Monday, June 15, 2009
Why were the remains of World Trade Center towers shipped to China?
Baoshan Group Buys Steel Debris from WTC
Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, January 24, 2002
[This is Google's cache of http://english.people.com.cn/200201/24/eng20020124_89243.shtml. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Apr 7, 2009 13:49:28 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime.]
The Baoshan Iron and Steel Company Group has bought 50,000 tons of steel debris from the World Trade Center destroyed by terrorists on September 11 last year.
The company plans to feed the debris, purchased for 120 US dollars per ton, into a furnace to make new steel.
The Baoshan Iron and Steel Company Group has bought 50,000 tons of steel debris from the World Trade Center destroyed by terrorists on September 11 last year.
A cargo vessel carrying the steel debris is due to arrive at Shanghai Port this Friday, Beijing Youth Daily reported Wednesday.
The newspaper quoted sources from the conglomerate as saying that the steel debris was purchased for 120 US dollars per ton.
The Shanghai-based conglomerate plans to feed most of the debris into a furnace to make new steel.
Cut, melted, reforged
At least 400,000 tons of steel debris has resulted from the destruction of the twin towers.
A New York-based iron and steel administrative company has been selling most of the steel debris globally, and New York City is said to keep part of the WTC debris to commemorate the innocent people killed in the terrorists' attack.
The charred steel girders from the World Trade Center - cut, melted and reforged - will soon end up in hundreds of thousands of soup cans, appliances, car engines and buildings across the world, according a recent report by New York Daily news.
About 60,000 tons of steel from the twin towers' once-magnificent skeleton have been cut into manageable 3- to 5-foot lengths and loaded onto barges.
While mostly bound for mills in South Korea, shipments also have made their way to Malaysia, Chicago and Florida.
The steel's swift journey from the smoldering piles at Ground Zero to recycling furnaces is the result of a controversial decision by the city to send the girders, columns and beams to scrap yards in New Jersey - which then put them up for sale.
Disgrace, profit, memorial?
"This is a disgrace to the memory of the nearly 3,000 people killed," said Sally Regenhard, the mother of Firefighter Christian Regenhard, who died Sept. 11.
She is part of a group of victims' families, structural engineers and fire-safety experts who want the recycling halted until the steel can be examined more thoroughly.
Metal Management Northeast of Newark and Hugo Neu Schnitzer East of Jersey City won the initial bidding for the city contracts to recycle the Trade Center steel - and continue to bid on subsequent portions of the nearly 300,000 tons of steel at Ground Zero. Few details have been released.
Industry experts estimated the steel is being sold by the city Design and Construction Department to the recyclers for $75 to $100 a ton. Once cut and reforged, it can sell for $220 to $600 a ton. Still, the companies say their profit has been modest.
The recycling process is so quick, industry experts said, that little more than four months after the terrorist attacks, tons of the steel probably have been mixed with virgin ore, melted and reused.
Amid the piles on the firm's dock is a charred boulder pierced with steel rods. The chunk of concrete and steel, which Metal Management workers call The Meteorite, contains three to four floors of a building compressed into a 5-by-7-foot ball.
Marked "For PA" in chalk, it will one day be part of a Port Authority memorial in honor of the nearly 3,000 people killed at Ground Zero.
However, the vast majority of the steel Metal Management receives - generally the larger pieces from the disaster site - is being recycled. Barges containing up to 1,200 tons of steel regularly leave piers in lower Manhattan and head to the Newark scrap yard.
US recyclers are increasingly turning to Asian markets, where mills pay from 5% to 10% more than domestic firms.
The recycling work will likely take up to a year to complete.
Metal Management has donated several pieces of wreckage to organizations seeking to establish WTC memorials. Less than half a mile from its dock, two 8-foot I-beams form a replica of the towers in an unfinished shrine at Stella Maris Seamen's Church.
The following New York Times article discusses the government's report about the collapse of World Trade Center building 7. A week after this article was written, a high school physics teacher and others challenged the accuracy of the government report, and it was changed.
Fire, Not Explosives, Felled 3rd Tower on 9/11, Report Says
New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON
August 21, 2008
Fires in the 47-story office tower at the edge of the World Trade Center site undermined floor beams and a critical structural column, federal investigators concluded on Thursday, as they attempted to curb still-rampant speculation that explosives caused the building’s collapse on Sept. 11, 2001.
