As the Waterfront Alliance prepares to honor master builder Steven Plate as a 2021 Hero of the Harbor for his extraordinary accomplishments—removal of millions of gallons of water from critical infrastructure after Hurricane Sandy, multi-year restoration of the World Trade Center site after 9/11, cultivating a resilient physical and social framework—we’d like to pause and tip our hats to a true people person. Warm and gregarious, Steve is Chief of Major Capital Projects at The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. Get to know him a bit in our Q&A below.

You’ve been with the Port Authority for 36 years. Among other projects, you directed the reconstruction of the World Trade Center, and you oversaw the building of the JFK AirTrain and the raising of the Bayonne Bridge. Somehow, you also found time to be mayor of your New Jersey town for a few years. What’s your secret to success?

The Port Authority is in my DNA at this point. Being able to make a difference in such a grand scale—rebuilding a region, rebuilding all the transportation, having the ability to make people’s day a little better than the day before—to have that impact is unbelievable.

I’m very passionate about what I do, and very serious about making sure we perform. I’m probably too tough on myself, but I demand from myself more than I ask of other people. It’s just never good enough. Never. There’s always more energy to put on an issue to bring it to closure. But I also don’t take myself seriously. It’s great to have a sense of humor. You give 150 percent and try everything you humanly can with your God-given talents, and then don’t look back. But equally as important is to have a balance in life. Family first.

It’s also about setting priorities. What are the top 10 things you want to accomplish in your life? That’s been a guiding force for me. My word is my bond. When I tell someone I’m going to do something, I will tell you that I deliver. We’ve been very, very effective and have a great reputation in the industry, whether it’s delivery of a project or just being fair. Tough but fair: we have fiduciary responsibility to protect the public funds, while also making sure that people are treated in a fair way.

I use metrics. In the old days, when asked, how are you doing on a project, people probably replied, I feel good about it. Feeling good is a nice emotion. But what does feeling good really mean? I break the project down into pieces of steel, cubic yards of concrete, linear feet of conduit, etcetera. And then we track it. Everything can be broken down into math.

Being mayor helped broaden me as an engineer. I love people. I really love to engage them. One thing I learned from being mayor was it’s not always in a book. It’s in your heart, and it’s in other people’s hearts. As a mayor, you have to listen, digest, not react, and then work with a person to come up with a solution to a problem.

You have to respect everyone. New York is a mosaic. Whatever your background, whatever your culture, it’s really a special place. Everybody has value. We shouldn’t think because I have 40 years of experience and he only has 10, I’m smarter than him. That’s the way I have meetings. I’ll say, everybody set their position aside and let’s have an open discussion. When that synergy kicks in, it’s amazing. Sometimes I set goals that I don’t think they’re going to make and they make it. I just sit down and go, Wow, that’s inspiration. Everybody has got to be open to new ideas. I mean, now we’re moving into artificial Intelligence. The world is changing.

We redefine ourselves as people, and we accomplish great things. We had the first meeting about the World Trade Center, I remember distinctly, it was 2006. People were asking us, frankly, to get going. We got in the room, and everybody had their little fiefdoms, for lack of a better word. No one was working together. And I said, guys, we need to move forward. Everybody checked their egos at the door, and we got to work as one. We were able to all compromise. All of a sudden, things started to get built.

I’ve got a million stories. This was the most complicated project in history of the world. I know that sounds a little partial, but I think it’s fair to say. This project transcends, on a human level, a passion, a commitment to remember those people, colleagues whom I rode the elevator with. I wasn’t there that day. That’s another story. Everyone wanted to come back, and not just build great buildings, but remember those people in a special way, and bring this great city back to life. And when that tower started to go up, it sent the message to the world that there’ll be bad days, and sometimes you’ll knock us down. But make no mistake: we’ll come back bigger and better than you can ever imagine.

Let’s talk about lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy. What was happening at the World Trade Center, where some Port Authority offices are, right before the storm hit? What happened during and after the storm?

[As Hurricane Sandy approached, in October 2012, we were] battening down the hatches, as they say on ships, and putting in sandbags, closing up ceiling hatches; basically trying to put up a barrier around the entire World Trade Center site. Well, at that point, the site wasn’t sealed. The doors were wide open, the windows were wide open, the roof wasn’t on. When Sandy hit, we had 125 million gallons of water arrive at the site suddenly, and that was surreal.

I remember distinctly, that night I was walking on the south side of the site to do one last walkthrough and we thought it was pretty much dealt with. I was on Albany Street, and all of a sudden we’re standing there, and the water went from my ankles to my chest. And we saw a car floating by and we said, let’s go save that person. When we got to the car, we realized that was empty. But we saw that the water hadn’t come from the Hudson, it came through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. We immediately went back to the site. I had hundreds of construction workers there trying to protect our assets. But it was just too overwhelming. It was unprecedented. It looked like a waterfall. The construction workers said, let’s get more buckets. I said, buckets are not going to help at this point. I said, let’s pull back; we’ll reassess.

The next morning, I called everybody in a room and I said, no hierarchy, I don’t care what your background is, whether you’re 20, 40, 60: everything is on the table. The only condition is, everybody stays safe. Well, there were no trains, there was no heat, there was nothing. We set up a logistics office and we had tactical meetings every day. Less than 24 hours later we were able to get a diesel generator, and we were able to light Tower One. We wanted to show the world that we were back and we weren’t going to give up. This is a very sacred place, and it became emotionally charged for us. With the know-how and the ability of people to truly rise to the occasion, as we always did and continue to do, they were able to remove all the water in two to three days. If you let people be creative, let people use their God-given talents, it’s amazing what they can do. I just shake my head. Wow.

