The heartbreaking round-the-clock unprecedented project to remove 1.7-million tons (1.5 million t) of twisted wreckage from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center once stood, is completed.
At first, there was a hushed silence as thousands of people, including relatives of victims, attended ceremonies at the site on May 30, Memorial Day, to observe the closure. Then, at 10:29 a.m., the minute when the second 110-story tower fell to earth almost nine months before on Sept. 11, the clang of firebells — five rings repeated four times — broke the solemn quiet.
This was the 5-5-5-5 code used in New York City firehouses to signal the death of a fellow firefighter.
Fifteen people representing the police and fire departments, families, agencies and others who had lost loved ones in the tragedy, plus a representative of equipment operators who had completed the herculean cleanup, slowly bore a stretcher up a 500-ft. (152 m) white-covered ramp, past a line of hundreds of saluting police and white-helmeted firemen on each side. On the stretcher rested a folded American flag, symbolizing those who have not been found.
Next a 14-wheel flatbed truck, bearing a 58-ton (53 t) I-beam, draped in a black cover on which a large flag rested, proceeded up the platform, to the trilling of a kilted bagpipe band and the roll of drums. The beam was the last vertical steel column which had been in place at Ground Zero, and the last large piece of steel to leave the excavation site. Sprayed with the number of fire, police and port authority personnel who were lost, it was Column No. 1,001B of the South Tower.
Taps sounded when the truck reached the top of the platform. Bagpipers played “America the Beautiful.” Only then was there what The New York Times called “a sustained, almost defiant applause that sought to fill a rare silence that had lasted nearly half an hour.”
More than 2,800 people died in the attack. The remains of about 1,000 of these have been identified.
Monumental Effort
The ceremony officially closed the main excavation and removal effort, which had continued around the clock since Sept. 11, and has cost $750 million (just for construction activities, excluding recovery efforts by firefighters). The project consumed more than 3.2-million construction man-hours. Ironworkers torched and cut apart thousands of steel girders. Skilled operators carefully maneuvered many sizes of hydraulic excavators and cranes to dig or lift material. They also utilized grapples (one of the main pieces to be used) to remove steel beams and concrete, plus bulldozers tracked front end loaders, small backhoes, trucks, forklifts and a wide variety of other equipment.
“This will become a case study for our industry,” said Mary Costello, vice president of corporate communications of Bovis Lend Lease Inc., New York, NY, which has been the construction manager for the project since January.
“It was kind of like an angel was on our side. Contractors have been working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, since Sept. 11. We’ve had incredibly mild weather and haven’t lost a single day due to weather or construction delays. There has been only one minor accident, a fractured bone.”
The tragedy touched Bovis personally, as it did many thousands of people who lost family members or friends. One of the firm’s female construction workers lost her husband, an elite firefighter, on 9-11. The couple had five sons all under age nine. On Sept. 11, neither knew that she was pregnant with their sixth child. She recently gave birth to a little girl.
“The Ground Zero work was one the most unusual, in terms of manpower and equipment, in the history of the construction industry.” John Spavins, a spokesperson of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction (D&C) told Construction Equipment Guide (CEG). “At its peak, from late November through mid-December, more than 3,000 construction workers were at the site over a 24-hour period. It wasn’t just digging dirt. The top concern was trying to find live people or remains in all this debris, which included 116 stories — 110 stories above and six stories below — from each building, compacted into the equivalent of 13 stories.”
Spavins said the fall of the buildings greatly disrupted power and telecommunications utilities, where a “tremendous amount of work” is being done. Damage to water mains also was severe.
“Our department was already doing significant water main work before the attacks,” Spavins said. “Then we had additional work under certain streets because of the attacks.”
The continuous stream of heavy trucks carrying excavated debris to barges wore into streets around Ground Zero, which will require considerable street resurfacing downtown. Spavins said the federal government will reimburse the city for this.
In the weeks after the attack, concern grew about the possibility that the 3,000-ft. (914 m) long, 3-ft. (.9 m) wide underground wall protecting the WTC’s 16-acre (6.5 ha) deep basement area from the Hudson River might collapse. Spavins said tiebacks are being installed to temporarily shore up this wall until decisions are made on future buildings at the site. This work, drilling tieback rods through the wall into the bedrock, is expected to be completed in the next four to six weeks.
D&C has been in charge of construction activity at the WTC site. The New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM) has been responsible for the overall effort, including police, fire and health departments.
Work at Ground Zero was originally under four prime contractors, each responsible for a specific area. These were Tully Construction Co. Inc., Flushing, NY; Turner Construction Co., New York, NY; Bovis Lend Lease; and AMEC.
Turner completed its work on Jan. 3, 2002. Tully is now a subcontractor to Bovis, which is the prime on the remaining work, and AMEC is a consultant. Tully also is working on subway and tube reconstruction under contract to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the WTC property.
Neither the city nor Bovis could provide a list of other contractors and subcontractors that had worked in cleanup and recovery efforts.
