TalB

Unblinking Eyes, for Million, at Freedom Tower - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog
September 24, 2008, 12:36 pm

Unblinking Eyes, for $20 Million, at Freedom Tower

By David W. Dunlap


Two crane booms, in a V shape, mark the emerging 1 World Trade Center (or Freedom Tower), which will have $20 million worth of electronic security. (Photo: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times)

This is the scale of 1 World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower, which is now beginning to emerge from below ground: the contract for the electronic security system alone is worth $20,407,680.

Meeting last week for the first time within sight of ground zero, the commissioners of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey approved a contract in that amount with Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies.

Steven P. Plate, the director of priority capital programs at the authority, told the commissioners that the money would buy: “A state-of-the-art integrated security system that includes closed-circuit television, coupled with video analytics to detect abnormal situations; digital recorders; access control systems; provisions for chemical, biological and radiation detection; a fiber-optic backbone and network; and related electrical infrastructure.”

That’s when City Room’s ears perked up. “Video analytics to detect abnormal situations”?

If you have ever wondered how security guards can possibly keep an unfailingly vigilant watch on every single one of dozens of television monitors, each depicting a different scene, the answer seems to be (as you suspected): they can’t.

Instead, they can now rely on computers to constantly analyze the patterns, sizes, speeds, angles and motion picked up by the camera and determine — based on how they have been programmed — whether this constitutes a possible threat. In which case, the computer alerts the security guard whose own eyes may have been momentarily diverted. Or shut.

An alarm can be raised, for instance, if the computer discerns a vehicle that has been standing still for too long (say, a van in the drop-off lane of an airport terminal) or a person who is loitering while everyone else is in motion. By the same token, it will spot the individual who is moving rapidly while everyone else is shuffling along. It can spot a package that has been left behind and identify which figure in the crowd abandoned it.

Or pinpoint the individual who is moving the wrong way down a one-way corridor.

Because one person’s “abnormal situation” is another person’s “hot dog vendor attracting a small crowd,” the computers can be programmed to discern between times of the day and days of the week.

Some of the companies offering video analysis are IntelliVision, Verint and Cernium, whose Web site includes a television news segment noting that its Perceptrak program is capable of detecting that dreaded phenomenon: “people who are converging.”

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Rockvegas

World Trade Centre site projects delayed

Published 6:04a.m. 3rd October 2008


Owners of the World Trade Center site scaled back designs for a multibillion-dollar transit hub and delayed other projects by several years.
They said costs will still be more than $US1 billion ($A1.27 billion) over budget.

In a widely awaited 70-page report on the rebuilding of ground zero, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said the elaborate rail hub will cost $US3.2 billion ($A4 billion), $US700 million ($A887 million) more than planned, and should open in 2014, five years after the original completion date.

The planned memorial to the September 11, 2001, attacks will be finished by the 10th anniversary, the report said, except that some of the 500 trees in a cobblestone plaza may not be planted and a visitor's centre may not be open.

Governor David Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg had publicly urged the agency to guarantee completion by the anniversary.

An underground September 11 museum should open in 2013, four years later than originally planned.

Completion of the signature project, a 541-metre Freedom Tower now under construction, is about $US200 million ($A253.71 million) over budget and will be delayed several months to 2013.

The agency did not set schedules for four other office towers planned for the site or for a performing arts centre, and did not issue a final budget for the memorial.

"While we still face many challenges ahead, we believe we have created a level of certainty and control over this project that has been missing since its inception," the agency's executive director, Christopher Ward, said in a letter to Paterson.

Port Authority officials declined to take questions after releasing the report, saying they would join the governor at an afternoon news conference.

Ward said he realised the new deadlines "will be met with a degree of skepticism".

Deadlines for almost every project at the site have changed since plans were first introduced in 2003.

Ward acknowledged the new schedule could also change.
"I cannot promise that we will meet every single milestone every step of the way," he wrote.

Bloomberg, who chairs the foundation building the memorial, and foundation officials had pressured the agency to commit to a 10th anniversary opening, saying the public must be able to visit the area by that symbolic date.

