Category: WTC

USATODAY.com
The roar of 1,000 motorcycles accompanied a steel beam from the World Trade Center on Saturday as it traveled to Pennsylvania, where it will be part of a memorial to those who died there in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Hundreds of current and retired New York City firefighters left Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field at about 7 a.m. to escort the girder on the 311-mile ride to Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The members of the New York City Fire Riders joined a larger group that included bikers from as far away as Georgia. The beam rode on a flatbed truck.

I’ve talked about this story before (click the WTC link below), but now it’s been properly christened and launched.

Yahoo! News

The USS New York, an amphibious assault ship built with scrap steel from the ruins of the World Trade Center, was christened Saturday as a source of strength and inspiration for the nation.

It’s nice to see at least part of the scrap steel being used for something appropriate. It seemed odd somehow that the scrap was mostly taken away to be reprocessed in Asia.

The Record (NorthJersey.com)

The brains behind the use of salvaged World Trade Center steel in a new Navy warship is a Rutherford volunteer firefighter excited about seeing his vision christened this weekend as the USS New York.

Her name is New York, but to Scott Koen, she is a phoenix.

The christening will take place Saturday at a Louisiana shipyard with a bottle of champagne smashed across her bow, which contains 24 tons of steel that once towered over Lower Manhattan.

Armed with air-defense missiles and two 30mm guns for close combat, the USS New York is designed for missions that include special operations against terrorists. It can carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-ready Marines who can reach shore by helicopter and assault craft.

Some behind-the-scenes information about rebuilding where the twin towers stood.

AP via Yahoo! News
The steel bound for the Freedom Tower at ground zero travels thousands of miles, from a plant in Luxembourg where columns are rolled through casting machines at temperatures approaching 2,340 degrees.

Scrap metal melted into liquid steel in an electric furnace is cast, heated, cooled and heated again at the ArcelorMittal steel mill in Differdange.

The steel makes its way to a plant in Virginia where the huge columns are cut to size. Eventually, it is shipped to New York City, where the columns are lifted by crane and painstakingly set on top of each other at ground zero.

The jumbo steel columns — foot by foot, ton by ton — are forming the skeleton of the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, designed just after the 2001 attacks to replace the destroyed World Trade Center. Each column makes a 4,700-mile journey, taking weeks and sometimes months to arrive at ground zero.

I like a good recycling story …
Yahoo! News
With a year to go before it even touches the water, the Navy’s amphibious assault ship USS New York has already made history twice. It was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center, and it survived Hurricane Katrina.
USS New York is about 45 percent complete and should be ready for launch in mid-2007. Katrina disrupted construction when it pounded the Gulf Coast last summer, but the 684-foot vessel escaped serious damage, and workers were back at the yard near New Orleans two weeks after the storm.
The ship was an impetus for many of the yard’s thousands of workers to return to the job, even though hundreds lost their homes, Quaglino and others said.
Northrop Grumman employed 6,500 at Avondale before Katrina. Today, roughly 5,500 are back on the job, working on the New York and three other vessels. More than 200 employees who lost their homes to Katrina are living at the shipyard, some on a Navy barge and others in bunk-style housing.
Steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite, La., to cast the ship’s bow section.