We never, ever wavered; never, ever paused. The event was dealt with; we moved on. But it was something that had never been done before, especially at this magnitude. We became experts in how to restore a site, and we needed to protect ourselves against the next storm. I said we need to do something different, and we came up with a triple layer of protection, all interlinked. And then we came up with an elevation calculation based on our data that was actually higher than what FEMA ultimately came out with.

You devised an innovative deployable flood protection system for the World Trade Center site after Hurricane Sandy. Please tell us about this system.

I said, let’s develop a system that can utilize the strength of bollards that are already in place and build a series of walls between them. I coined the phrase, the bollard protection system. You see people testing it periodically, or when there’s a storm coming. That’s layer one. Then all hatches became like submarine hatches, if you can visualize that, with structural strength that can handle  the weight of water hitting it.

The third layer was just in case the water passes the bollards and then it passes the hatches; we have additional isolation in selected rooms as well as pumping capacity throughout the facility. We’ve reinvented ourselves and reinvented the industry. You’ll find that the many things we’ve done have been borrowed, utilized, and become the model for many projects throughout the region and the country. People come from all around the world to see what we’ve done.

The raising of the Bayonne Bridge was a feat of engineering. Tell us about it.

Coming off the reconstruction of the World Trade Center, I had confidence—and not just me, but the whole staff. They led the way. We challenged ourselves intellectually. We realized [the raising of the Bayonne Bridge] was critical to the region, critically important to the economy, to keep our ports vital in a new era of larger Panama Canal ships. Before this bridge was raised, we were classified as the third largest port in the United States. We raised the bridge 64 feet. We had to adjust tremendous loads. I mean, it’s not just moving a roadway up—as we’re doing this, the bridge is torqueing. We had to convert rivets to high-strength bolts, and these rivets were done in 1931. Raising the bridge in a very thoughtful, methodical way was critical. Now we handle the new Panama Canal ships, the larger ones.

The numbers are staggering—prior to raising the bridge, as a result of the boats going under the bridge and unloading at the different ports, $55 billion was generated for the economies of New York and New Jersey. When we finished the bridge, the numbers jumped to $65 billion a year almost overnight, and made us the second largest port in all of the United States. With the epidemic, our ports didn’t slow down. They actually increased. We’re talking about numbers in the range of $150 billion in the last year or so. And utilizing these new ships means a tremendous reduction in greenhouse gases, smog, since the largest ships are newer and have more efficient engines.

Throughout your life and career, you’ve worked with young people—from coaching youth sports teams to addressing high school seniors. What’s your best advice for the next generation?

Find your passion and love what you get up each day to do. Mine was working in construction. In fact, I come from a union family. My mother was extremely smart, but she wasn’t allowed to go to college. When I suggested that I wasn’t going to college and was going into union labor instead, that didn’t go very far. She said, you’re going to school. I muscled through school and got a great education. You learn a lot in school, but you learn equally as much dealing with life as a laborer. It teaches you the value of what it means to accomplish things, and gives you respect and a better understanding for what people go through. Today, when I talk with a construction worker, I don’t say why has it taken you so long, I say, help me understand how we can make your life a little easier, and how you can be more effective.

The most important thing is to keep your moral compass always pointed true north. Don’t deviate. Stay focused on what’s right, even if you don’t succeed. Most times you will succeed, if your heart is in the right place, your focus is in the right place. It may not happen as quickly as you’d like, but if you stay focused, and you never give up, I’ll go out on a limb and guarantee that you’ll succeed in life.

Always remember it’s never about the individual. It’s about ordinary people working together and that synergy becomes like the World Trade Center, like the Bayonne Bridge, doing extraordinary things.

Life will hit you with negatives all day long. But you know what? The cup is always half full, not half empty. So always be positive. Never take no for an answer. If someone says that can’t be done, your challenge is to come up with a way to get it done.

Think about when we started working to rebuild the World Trade Center. It was a pile of rubble 20 stories high. And yet there was never a discussion about giving up. When do you really grow? When everything’s rosy and wonderful or when things are challenging and tough? It’s like a piece of coal becoming a diamond, forged by a tremendous amount of heat, and tremendous amount of pressure.

When you’re under pressure, you rise to the occasion, keep calm, keep focused. Don’t be overwhelmed. If you got to take a couple of breaths, take a couple of breaths, deep breaths. Be like the military, the first responders: run to the problem. Run to the fire. Not away from it. Don’t fear it, look at it in the eye. And don’t let it win. You’ll win. The other thing is don’t ever let anybody define you. You define yourself. And don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do something. Make a difference in this life and leave a legacy. Find your passion and never give up. And enjoy the ride. It’ll be a lot of fun.

What’s your favorite waterfront in the metropolitan region?

I’m a Bronx boy married to a Queens girl, moved to New Jersey, so we’re truly bi-state in this house. We’re passionate New Yorkers and also passionate New Jerseyites, Nancy and I. My favorite waterfront? Standing on the Jersey coast along the Hudson River, looking at the New York skyline, and especially the World Trade Center, knowing I had a small part in it. The Port Authority is truly the master builder and I’m very honored and privileged and humbled to be a small part of this with many great people.

Thank you for your insights, Steve, and congratulations for being honored as a Hero of the Harbor