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Rockhampton - - Lolz

Daquan13

As long as Ground Zero is still being worked on, moving and progress is stgill in effect, then it will still be rebuilt despite the delays.

TalB

W.T.C. office to tackle neighbors’ concerns
Volume 21, Number 22 | The Newspaper of Lower Manhattan | Oct. 10 - 16, 2008

W.T.C. office to tackle neighbors’ concerns

By Julie Shapiro


While construction continues to develop the W.T.C. the Port authority is considering closing Vesey St. in a month and moving the Liberty St. entraceway into Battery Park City a block to the south.

The Port Authority has a new plan to rebuild ground zero and a new office to coordinate it — but the community’s quality of life concerns remain the same.

The new plan came from Chris Ward, the Port’s executive director, whom Gov. David Paterson appointed last spring. Ward has appeared twice before Community Board 1, a show of openness that drew the community’s support even as Ward was unable to solve many of their construction-related problems. Led by Quentin Brathwaite, the new office is the Office of Program Logistics, which Ward created to combine construction coordination with community outreach.

But the Port’s focus on the community doesn’t mean the community will always win.

“There may be times when the needs of the site exceed the capacity to address community concerns,” Ward told City Councilmember Alan Gerson during a hearing Monday.

Ward’s comments came several days after he released a report on the W.T.C. site that shows $1.5 billion in cost overruns and puts several major projects behind schedule. Ward presented the report to C.B. 1 Monday night and addressed the community’s quality of life concerns, including disruptive construction noise, the likely closure of a block of Vesey St. and service outages on the No. 1 subway and PATH trains.

Several residents complained that the noise from the site starts with truck backup alarms beeping before 6 a.m. and ends with jackhammering past 11 at night.

“It’s killing us. It’s killing us,” said Pat Moore, who lives across from the site at 125 Cedar St. “You just can’t get any sleep.”

Bill Love, a C.B. 1 member who lives in Gateway Plaza, reminded the Port of its previous agreement to try to restrict work between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.

“I can’t state unequivocally…that we can restrict all construction at all times within those hours,” Ward told C.B. 1’s W.T.C. Redevelopment Committee.

Ward added that he would look into moving noisy work into the daytime rather than early in the morning and late at night, but he said he could make no promises.

“The schedule needs to be the efficient schedule,” Ward said.

That may not be precisely what the community wants to hear, but “at least it’s more realistic,” said Julie Menin, chairperson of C.B. 1, after the meeting. “Before what we got were a lot of different platitudes about what was happening, which turned out not to be the case. By leveling with the community, [at least] people can plan…. Of course it’s frustrating to not get exactly what the community needs, but at least we’re getting more responsiveness than before.”

At the C.B. 1 meeting, Glenn Guzi, a program manager for the Port Authority, added that the Port has set aside several million dollars for soundproof windows in buildings facing the site. However, it is up to the individual building owners to install the windows, and Samson Management, the owner of Moore’s building, has not installed the windows.

“It is time for the government to step up and speak to those management offices and insist,” Ward said.

Because of the pervasive noise and other inconveniences Moore has faced, she and several other residents were angry to hear about the subway outages announced last week. The 1 train will terminate at Chambers St. for six weeks in the summer of 2010 and possibly some of 2009, and the PATH trains will shut down on 40 out of 52 weekends starting next summer. Moore was particularly offended by the way Gov. Paterson described the impact of the outages on Lower Manhattan residents and commuters.

“As much as it will be a sacrifice for them, I hope that they will also see it as a contribution they are making to the memorial coming in on time,” Paterson said during a press conference last week. “And if we didn’t think the memorial could come in on time, we wouldn’t ask them.”

Moore called the governor’s comments flip, cavalier and insensitive.

“How dare he say that?” Moore asked. “Haven’t we made enough contributions already? What are we getting out of this? We’re getting all the inconveniences and all the noise.”

Andy Jurinko, Moore’s husband, said those who live near the site have been making sacrifices for seven years, including the several years where they lost their homes.

