The Freedom Tower

Ground Zero will get a little heavier tomorrow.
At least 40 trucks will descend on the construction site for the New World Trade Center, hauling 400 cubic yards of concrete for footings for the Freedom Tower. Construction workers began digging the foundation at the site back in the spring. The blasted bedrock a few months later and by August, they were inserting reinforced steel into the ground in preparation for pouring the foundation footings which will be poured tomorrow for the concrete core and thick-crash-proof walls at the job site. Up, up and away Freedom Tower.

It looks like the city of New York won’t be offering any subsidies to Merrill Lynch to keep their offices downtown. The New York Post reported the Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg threw water on the idea earlier this week. In fact, Bloomberg said he thought it would be out of line for Merrill Lynch to ask for such a subsidy. The long time Ground zero resident has made lower Manhattan its home since 1914. WTC developer Larry Silverstein met with Merrill Lynch to discuss the possibility of moving to the new World Trade Center. They talked about leasing space to the company in one of the prospective towers planned at the site. It has been reported that Merrill is not interested in leasing space in the Freedom Tower.

As the construction of Freedom Tower proceeds at the site of the devastated World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, it raises questions about the feasibility of rapid evacuation from a tall building in a disaster scenario. Over 95 years ago, similar questions were being considered on the construction project that produced the ill-fated ocean liner Titanic. In examining the Titanic project, there are a number of lessons from history that can be taken away and applied to the construction of today’s skyscrapers. 


Mark Kozak-Holland, author of the Lessons from History series of books as a few thoughts on the matter. In his latest book, “Avoiding Project Disaster: Titanic Lessons for IT Executives” (www.mmpubs.com), he describes the project that built the ocean liner TItanic and the business decisions that doomed the ship before it even left the docks.


”In the design phase of any project, whether a tall building, transportation vehicle, or even an IT system,” Kozak-Holland states, “architects have to examine the requirements and determine safety and availability levels once delivered into operation. Likewise, Titanic’s architects had to consider these levels of safety; they were faced with a number of technology choices over which safety features to incorporate into the ship. A transatlantic liner faces a number of hazards that may require rapid evacuation.
Initially, Titanic’s architects opted to go with the highest level of safety that incorporated the latest technologies including a double hull, bulkheads with electric doors, a front-end crumple zone, and triple-stacked lifeboats from 16 stations. This was expected when constructing the ultimate luxury liner and analogous to what you would expect today when purchasing a Lexus or Mercedes - high standards in both what it does and how it does it (functional and non-functional requirements).” 


With tall buildings today, architects have safety technology choices too; for example, fire-resistant materials and sprinkler systems. At the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the escape plan uses elevators to halve the evacuation time with smoke-proof waiting areas for those unable to escape the fire to wait for rescue by a service elevator.
In the Taipei 101 Tower, each floor includes emergency escape corridors leading to fire-safe rooms, and there are outdoor balconies every eight floors allowing refuge. Specially reinforced fire or “bomb” elevators are exclusive to emergency crews and fire departments, allowing rapid access to fires and avoiding conflict with those trying to evacuate. Other safety technologies being developed include parachute-like devices for people to use to rescue themselves.


With Titanic’s project, there was a twist in the story as the selected safety features were undermined by executive pressure from White Star’s director Bruce Ismay who pushed for the ultimate passenger experience. Kozak-Holland’s book shows how Ismay insisted, for example, in the need for a spacious 200-foot dining room/ballroom which cut straight across the bulkheads in the centre of the ship. Similarly, a desire to give a clear ocean vista to the first-class suites on the promenade/lifeboat deck was at odds with the triple-stacked lifeboats, towering 15 feet in the air.
Titanic’s overconfident architects conceded and, in the end, four bulkheads barely reached ten feet above the water line, and the 48 triple-stacked lifeboats were reduced to a single-stack of 16, far too few given the ship’s passenger capacity. Similarly, the double hull that was supposed to extend the full height and wrap entirely around the ship was limited to just the hull bottom well below the water line, so as not to narrow the ship’s interior width and to preserve valuable passenger space. 


By the end of Titanic’s construction phase, there was little acknowledgement that anything was seriously wrong with the design, even though the ship’s non-functional requirements had been severely compromised. Titanic’s architects and project team still believed that Titanic was practically unsinkable and could survive any situation because of the aggregate effect of safety features, her sheer size, the broad hull design, and the use of latest safety technologies. After all, no one had implemented this many safety features into a ship before. This fact was used actively as part of the marketing campaign, and expectations remained high. The lifeboats were viewed as an added safety feature, useful only if Titanic had to rescue another ship in distress.


Much has been written about the Freedom Tower’s superior safety features like the 200 foot high concrete base; a concrete core with three foot thick concrete walls to protect life support systems like emergency stairs, elevators, fire suppression and ventilation systems; sensors and filters installed within the air supply system to detect chemical or biological agents; and a steel and titanium plate skin.


The sinking of Titanic was caused by compromises made during its design, construction, and testing phases to accommodate various business interests. These compromises reduced the effectiveness of safety systems and provided faulty operational data upon which to base management decisions.
Kozak Holland concludes that “While no one could predict that the ship was going to run into ice, the compromises made during the build and launch of the ship almost guaranteed that any such collision was going to be a serious one.” 

