The Freedom Tower

The Gothamist.com says “The reaction to Mayor Bloomberg’s wind power plan, which proposes wind turbines off the shores and maybe even atop buildings and bridges, is decidedly mixed. In one corner, you have fans like Donald Trump–”It’s something we should absolutely be looking at”–and former mayor Ed Koch–”I think it’s ingenious. Absolutely ingenious.” In the other corner, you have, oh, architects and engineers who think the plan, per the NY Times, “would be complicated and expensive and barely begin to meet the growth in demand for electricity that is expected in the coming years.”

The experts points out that it would be costly to retrofit buildings to support heavy turbines. The TImes also points out an original design for Freedom Tower from Skimore, Owings & Merrill included eight wind turbines but “Gov. George E. Pataki expressed concern about the danger the blades would pose to migrating birds, and others worried about them icing up.” The head of solar energy design company altPower, Antony Pereira, said, “New York is really a solar city,” noting it’s less expensive to install solar panels and they pay for themselves much faster.

Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday, “Are you going to put a big windmill on the top of the Empire State Building? I think that’s very unlikely…Can you put windmills off the coastline? That is highly likely.” And as for Trump, when the Post asked if he’d add wind turbines, he said, “My buildings are known for their great architecture, so I’d have to give it some serious thought.”

Government Computer News reports that the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that it was fire and not explosives or impact from debris that caused the 47-story World Trade Center building 7 to fail.

NIST announced the findings of the three year study Thursday [http://wtc.nist.gov /], and recommended changes in national building codes to take into account the affects of thermal expansion on structural members.

“Our study found that the fires in WTC 7, which were uncontrolled but otherwise similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings, caused an extraordinary event,” said Shyam Sunder, lead investigator in the NIST World Trade Center study. “Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down.”

Building 7 was the third building to collapse in the World Trade Center attacks. The two iconic towers collapsed shortly after being hit by hijacked airliners that morning. Building 7 was set ablaze by debris from the attacks and collapsed several hours later. NIST began investigating the attacks in August 2002 and released its findings on the collapse of towers 1 and 2 three years later. Investigators spent the last three years investigating Building 7.

“The investigation was an extensive, state-of-the-art reconstruction of the events that affected WTC 7 and eventually led to its collapse,” NIST said. “Numerous facts and data were obtained, then combined with validated computer modeling that is believed to be close to what actually occurred. A single computer simulation of the structural response to fires took about eight months to complete on powerful computing workstations and clusters.”

The investigation was somewhat hampered by the fact that steel samples from the building were not available for examination and testing. Debris from the attacks was removed as quickly as possible from the sites so that emergency responders could work in the area. Once removed from the scene, steel from Building 7 could not be clearly identified. Unlike pieces from the two primary towers, which were painted red and contained distinguishing marks, remains of Building 7 contained nothing to distinguish them.

This meant that there was much less physical evidence to examine from Building 7. “Nonetheless, the NIST investigation of WTC 7 is based on a huge amount of data,” investigators wrote. “These data come from extensive research, interviews, and studies of the building, including audio and video recordings of the collapse. Rigorous, state-of-the-art computer methods were designed to study and model the building’s collapse. These validated computer models produced a collapse sequence that was confirmed by observations of what actually occurred.”

If you live near Interstate 287 or Interstate 78 in Central New Jersey, you may be roused by early morning thunder Saturday, Aug. 23, don’t necessarily look for rain.
MyCentralJersey.com says the thunder will “probably the sound of hundreds of motorcycles, fire trucks and emergency vehicles escorting a memorial cross constructed out of steel beams taken from the remains of the World Trade Center. The steel cross is being transported from Brooklyn to its eventual permanent location at the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company near the Pennsylvania Sept. 11, 2001, crash site of United Air Lines Flight 93.

“All told there should be about 1,000 motorcycles,” said retired Air Force staff sergeant Mike Angelastro, one of the lead organizers of the Iron and Steel — New York City to Shanksville Run.

“Cycles are joining us in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, all along the run,” Angelastro said. “We have people coming from far as Georgia for this.”

Eugene Stolowski is one of four FDNY firefighters who were injured in January 2005 when they jumped from the fourth-floor window of a Bronx building in a fire that took the lives of two other firefighters.