Bovis said a list would violate company policy. Sources at the city said many complicating factors on contracts, or lack of official contracts, prevented releasing names.
A Remarkable
Achievement
Many remarked that a unique spirit, undoubtedly derived from the sense of loss and tragedy, pervaded the work and helped coalesce the effort.
“There were zero problems,” said Bovis’ Costello. “It was a remarkable project, way under budget, way ahead of schedule. Considering the magnitude of what happened on Sept. 11, if you had to do that type of work, it couldn’t have been done any better.
“I’ve never seen people work so well together as a team. With such wonderful cooperation from all the other contractors and trades, it was really a project to be proud of,” he added.
“There was never a schedule — that’s a bad word — on the Ground Zero work,” Spavins said. “We came in earlier than anticipated, at lower cost than anticipated. It has been a tremendous effort on the part of the city government and the construction industry, including organized labor.”
“Our mechanics had to repair all equipment on the job; there was no time to send them out because we were working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on 12-hour shifts,” Tom McGuire, president and business manager of Local 15, International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) in New York, told CEG. “We had as many as 600 operating engineers down there, including equipment operators, mechanics and welders, plus as many as six survey parties monitoring buildings in the vicinity to be sure they were safe and structurally sound. Some of our survey engineers had worked on the original twin towers. We also had 125 people processing debris for the Army Corps of Engineers after barges carried it to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
“Our people in the beginning were working as volunteers; they weren’t worried about being paid or anything else. We had people from as far away as Alaska and California. The whole thing was to help the families bring closure for their dear ones that perished. At first, it was strictly rescue because everything you picked up was a body or parts of bodies. Then it went to recovery and cleanup.
“It was not the easiest thing in the world working on this; sometimes there were very sad conditions down there. It’s a mental strain as well as a physical strain. You should know that we completed the job six months ahead of schedule, with only one minor injury and the reason for that was that the work was 100 percent union from beginning to end. We fast-tracked on two 12-hour shifts; because of that the city saved more than $1 billion,” he noted.
“Among the contractors, Tully supplied its own operators and did the nuts and bolts work themselves. The other companies, Turner, AMEC and Bovis, subbed everything out as general contractors,” Spavins explained.
The other main trades, besides the operating engineers, were the ironworkers (Local 40) and the laborers (Locals 79 and 731 of the Laborers International, AFL/CIO).
McGuire, who attended the final ceremonies on May 30, remarked on the silence there. “There were no speeches, no talking. just silence,” he said. “I think that was the best way to express our grief and the spirit we had in honoring the people who lost their lives, and being sensitive to the families who were there.”
Equipment suppliers were critical to the effort, providing thousands of units of equipment from Sept. 11 through the succeeding months.
“Probably one of the most significant differences between a routine job site and Ground Zero was that this was an around-the-clock, 24-hour-a-day project,” said Patrick Ahern, president of Edward Ehrbar Inc., an equipment distributor in Pelham Manor, NY, one of the many which provided rental equipment throughout the nine months, both at the WTC site and the landfill in Staten Island.
“It was not unusual, particularly in the first four or five months, for our product support operation to service our equipment, or other equipment, at 2 a.m. Sunday morning. It didn’t matter; we were on call. Because of the 24-hour work, and the good weather, everyone working together finished the job in nine months,” he said.
Rebuilding
Rebuilding has already begun on an around-the-clock schedule, for 7 World Trade Center, the destroyed station and tracks for the PATH line to New Jersey, as well as the No. 1 and No. 9 subway stations.
President Bush has earmarked $20.9 billion for redevelopment of the WTC downtown area. New York City has lost 100,000 jobs and $16 billion in gross domestic product since the attacks, which damaged or destroyed 30-million sq. ft. of building space.
Legislation has already been enacting for $15.9 billion in federal aid. This includes $6.1-billion in new funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for infrastructure repair, grants to business, assistance to needy family and other needs, and $1.3-billion to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. for transit repair.
Proposed spending includes $2.75 billion to FEMA for transit repair and $2 billion to the Department of Transportation for improving subways and streets.
Six or more proposals for a memorial at the WTC site are expected to be announced in July.
A joint city and state government body called The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is overseeing the redevelopment, working with the Port Authority on the many issues relating to rebuilding, and the memorial. “There are all sorts of planning questions relating to what was there before, what’s there now, how we handle the memorial and so forth,” said Spavins.
Many families of the victims want a memorial to take up at least the 7-acre (2.8 ha) site where the twin towers once stood. This leaves a question whether there would be enough space left for office and retail space to generate the revenue which the Port Authority needs. One proposal calls for five 55-story buildings on other parts of the Ground Zero area.
A group, led by developer Larry Silverstein, purchased a 99-year lease of the complex, agreeing to pay the authority a yearly rent of $120 million. This is contingent, however, on receiving 10 million sq. ft. of office space and 650,000 sq. ft. of retail space.
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