No one died when the tower, 7 World Trade Center, tumbled, as the estimated 4,000 office workers there at the time had evacuated before it gave way, nearly seven hours after the second of the twin towers came down.
But the collapse of 7 World Trade Center — home at the time to branch offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service and the Giuliani administration’s emergency operations center — is cited in hundreds of Web sites and books as perhaps the most compelling evidence that an insider secretly planted explosives, intentionally destroying the tower.
A separate, preliminary report issued in 2002 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency questioned whether diesel fuel tanks installed in the tower to supply backup generators — including one that powered the Giuliani administration’s emergency “bunker” — might have been to blame.
But S. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, based here in the suburbs of Washington, also rejected that theory on Thursday, even as he acknowledged that the collapse had been something of a puzzle.
“Our take-home message today is the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery,” Dr. Sunder said at a news conference at the institute’s headquarters. “It did not collapse from explosives or fuel oil fires.”...
During the last four decades, other towers in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles have remained standing through catastrophic blazes that burned out of control for hours because of malfunctioning or nonexistent sprinkler systems.
But 7 World Trade Center, which was not struck by a plane, is the first skyscraper in modern times to collapse primarily as a result of a fire.
Adding to the suspicion is the fact that in the rush to clean up the site, almost all of the steel remains of the tower were disposed of, leaving investigators in later years with little forensic evidence...
The skeptics — including several who attended Thursday’s news conference — were unimpressed. They have long argued that an incendiary material called thermite, made of aluminum powder and a metal oxide, was used to take down the trade center towers, an approach that would not necessarily result in an explosive boom. They also have argued that a sulfur residue found at the World Trade Center site is evidence of an inside job.
Dr. Sunder said the investigators chose not to use the computer model to evaluate whether a thermite-fueled fire might have brought down the tower, since 100 pounds of it would have had to have been stacked directly against the critical column that gave way, which he said they did not believe had occurred.
To the skeptics, it was a glaring omission.
“It is very difficult to find what you are not looking for,” said Shane Geiger..
Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, January 24, 2002
[This is Google's cache of http://english.people.com.cn/200201/24/eng20020124_89243.shtml. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Apr 7, 2009 13:49:28 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime.]
The Baoshan Iron and Steel Company Group has bought 50,000 tons of steel debris from the World Trade Center destroyed by terrorists on September 11 last year.
The company plans to feed the debris, purchased for 120 US dollars per ton, into a furnace to make new steel.
The Baoshan Iron and Steel Company Group has bought 50,000 tons of steel debris from the World Trade Center destroyed by terrorists on September 11 last year.
A cargo vessel carrying the steel debris is due to arrive at Shanghai Port this Friday, Beijing Youth Daily reported Wednesday.
The newspaper quoted sources from the conglomerate as saying that the steel debris was purchased for 120 US dollars per ton.
The Shanghai-based conglomerate plans to feed most of the debris into a furnace to make new steel.
Cut, melted, reforged
At least 400,000 tons of steel debris has resulted from the destruction of the twin towers.
A New York-based iron and steel administrative company has been selling most of the steel debris globally, and New York City is said to keep part of the WTC debris to commemorate the innocent people killed in the terrorists' attack.
The charred steel girders from the World Trade Center - cut, melted and reforged - will soon end up in hundreds of thousands of soup cans, appliances, car engines and buildings across the world, according a recent report by New York Daily news.
About 60,000 tons of steel from the twin towers' once-magnificent skeleton have been cut into manageable 3- to 5-foot lengths and loaded onto barges.
While mostly bound for mills in South Korea, shipments also have made their way to Malaysia, Chicago and Florida.
The steel's swift journey from the smoldering piles at Ground Zero to recycling furnaces is the result of a controversial decision by the city to send the girders, columns and beams to scrap yards in New Jersey - which then put them up for sale.
Disgrace, profit, memorial?
"This is a disgrace to the memory of the nearly 3,000 people killed," said Sally Regenhard, the mother of Firefighter Christian Regenhard, who died Sept. 11.
She is part of a group of victims' families, structural engineers and fire-safety experts who want the recycling halted until the steel can be examined more thoroughly.
