The Freedom Tower

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has apologized for saying a fallen police officer was no hero despite the fact that he had worked at ground zero for an extended time during the clean up at the World Trade Center.
The mayor extended his apology to the father of Jame Zadroga in a meeting at city hall. The city medical examiner Charles Hirsch said Zadroga’s death was not caused by toxic fumes at Ground Zero. The mayor said he was going to try to find a way for Sept. 11 victims memorial to include those who have been sickened by the toxic zero dust and debris.
“We wanted to have a hero,” Bloomberg said Oct. 29. “There are plenty of heroes. It’s just that in this case, the science says this was not a hero”” he told the Associated Press.
“The family of James Zadroga, a retired police detective, rejects allegations that the 34-year-old took any medications improperly. At least two other medical experts have concluded that the material found in his respiratory system included microscopic shards of debris from the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The mayor backpedaled after saying Zadroga was not a hero, calling him “a great NYPD officer” who had repeatedly risked his life for the city and had gotten sick from breathing contaminated air at ground zero. He said, however, that it would be up to the public to decide whether Zadroga was a hero.”

The pit were the Freedom Tower is being build is itself a symbol that sums up the history of Ground Zero in the five years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to a website called Fundraising Ideas.
“Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, ground zero remains a 16-acre, 70-foot-deep hole in the heart of Lower Manhattan. High above it, a scaffolded bank building, contaminated during the attack, hulks like a metal skeleton, waiting endlessly to be razed.
 
The wreck that still stands tall and the pit that still sinks deep sum up the troubled history of ground zero,”authors at the site say. “A site of horrific tragedy whose rescue and cleanup operation was a model of valiant efficiency, ground zero turned into a sinkhole of good intentions where it was as difficult to demolish a building as to construct one.”
For all that has not yet risen from the ashes, there has been considerable sturm und drang, “like a novel, a cheap novel,” said Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the site. The combination of big money, prime real estate, bottomless grief, artistic ego and dreams of legacy transformed ground zero into a mosh pit of stakeholders banging heads over billions in federal aid, tax breaks and insurance proceeds.
 
Only now, after a whirlwind of negotiations to resolve crises in advance of the fifth anniversary, is subterranean work substantially under way, raising the hope that reconstruction may proceed. Even so, many family members of victims are quick to point out that they still have nowhere to go to mourn their loved ones and only shaken faith that they will see a fitting memorial in the near future.
 
Pataki, who assumed control of the reconstruction effort in the earliest days, did not intend it to be so protracted. In the spring of 2003, pressed by business leaders who had denounced the anemic pace of rebuilding, Pataki promised to be “bold and daring and swift.”

Standing in a hotel ballroom, he pledged that the skyline would be restored by this fifth anniversary when the Freedom Tower, as he christened it that day, would be topped off at 1,776 feet. By the end of 2006, he continued, a grand new PATH terminal and Fulton Street Transit Center would open, the substructure for a memorial would be built and a grand piazza, the Wedge of Light, would be created.”

 None of this has happened yet.

A collision migration system for birds that is planned for the Freedom Tower is being installed to deter traveling creatures from striking the tower. Industrial orinthologist Richard Podolsky says the system will use radar to detect birds approaching upper floors of the tower and other tall buildings in Lower Manhattan. The tower also will have devices to dim lights in the tower that illuminate the antenna and sculpture on top of the tower. Urban birds like pigeons, sparrows and starlings have figured out that tall buildings pose a problem for them while in flight. But migrating species like White-throated Sparrows, Ovenbird or Ruby-crowned Kinglet have more trouble navigating around tall buildings.
No Supermen among these feathered friends. The Audubon Society is keeping a close eye on these new developments.

There’s another predictable scheduling snag in the long range plans for the World Trade Center Memorial. The current plans call for the memorial to be completed in 2009. Delays in this massive World Trade Center project are one of the things we can count on as we track the progress of the many construction projects at Ground Zero. In an editorial posted by the Downtown Express, the blog notes that timetables and schedules in redevelopment plans are the one certainty we can count on. “Delays have been one of the few certainties, and milestones end up getting reached whenever they get reached. So maybe these observers aren’t too concerned that the Port Authority plans to finish building the World Trade Center memorial in 2009, at which time the thousands of tour buses driving to the memorial can begin idling for two years, when the Port plans to finish building an underground garage where they can park.”
In fact, the plans call for the memorial to be completed in three years and the garage in five. That the plan, not a delay or a mistake in scheduling. Hurry up and wait.