Another sacrifice the community will likely have to make is the closure of Vesey St. between Church and W. Broadway. Silverstein Properties would use that block of Vesey St. to stage the construction of Tower 2.

“The contractor would like nothing better than to shut it down within the next few weeks,” said Sam Schwartz, the Port’s newly hired traffic coordinator with the Program Logistics Office.

Schwartz, better known in traffic circles as “Gridlock Sam,” likened Lower Manhattan’s streets to an obstacle course and said he would do everything he could to keep Vesey St. open. But the Port has already widened the sidewalks on blocks of Barclay St. and W. Broadway, in preparation for Vesey St.’s closure.

The community wants Vesey St. to stay open because it is a key east-west thoroughfare connecting Battery Park City to the Financial District. Many pedestrians who used to traverse the W.T.C. use the Vesey St. bridge to cross West St., and while the bridge will not be affected, pedestrians will have to go several more blocks out of their way in order to use it. Vesey, site of the temporary PATH entrance, can see 15,000 pedestrians an hour and 150,000 to 200,000 pedestrians a day, according to the Port.

Around the middle of next year, pedestrians will also have to contend with changes to the Liberty St., bridge, which will land one block south on Cedar St. instead. The sidewalk on the west side of Church St. is also closed and will likely stay closed for the duration of the W.T.C. rebuilding, though the Port plans to add artwork to the construction fence showing how the site will eventually look.

At the community board meeting, Brathwaite, head of the Program Logistics Office, started several sentences with the phrase “When Vesey St. is closed,” though he quickly corrected that to “If and when.” Brathwaite, who had been assistant director of World Trade Center construction until his promotion, promised not to close Vesey St. without meeting with the community board first, which means that the street will stay open at least until next month.

“Safety is paramount,” Schwartz said. “It cannot be kept open if it is not safe.”

The community’s quality of life issues are likely to grow as work at the site ramps up — the work will peak in 2011 and 2012 with more than six times more manpower on the site than there is now.

Schwartz plans to hold “walkshops” on the streets around the site so residents can show him the problems they see. He also promised to tackle illegal vendors and placard parking around the site and to figure out a plan for the hundreds of additional tour buses that will inundate Lower Manhattan once the memorial is open.

“There’s no issue too big, and certainly no issue too little for us,” Schwartz told C.B. 1.

Menin, C.B. 1’s chairperson, called the Office of Program Logistics a step in the right direction.

“Someone will be able to deal with many of the logistical issues that have stymied and frustrated the process,” she said. “I’m encouraged overall by the level of answers we’re finally starting to see.”

Julie@DowntownExpress.com

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TalB

Phantom Freedom Tower Visible to All - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com
October 20, 2008, 12:52 pm

Phantom Freedom Tower Visible to All

By David W. Dunlap


David Dunlap/The New York Times

The core of the Freedom Tower at 1 World Trade Center is now visible above street level.

In the old days at the World Trade Center redevelopment project, elaborately staged events almost guaranteed that whatever milestone was being announced would not happen; at least, not in the time or form heralded from the lectern.

Having learned a painful lesson in public relations, officials are now content to let actual milestones speak for themselves.

Observant passers-by have been able to spot just such a turning point, now that the massive concrete core of 1 World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower, has emerged into public view from the depths of ground zero. On Oct. 10, Collavino Construction poured 520 cubic yards of concrete, raising the top of the core 14 feet, thereby bringing it 13 feet 8 inches above sidewalk level.

The walls of the core range from three to four feet thick. The concrete is extremely high strength, with a rating of 14,000 p.s.i. — that is, a strength under compression calculated at 14,000 pounds per square inch.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey made no formal announcement, though it did note the moment on its World Trade Center Progress page.

Of course, there is a long, long way to go. Ultimately, the concrete core is planned to be 1,293 feet high, taller than the Empire State Building. And it is a fool’s game to predict when — or even if — that goal will be reached. But it is growing harder to think of ground zero as a hole in the ground.

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