Metal Management Northeast of Newark and Hugo Neu Schnitzer East of Jersey City won the initial bidding for the city contracts to recycle the Trade Center steel - and continue to bid on subsequent portions of the nearly 300,000 tons of steel at Ground Zero. Few details have been released.
Industry experts estimated the steel is being sold by the city Design and Construction Department to the recyclers for $75 to $100 a ton. Once cut and reforged, it can sell for $220 to $600 a ton. Still, the companies say their profit has been modest.
The recycling process is so quick, industry experts said, that little more than four months after the terrorist attacks, tons of the steel probably have been mixed with virgin ore, melted and reused.
Amid the piles on the firm's dock is a charred boulder pierced with steel rods. The chunk of concrete and steel, which Metal Management workers call The Meteorite, contains three to four floors of a building compressed into a 5-by-7-foot ball.
Marked "For PA" in chalk, it will one day be part of a Port Authority memorial in honor of the nearly 3,000 people killed at Ground Zero.
However, the vast majority of the steel Metal Management receives - generally the larger pieces from the disaster site - is being recycled. Barges containing up to 1,200 tons of steel regularly leave piers in lower Manhattan and head to the Newark scrap yard.
US recyclers are increasingly turning to Asian markets, where mills pay from 5% to 10% more than domestic firms.
The recycling work will likely take up to a year to complete.
Metal Management has donated several pieces of wreckage to organizations seeking to establish WTC memorials. Less than half a mile from its dock, two 8-foot I-beams form a replica of the towers in an unfinished shrine at Stella Maris Seamen's Church.
The following New York Times article discusses the government's report about the collapse of World Trade Center building 7. A week after this article was written, a high school physics teacher and others challenged the accuracy of the government report, and it was changed.
Fire, Not Explosives, Felled 3rd Tower on 9/11, Report Says
New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON
August 21, 2008
Fires in the 47-story office tower at the edge of the World Trade Center site undermined floor beams and a critical structural column, federal investigators concluded on Thursday, as they attempted to curb still-rampant speculation that explosives caused the building’s collapse on Sept. 11, 2001.
No one died when the tower, 7 World Trade Center, tumbled, as the estimated 4,000 office workers there at the time had evacuated before it gave way, nearly seven hours after the second of the twin towers came down.
But the collapse of 7 World Trade Center — home at the time to branch offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service and the Giuliani administration’s emergency operations center — is cited in hundreds of Web sites and books as perhaps the most compelling evidence that an insider secretly planted explosives, intentionally destroying the tower.
A separate, preliminary report issued in 2002 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency questioned whether diesel fuel tanks installed in the tower to supply backup generators — including one that powered the Giuliani administration’s emergency “bunker” — might have been to blame.
But S. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, based here in the suburbs of Washington, also rejected that theory on Thursday, even as he acknowledged that the collapse had been something of a puzzle.
“Our take-home message today is the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery,” Dr. Sunder said at a news conference at the institute’s headquarters. “It did not collapse from explosives or fuel oil fires.”...
During the last four decades, other towers in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles have remained standing through catastrophic blazes that burned out of control for hours because of malfunctioning or nonexistent sprinkler systems.
But 7 World Trade Center, which was not struck by a plane, is the first skyscraper in modern times to collapse primarily as a result of a fire.
Adding to the suspicion is the fact that in the rush to clean up the site, almost all of the steel remains of the tower were disposed of, leaving investigators in later years with little forensic evidence...
The skeptics — including several who attended Thursday’s news conference — were unimpressed. They have long argued that an incendiary material called thermite, made of aluminum powder and a metal oxide, was used to take down the trade center towers, an approach that would not necessarily result in an explosive boom. They also have argued that a sulfur residue found at the World Trade Center site is evidence of an inside job.
Dr. Sunder said the investigators chose not to use the computer model to evaluate whether a thermite-fueled fire might have brought down the tower, since 100 pounds of it would have had to have been stacked directly against the critical column that gave way, which he said they did not believe had occurred.
To the skeptics, it was a glaring omission.
“It is very difficult to find what you are not looking for,” said Shane Geiger..
Labels: 9/11, thermite, World Trade Center towers
# posted by Maura Larkins @ 5:47 PM 
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