Recovery of remains at Ground Zero once again has slipped from the headlines and the consciousness of authorities who are celebrating pouring of the foundation of the Freedom Tower which most definitely will obscure future recovery efforts.
Yes, its been more than five years since the worse disaster on American soil hurled this nation into despair, war in two countries with the promise of at least a third front if we don’t keep a shaper eye on that bunch in the White House.
“Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officials are seeking to distance themselves from New York City’s “exploratory excavations” for human remains into the World Trade Center’s service road that parallels West Street,” say the folks at a blog called Take Back the Memorial “Sources indicate PA officials believe a significant amount of debris, containing human remains from the 9/11 attacks, will likely be discovered when work to reinforce the slurry wall beneath the road begins in earnest. While a full excavation can be worked around now, construction might be halted if such finds occur at that critical juncture. Yet Mayor Bloomberg agreed to the Department of Design and Construction’s recommendations to only dig test holes (the DDC was in charge of initial recovery efforts and, in March 2002, it had the service road filled and paved over).’
In a statement, the PA says “The city’s led efforts in terms of recovery at the site we consider to be paramount, so any adjustments we’ve had to make to construction we have made them, and we will continue to make them and we will always continue to make them,” said Port Authority Chairman Anthony Coscia. “To date they have not had a material impact on the construction schedule.”
Lets just wait and see.

A living memorial will be planted at the World Trade Center when families and dignitaries gather at Ground Zero three years from now.
The WTC Memorial is slated to open in 2009. Trees planted at the site will be brought there by a Houston company that will be responsible for planting hundreds of trees at the site. Environmental Design is owned by Tom Cox, who said the WTC contract is the most important contract the company has landed in 30 years. A three-year job The World Trade Center Memorial will keep Cox’s team busy for next three years, the Houston Chronicle said recently.
“A lot of work will go into selection of the trees for the memorial, and we chose Environmental Design because of their experience in projects such as this one,” said Lynn Rasic, spokeswoman for the World Trade Center Foundation, a nonprofit agency that will build, own and operate the memorial and museum at Ground Zero.

The first steel columns crafted to go up at the construction site of the Freedom Tower by mid December are being readied to be shipped to New York.
The steel is being fabricated in Lynchburg, Virginia by Banker Steel. They are making 14 columns to be used in the foundation of the new tower. The fabricator is building 14 columns. They are made by welding steel plates together. The columns are being taken to Lynchburg’s City Stadium to allow people to write messages on the beams on December 8 and 9 before they are shipped to New York City. The beams will be dedicated on December 10 by New York Gov. George Pataki and Virginia Gov. Tim Kane with bottles of champagne.

The feds have refused to change practices that might have created new standards to change autopsy guidelines to document a link between the deaths of rescue workers and the toxic air at Ground Zero.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said the agency would “pursue other avenues for documenting long-term health effects from exposure to air contaminants from the World Trade Center disaster.” The medical examiner for the city Fire Department says there are “insurmountable barriers” to studying the problem. There seems to be enormous problems related to standardizing test methods that can weed out all kinds of special interests, including lawyers interested in filing civil lawsuits and others with “undeniable self-interest in a cause of death. Meanwhile, construction of the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero continues with construction crews pouring tons of concrete for the footings that will support the 1,776 foot tower.

Trucks rolled at Ground Zero today. Concrete trucks, seventy of them, came to the site to dump more than 500 cubic yards of concrete for the core of the Freedom Tower. The concrete are for footings being poured to support the 1,776-foot tower. Construction supervisors say it will take up to two years for the building going up at Ground Zero to reach street level. The Port Authority, which owns the site, recently poured concrete to support the PATH rail center in another part of the work site. The construction is going forward despite continued protests by supporters of victims’ families who object to the project going forward while more human remains are being discovered at the downtown construction site.

Freedom Tower, going up! The concrete for the core of the tower was poured today. The concrete for the eastside walls are scheduled to be poured in just a few weeks and next month the columns to support the perimeter walls go up. “In the last seven months at the site, more has been done than in the past several years,” says a Port Authority bigshot as quoted on a blog called Curbed. Wow. They’re actually building this thing.”