Stolowski now volunteers for the FDNY Fire Family Transport Foundation, a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization which provides transportation to the families of injured, ill or deceased New York City firefighters and is handling the memorial transport.

“The memorial is a cross section of steel with the letters WTC welded to it to represent the Trade Center buildings,” Stolowski said. “The base was built out in Shanksville in the shape of the Pentagon, and the cross will be mounted on it there.”

The US Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will hold a media briefing and live public webcast on Aug. 21 in Gaithersburg, Md., on the findings and recommendations from its building and fire safety investigation of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7). WTC 7 was a 47-story building that fell nearly seven hours after the World Trade Center (WTC) towers collapsed following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The NIST WTC 7 report will present the probable collapse sequence for the building and will provide recommendations for improving building and fire safety in other buildings similar to WTC 7. The draft WTC 7 investigation report released at the briefing will be open for public comment through to noon Eastern Daylight Time on Sept. 15, 2008. The live webcast that will be accessible from NIST’s WTC website at http://wtc.nist.gov.

NY1 News says “Prosecutors are reportedly considering filing charges against the city in last summer’s fatal fire at the former Deutsche bank building.

Quoting The New York Times, NY1 says the newspaper is reporting “that investigators in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office believe neglect on the part of several city agencies may have contributed to the deaths of firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino.

According to the paper, investigators are focusing on the Buildings Department’s failure to check a disconnected standpipe and conduct routine safety inspections.

The fire was apparently started by a cigarette. Stairwells in the building had been sealed, blocking off escape routes.

City corporation counsel Michael Cardozo said that all departments have cooperated with the investigation and any charges would be unwarranted.

The district attorney’s office would not comment to NY1 about the investigation.

Meanwhile, one of the major fire unions is pushing for better communication to prevent further tragedies.

The Uniformed Firefighters Association wants commanders to be notified every five minutes about water supply problems and to relay that information to firefighters in the building.

A fire spokesman said the department is reviewing the proposal.”

“As Labor Day nears, the effort to revitalize the World Trade Center has experienced significant forward motion as well as a few hitches,” Commercial Property News reports. “In the months to come, the massive rebuilding project is likely to show signs of progress as well as facing a series of difficult choices. Public agencies and private-sector interests swiftly addressed some of the 15 major challenges detailed June 30 by Christopher Ward, the recently appointed executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Ward, who addressed the New York Building Congress on Friday about the agency’s regional capital plans, warned that the World Trade Center’s projects face major delays and cost increases. The Port Authority is due to present follow-up assessment at the end of September.

Ward immediately addressed one of the big challenges on July 1, announcing a redesign that will clip millions of dollars from the $2 billion transit hub designed by the renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Wrapping up another item on Ward’s to-do list, the Port Authority and St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church struck a deal last month that will allow the construction of the World Trade Center’s vehicle security center. The church will receive $20 million to relinquish the parcel at 155 Cedar Street where its building was located before it was destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

That parcel is one of three necessary to build the underground structure nicknamed the “South Bathtub,” which will contain the vehicle security center. The church will be rebuilt nearby at 130 Liberty St. Authorities checked off yet another task Ward’s list last month when the Port Authority and New York City established a joint policing and security plan for the World Trade Center.

Leasing for the World Trade Center’s five planned office towers has had mixed grades so far this summer, according to Commercial Property News. “Freedom Tower, which will be the rebuilt center’s tallest structure at 1,776 feet, scored its first private-sector tenant in June. Beijing Vantone Real Estate Co. agreed to a 23-year lease 190,000 square feet on the 64th through the 69th floors of the 108-story tower. But last month, Silverstein Properties Inc. headed back to the drawing board in its search for a tenant to anchor Tower 3, the 71-story, 2.1 million-square-foot building located at 175 Street. On July 17 the Port Authority acknowledged that Merrill Lynch & Co. had decided against moving to Tower 3 (pictured) when its 2 million-square-foot lease at the nearby 4 World Financial Center expires in 2013.”

Seven years after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center, hundreds who served as first responders are still suffering health problems, seven years after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center, according to Newsday, the Long Island newspaper “and despite a new $9 million federal grant for treatment and monitoring, doctors say more money is needed.

The Long Island World Trade Center Monitoring and Treatment Program at Stony Brook University Medical Center received the funding in a newly announced grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The money will pay for treatment and patient monitoring through next July.

