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At Ground Zero, Slow and Costly Work

January 13, 2008

At the eastern portion of ground zero, hundreds of workers contend with a nasty subterranean nest: steel and concrete, a defunct railroad, forgotten foundations, landfill, quartz deposits and glacial remnants in a vast pit that the Hudson River ceaselessly tries to inundate with icy, brackish water.

They are behind schedule.

wtc work

For such an ambitious construction project, delays are hardly unusual. But in this case, being late is very expensive.

On Jan. 1, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began paying penalties of $300,000 a day — $3.3 million as of Friday — for missing its deadline to complete the site excavation and preparation for two office towers at the World Trade Center complex.

Since it won’t finish the job until next month, the authority’s penalty phase could top $13 million, all of it paid to Silverstein Properties, owned by the developer Larry A. Silverstein, whose company is the leaseholder on the site and will build on it.

Critics of the authority say that the missed deadline should have been a surprise to no one. “It makes sense that penalties are worked into development deals with the Port Authority, since it has a history of slowing things up thanks to the bureaucratic maze that exists there,” said George J. Marlin, an investment banker who was executive director of the Port Authority from 1995 to 1997.

Mr. Marlin said he did not know the specifics at the site, but said “the bureaucracy of the Port Authority can slow down most anything,” adding, “What they define as fast track, and what a private developer defines as fast track, are two different things.”

But the authority insists that it has done everything possible to further an engineering project of stunning complexity. “Of course, we would have preferred to be on schedule,” said Anthony E. Shorris, executive director of the agency, which owns the site. “We weren’t slowed by paperwork or bureaucracy. It was the challenge of doing a project of this scale in this short a time.”

In the years since the twin towers fell, ground zero has been a magnet for dissent and dysfunction. Rebuilding efforts have been hampered by legal and political wrangling and construction delays, including the redesign and re-siting of the Freedom Tower; the off-again, on-again demolition of the black-shrouded Deutsche Bank building; and the announcement last month that the World Trade Center Memorial will be delayed two years until the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in 2011.

The authority’s contractors are completing a year-old, 6.7-acre excavation called the East Bathtub — extending from Liberty Street to Vesey and from Church Street to Greenwich — to prepare the three acres that will be the sites for the towers. Tower 3, at 175 Greenwich Street, will have 2 million square feet of office space, and Tower 4 will have 1.8 million square feet of office space at 150 Greenwich Street.

So far the East Bathtub price tag is $250 million, a chunk of the $16 billion that will be spent on the entire site to build, among other things, “what is, in essence, five Empire State Buildings,” said Steven Plate, director of trade center construction at the authority.

“We are proud to accomplish what we have so far in such a short time,” especially since 80,000 people daily “have moved through the subway and PATH stations at the site,” he said.

Engineers who have worked at the site said that the subterranean geology is ever surprising. “It’s a very complex, challenging area with a lot of unpredictable obstructions,” said Guy Nordenson, a professor of structural engineering at Princeton, whose engineering firm helped design supports that will preserve the historic ground-zero wall, a feature of the future memorial museum.

“You can do a lot of mapping there,” he added, “and you’ll still find the unexpected.” When asked whether the delays were caused by bureaucratic failings or the imponderables of the site, he said, “I’m inclined to give the Port Authority the benefit of the doubt.”

Silverstein Properties, the new leaseholder of the trade center at the time of the terrorist attacks, has paid the Port Authority nearly $658 million in ground rent — which it received in insurance proceeds — since 2001. In a 2006 renegotiation that designated Silverstein the builder of four towers there, the authority insisted on a five-year limit for the completion of construction, and in turn, Silverstein successfully negotiated for penalties in case the authority failed to complete its excavations on time. That was when the authority signed off on the 2007 completion deadline.

Via the NY Times Read the full story here

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