NEW YORK — With Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s announcement to the press that it could take nearly a year to clean up the debris from the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack, it’s clear downtown redevelopment won’t happen for a while.
Proposals for the WTC site haven’t been officially considered, and the cleanup process will slow the planning process. According to Giuliani, 133,024 tons of steel and other rubble in 8,977 truckloads have been removed so far.
The New York Times reports the degree of destruction is "unbelievable." The newspaper noted that the buildings contained more than 200,000 tons of steel, 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 600,000 sq. ft. of glass in 43,000 windows. Each floor, a reinforced concrete pad on a metal deck supported by steel cross beams, was about one acre and weighed about 4.8 million pounds.
According to the newspaper, engineers say the impact of the Boeing 767s and the heat generated by thousands of gallons of jet fuel weakened and buckled the buildings’ steel framework, causing the top floors to collapse and causing a domino effect that imploded each of the buildings.
