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Friday, September 21, 2001

"The people who have inflicted this upon us are clearly out to destroy our way of life," said Larry Silverstein. "It would be a tragedy to allow them their victory."

The consortium, that paid $3.2 billion for the World Trade Tower lease, has been assembling architects and staff to examine its options, in wake of the terrorist attacks that left the towers a pile of ruble in lower Manhattan and more than 6,000 dead or missing.

Silverstein said that rebuilding the World Trade Center would not only be a "moral statement" but an economic one as well. "The twin towers' 10-million square feet represented about 10 percent of the financial district's total space and served as the area's economic anchor," Silverstein said. "Lower Manhattan lost 15-million square feet in the attack and the office space is needed."

City officials and engineers, that have been monitoring the retaining wall that kept the Hudson River out of the basement of the World Trade Center, gave Silverstein good news Thursday.

The 60-foot high retaining wall that kept the river from flooding the seven-story concourse beneath the World Trade Center appeared structurally sound, but plans are being made to shore it up, engineers said. "We have very little concern about the wall in this stage of the game," said engineer Daniel Hahn, who is working with city officials in studying the trade center's foundation, known as the "bathtub." The bathtub is a 70-foot deep, 16-acre well, ringed by a 3-foot-thick concrete-and-steel retaining wall. It was designed to hold back the landfill that makes up the balance of lower Manhattan from the World Trade Center to the Hudson River.

To anchor the World Trade Center complex and its two twin towers to bedrock, the state of New York had to dig 70 feet down to bedrock, when it built the World Trade Center in the 1960s and 1970s. The material from the 16-acre area was used to expand lower Manhattan into the Hudson River, creating the land where Battery Park City and other buildings sit. The bathtub holds the World Trade Center's foundation and seven stories of parking garages, shopping concourses and the PATH train station that ran trains from New York City to New Jersey.

Rubble from the World Trade Center has filled the bathtub and city officials have been monitoring the stability of the retaining wall and there were fears that the wall could collapse and destabilize the rescue area as well as other building in lower Manhattan.

"At the moment lateral support to the retaining wall are gone in some places, so debris is helping keep the wall in place," said engineer Daniel Hahn. "The plan is to shore up the underground wall gradually to keep it standing as debris is removed from the pit."

Several heavy cranes, which were situated on portions of the retaining wall have been moved and engineers plan to dig 10 feet down along the outside of the retaining wall and put in steel ties to pin back the wall.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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