For months after the towers fell, a Brooklyn woman spent her days inside a trailer near Ground Zero making sure firefighters, ironworkers and Red Cross volunteers never lost the one thing keeping them connected to each other: a charged phone. Gina Ruberto, who lived in Windsor Terrace at the time, handled the staffing schedule for a Nextel battery-charging operation that ran around the clock, and when shifts fell through, she covered them herself.
Ruberto worked for Nextel at 55 Maiden Lane, across from the Federal Reserve, and traveled from Windsor Terrace into downtown Manhattan to keep the operation running, according to Brooklyn Paper. Ground Zero had no electricity, so the trailer Nextel brought in became a place where workers could swap out dead batteries and take a brief break from the pit. Separately, 59 Maiden Lane was a 44-story tower, according to a LoopNet listing.
A Communications Blackout Across Lower Manhattan
The collapse of the towers caused extensive damage to wireless and communications infrastructure in Lower Manhattan, according to the National Academies Press. Nearby, a Verizon central office suffered damage that took three years and $1.4 billion to fully restore, per the U.S. General Accounting Office. Communications infrastructure around Ground Zero was effectively destroyed, and the region's cellular network buckled under both physical damage and overwhelming congestion.
Into that vacuum came Nextel, which provided hundreds and eventually thousands of phones to workers on site. The phones ran on Nextel's Direct Connect service, built on Motorola's iDEN technology, giving users an 800 MHz digitally trunked radio system that functioned as an instant group walkie-talkie without dialing through the jammed cellular network, according to Urgent Communications. That two-way radio function used Nextel's separate iDEN network through the closest cellular towers, where it was isolated from heavy cellular traffic, making Nextel devices a lifeline for firefighters, ironworkers, construction crews, Salvation Army volunteers and Red Cross workers moving through the site.
Keeping The Phones Alive, One Battery At A Time
None of it mattered if the batteries died, which is where Ruberto's trailer came in. Staffed 24/7 by Nextel employees who came from across the tri-state area, the operation let workers swap batteries and grab a moment off the pile before heading back in. Nextel's New Jersey warehouse sent phones and equipment toward Ground Zero, and employees transported gear in their own cars through security checkpoints to keep the supply moving, the outlet reports.
Ruberto, who was in her 30s at the time, was responsible for keeping the battery-charging operation running and ensured workers always had charged batteries to stay on the technology. She watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center, then spent the weeks and months that followed at Ground Zero as the effort shifted from rescue to recovery. From the trailer, she watched bulldozers and rescue operations unfold outside.
An Operation That Outlasted The Rescue Phase
The battery-charging operation continued through the end of December and into January 2002, well into what had become a recovery mission rather than a search for survivors. The broader cleanup at Ground Zero spanned nearly nine months in total, concluding with a formal ceremony on May 30, 2002, after crews removed roughly 1.8 million tons of debris, according to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Around Ruberto's trailer, other forms of support poured in alongside the phones: oil trucks arrived from other states to keep generators running, food came in from throughout the region, hotels opened rooms for ironworkers and first responders, and firefighters traveled across the country to work shifts at the site.
The temporary communication system Ruberto helped run was eventually shut down as the need for it diminished. Workers had relied on it, free of charge, for months. Among those who passed through was ironworker Charles Lyon, who visited Ruberto at 59 Maiden Lane in January and brought her a Time magazine hardcover along with a cross recovered from the World Trade Center, a gesture she still remembers from that period.
A Story Ruberto Wanted Told 25 Years Later
Ruberto, who chose to be known by her maiden name, has described her time at Ground Zero as defined by love, caring and camaraderie among strangers thrown together by catastrophe. “For the people on the ground, love took over,” she said, according to Brooklyn Paper's account. She has also said, of the response that followed the attacks, “the hate didn't win,” framing the history of 9/11 as one that includes survivors, helpers and communities that came together afterward.
The breakdowns Ruberto witnessed firsthand were part of broader communication problems among first responders. Later discussions and initiatives also addressed public-safety communications, as reflected in materials from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the First Responder Network Authority, the Federal Communications Commission and a New York City Council report.
The later corporate and network history of Nextel falls outside this account. More than 150,000 emergency responders and survivors have since enrolled in the federal World Trade Center Health Program, established under the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act to monitor and treat long-term illnesses tied to toxic dust exposure at the site, according to City and State New York. For Ruberto, a Brooklyn woman who has spent 25 years carrying the memory of that trailer, the quiet job of keeping people's phones charged remains tied to a much larger story about who showed up when the city needed them.