The important lessons from history for today’s Freedom Tower are: 

- With a lengthy construction project of four years, do not allow overconfidence to develop based on the aggregated effect of all the safety features. 
- Manage the expectation levels.
- Do not allow compromises of safety features to creep in. 


After all, Titanic’s construction project was also four years.
From The PR Wire

In 1997, the New York City Audubon Society launched a new project. It was called Project Safe Flight. It was set up to monitor bird collisions into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. The project was begun because birds migrating down the Hudson or East rivers were flying into the towers as they attempted to fly north or south.
Developers of the Freedom Tower are already on board this time and have integrated ideas into their plans. According to ABC News, the first 186 feet of the Towers will have wavy textured window glass. From the birds-eye view, the towers will look like stone to birds, not windows they can fly through.
“Interestingly, home grown “urban birds” like pigeons, sparrows and starlings seem to have figured out how to safely navigate the glass canyons of New York; the top 20 bird species involved in collisions were all migrants,” according to ABc. “ The top five species involved in collisions are White-throated Sparrow, Common Yellowthroat, Ovenbird, Dark-eyed Junco, and Ruby-crowned Kinglet.”
Well, who knew?

Like the character in the film, Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray, the recent discovery of more human remains has created a nightmarish problem for some families of 9/11 World Trade Center victims. While some families have mourned the fact that they have never been notified by authorities that remains of their loved one have been found, others have a uniquely different problem, according to a recent story in Metro New York.
“Some family members who never received any remains are uncertain about what they want to find,” the story said. “Others, who have already buried what remains were found, are faced with the possibility of another funeral or burial.
“I’ll tell you the truth, I couldn’t go through exhuming his body again,” said Bruce De Cell, whose son-in-law, Mark Petrocelli, was killed in the north tower. The family has received remains five times and buried him twice, the last time in 2003. “As far as I’m concerned, I hope I don’t hear any more.”

This photo of the Freedom Tower is worth a thousand words: From Wired News

Word on “The Street” is that the brokerage house Merrill Lynch won’t be moving into the Freedom Tower.
In fact, some lower Manhattan folks are wondering if Merrill will stay downtown where the firm has been since 1914. The company has more than 9,000 employee who work downtown. New York Business.com says the company will decide in six months whether it will relocate to midtown or suburbs. In fact, New Jersey is an option.
It’s not looking good for the Freedom Tower rental agents. Merrill Lynch could move its trading business from Manhattan,” says David Arena, president of the New York region for Grubb & Ellis. “It already operates successfully in New Jersey, and other firms—like UBS and the Royal Bank of Scotland in Connecticut—have proved that you can trade in locations other than New York City,” the business website said.

This is from Phillip Nobel, a writer for Metropolismag.com:
“Even after several years, many of them spent at Ground Zero among the strange tribes concerned with the site’s reconstruction—even after at no little pain turning that immersion into an account running 85,000 words—I maintained that I was at home with the aftermath. The instant memorials had not gotten to me, neither massed candles nor vain posters of the “missing.” The Tribute in Light, that importunate civic grandiosity, left me blank when it made its debut the first spring after. And none of the formal memorial designs, professional or amateur, ever impressed me as the least bit fitting, let alone moving or, god forbid, “healing”: it was processed, I was done.

“So imagine my surprise when I first found myself in tears at the site as late as the summer of 2006. The catalyst was not a vision of the still distant shrine-pools conceived by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, still less those dual-role future memorials—Calatrava’s train station or what’s left of Libeskind’s master plan—the effects of which, through careful imagining, I had long ago dismissed as emotionally neutral. Instead the artistic team that finally cut through my cynicism was the comparatively humble duo of David Childs and Jenny Holzer—an architect who builds with little pretension to transcend and a now hackneyed artist of the severest sterility. I should add the great E. B. White too, since it was his Here Is New York, scrolling in huge white letters on Holzer’s screen in Childs’s lobby at 7 World Trade, that finally broke me down.”
Real grief sometimes takes time.

Plans to open the World Trade Center Memorial Museum has been pushed back to sometime after the 2009 opening, according to the New York Daily News.
The museum, hallmarked by two sunken pools where the twin towers once stood, won’t open now until 2010, the newspaper says. They said the delay is complicated by a timetable that delays the museum opening after a visitor’s center is completed. The center provides access to the museum’s underground exhibition space.
It sounds more complicated that it needs to be. In fact, it sounds like a planning problem, something that could easily have been worked out before the organizers announced plans they’ve scrapped.
I know an events planner who takes care of loose ends these folks can’t even imagine. Like the rest of the country, I want to know whose in charge of this rudderless ship?

The New York City Medical Examiner’s office says workers have found at least 300 more bone fragments in another manhole at Ground Zero. These fragments bring the total to over 500 fragments found at the site in just a few days.
The newest bones were found Saturday along a service road on the western edge of Ground Zero. Workers are currently searching 12 manholes and underground areas on the same road, missed during the initial recovery effort.