Freedom Tower's steel journey
NEW YORK (AP) - February 22, 2008 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.
Jim Brown, a steelworker at the Virginia factory, sees the
symbolism in each column.
"It stands for something. It represents something. It
represents strength," Brown said. "You can tear down a building,
but you can't tear down the spirit of people."
Steel for the Freedom Tower comes first from Luxembourg,
location of one of the world's only plants that builds columns of
that size.
Poured into an H-shaped mold, the steel passes through a
continuous casting machine in Differdange, cooled, cut down and
reheated while engineers work at computers in distant control
rooms.
The first shipment left Europe in 2006; some 9,400 tons have
been ordered so far from ArcelorMittal. Nearly 50,000 tons will be
needed to build the 102-story tower.
About two weeks later, the steel arrives at New Jersey or
Virginia ports and are trucked to Banker Steel in Lynchburg, Va.,
where Brown is waiting.
Fabricated with base plates to connect the pieces and milled so
that the ends are completely flat, the steel leaves Virginia,
stopping at a New Jersey trucking yard before making the last leg
of the trip to the trade center site.
The first Freedom Tower columns to rise at the end of 2006 were
painted white, bearing signatures of ironworkers, New Yorkers and
family members of Sept. 11 victims. They are gone from view now,
covered with concrete.
The current columns - plain brown, with quality codes scrawled
on their ends - are surrounded by hundreds of slender steel rods,
trailers and hundreds of Tishman Construction Corp. workers.
Meanwhile, commuter trains snake through the site every few
minutes.
Last month, six columns came from New Jersey and were set into
place on the building's west side. Ironworker Richie Shuler was
there. He returned to the site last October, for the first time
since trucks removed over a million tons of rubble from the
destroyed towers just after the attacks.
"I was here two hours after the trade center fell," Shuler
said.
In the beginning, the return to rebuild the site was "a little
eerie," he said, "but it becomes a job."
By summer, steel will rise above street level for the first
time; the Port Authority of New York and Jersey, which owned the
trade center and is building the Freedom Tower, says it will take
four more years to build: 102 stories, the same height as the twin
towers, topped by a spire once likened to the Statue of Liberty's
torch.
Brown is waiting eagerly.
"We want to bring that completion," he said. "We won't be
happy until we see the needle put on top of it."