pictures are personal snaphots from when these guys were working at ground zero. Looking at the pictures is disconcerting because I’ve seen all these views before from the news, but without familiar people in them. It’s almost like recognizing your family and friends in pictures of the Titanic – two familiar things from wholly different worlds. Or like running into your grade school teacher on vacation.

(nat sound people murmuring about pix)

These guys were not first responders. They worked for a company, TruePosition,  outside of Philadelphia that locates mobile devices – not by GPS tracking but by using old-fashioned trigonometry and math. And they discovered that there were cell phones – over 1600 of them in the pit, the main wreckage area – in the hours after the September 11 attacks.

I hadn’t really heard anything about this operation in the 10 years since September 11. In fact TruePosition is pretty mum about it too – though proud. A plexiglass case in the lobby holds a piece of TruePosition equipment that they used that day.

I heard about it through Ted Boinkse. I’ve known Ted for over 25 years and the operation just came up in conversation. 10 years ago there was no Facebook status update to say “I was participating in a search and rescue effort at the site of the worst terrorist attack on American soil”. Ted would never do that. He doesn’t even have a facebook presence now.


So these guys were called in – this is how it worked:

All cell phones check in with the network every minute or so via a cell tower. Those cell towers can be all over the place, so by comparing the difference in the time it takes the cell phone signal to reach each tower, simple trigonometry makes it easy to determine an area of overlap. The more cell towers, the smaller the area of overlap and the better the accuracy. While movies show us tracking devices and GPS enabled technology, even 10 years ago, in real life it doesn’t always work like it does in the movies. You don’t see this kind of tech in the movies because, after all, trigonometry is not usually regarded as sexy.

(LARRY – if you can make a call, we can find you.)

I asked them what they had seen that surprised them, and they told me at least one thing that I had never heard before:

(ROB – all the porn everywhere)

I completely understand why I have never heard that before, since just to mention it would distract from the immeasurable loss that occurred there and by implication sully the memory of those that died there. But I can’t get beyond the incongruity of picturing it there – in the workplace before or after the disaster.

September 11 Project

01JUL16

Helena Espvall, cello and Michael O'Reilly, guitar.

06.meandering 1 - 2

05.intermezzo 1 - 2

04.an Ending 1 - 2

03.swirling 1 - 2

02.sweet 1 - 2

01.main 1 - 2

15FEB17_V2

I make independent films (https://vimeo.com/michaeloreilly) and music for those films. This musical piece is originally from the independent film ORION CLIMBS (https://vimeo.com/21482469) that I made about my grandparents in 1994. This piece underscores the portion of the film in which I talk about my maternal grandfather.

MichaelOReilly

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