Dr. Benjamin Luft, the program’s director, said yesterday the difference between the medical conditions seen shortly after the attacks and those being treated now has been the transformation from acute illnesses to chronic ones.

Respiratory problems, gastrointestinal conditions and post-traumatic stress disorder are common and often chronic for those who worked at Ground Zero, Luft said.

“We have about 4,500 people in the program,” he said, “many of whom suffer from a wide variety of problems and we continue to do our surveillance for new things that might evolve, whether it’s cancers or autoimmune diseases.”

But if, as Luft and his colleagues predict, World Trade Center disorders could afflict some for life, funding through next July will do little to aid the center’s long-term work.”

EfluxMedia reports the New York Police Department “wants to keep track of every automobile that enters Manhattan over the 16 bridges and 4 tunnels.

The elaborate scheme is part of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative and represents an improved technique to secure the area around the World Trade Center.

The New York Police Department plans to install permanent license plate scanners at the 20 crossings into Manhattan, one of the five boroughs of New York City. The scanners will be designed to transmit information to an NYPD command center, where data would be scrutinized to determine if a certain vehicle has ever been related to any suspicious activity or current inquiry.

“We can’t deny the reality that we’ve had two attacks at that location - two successful terrorist attacks,” stated Raymond Kelly, the current Commissioner of the largest police force in North America.

The plan, which is still being revised, has already raised discontent. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, categorized the project as “an assault on this country’s historical respect for the right to privacy and the freedom to be left alone.”

But according to Paul J. Browne, New York City Police Department’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, the plan has a preventive role in forestalling another terrorist attack, and would not be an inconvenient to vehicles or pedestrians.”

For those who thought Osama Bin Laden’s coven comprised only homicidal males, the New York Daily News brings you Aafia Siddiqui, captured last month in Afghanistan.
“In her possession were “documents describing the creation of explosives, chemical weapons and other weapons involving biological material and radiological agents.” And, the scariest thing, a list of New York landmarks - Statue of Liberty, Times Square - the subway system and Plum Island, the government research laboratory off Long Island.
Siddiqui, a 36-year-old Pakistani and a graduate of MIT, was nabbed lurking around a government compound in Afghanistan. While awaiting questioning, she allegedly grabbed a U.S. Army officer’s rifle and fired. Bad move.
The officer fired back with a pistol, wounding her, and Siddiqui was brought to New York to face federal charges. Her lawyer calls her a ’sacrificial lamb.’ “

The New York Observer says that “HSBC employees should soon, from their aerie atop 7 World Trade Center, be able to peer down at the morass of construction at the city-and-state controlled ground zero below.
The massive bank is poised to become landlord Larry Silverstein’s newest tenant at 7 World Trade. Now that HSBC has a lease pending on the 52-story tower’s top seven floors—comprising 280,000 square feet of the tower’s 1.7 million—7 World Trade is nearly full.
A knowledgeable source told us that a lease is indeed “out,” as commercial real estate’s insufferable jargon would have it, meaning that a lease exists, HSBC has a copy and its execs are eyeing the dotted line. The source would not reveal the rent per square foot, but suggested that the top few floors would command higher prices, perhaps in the mid $90s a square foot, and the lower floors would go for somewhere in the mid $70s or $80s. Of course, those face values don’t take into account any concessions that Silverstein Properties might offer, like free months of rent and build-out allowances.
Mr. Silverstein opened 7 World Trade to much fanfare in early 2006. He said at the time to whoever would listen that he, as a private developer, had rebuilt faster than the government-involved World Trade Center site across Greenwich Street from his new tower. Now, nearly three years on, Mr. Silverstein can continue to gloat, if he’s so inclined, at having a prime financial tenant gobble the last big space at 7 World Trade while ground zero’s various stakeholders (including Mr. Silverstein) continue to triangulate.
HSBC’s New York headquarters are now housed in the 500,000-square-foot scalloped, glass tower that wraps around the Knox Building at 452 Fifth Avenue, between 39th and 40th streets.
Linda Recupero, a spokeswoman for “the world’s local bank,” would only give us one of those no-comment comments: “We regularly review our space requirements, as we are doing currently, but have no further comment to make at this time.”
Mr. Silverstein’s folks also wouldn’t comment.”