TPT January 2008

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January 2008 102 ›
From the Americas
Steel
Undergirding Yankee Stadium II is the work of
many hands – mainly Nucor’s
Two new baseball stadiums are under construction in New York
City, one of them the successor to Yankee Stadium – “the house
that [Babe] Ruth built,” on which ground was broken on August
16, 1921. On that date in 2006, the first shovelfuls of earth were
turned for a new Yankee Stadium. In a recent issue of the New York
Sun, Christopher Faherty furnished ample evidence that the $1.02
billion state-of-the-art structure going up across the street will be
the house that Nucor built.
Of the thousands of tons of steel that have already been hauled
to the Yankee Stadium site and to Citi Field, the new home of the
New York Mets, about 60 per cent was once ferrous scrap: steel
goods collected from junk yards, town dumps, and the back rooms
of automobile repair shops. Amassing this steel scrap was the first
step in the creation of the steel beams and trusses forming the
backbone of the stadiums, both set to open in 2009 (“Steel makes
its way to new city stadiums,” October 26).
Mr Faherty noted that this aspect of the project was in the hands
of America’s largest scrap broker, David J Joseph Co (Cincinnati,
Ohio), which is providing most of the steel goods to be melted
down and fabricated into usable forms for the two huge arenas.
The company buys its material from scrap dealers and large
manufacturers selling steel left over from their own production
operations.
From there, the action moves to Nucor, the highly successful
minimill operator that has turned the rising costs and environmental
hazards of manufacturing virgin steel to its advantage. At the US
headquarters of Nucor-Yamato Steel Co, in Blytheville, Arkansas,
the scrap steel for the New York stadiums, much of it broken down
into fist-size pieces in a shredder, is recycled by Nucor into steel
beams for further fabrication elsewhere (see below).
Besides working with the contractors in charge of building the
stadiums, Nucor makes steel beams for the new Meadowlands
Stadium, in New Jersey, and the World Trade Center Memorial in
lower Manhattan. For their part, the managers of the two stadium
projects said they are excited about building what the architects say
is the unique part of each structure: made from steel, of course. Mr
Faherty writes, “In the coming months, the Yankees will build a steel
replica of the famous white fence in the outfield of Yankee Stadium.
And the Mets will begin constructing the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.”
Arkansas-Québec-New York
Paul Lester, a sales analyst at Nucor who leads tours of the
company’s huge Blytheville plant, traced for Sun readers the
progression from scrap heap to the outfields and concourses of the
new stadiums rising in New York:
› The scrap is first melted down and turned into a single semi-
finished piece of steel, a process which takes about 35 minutes.
The piece is then stored for two to three weeks before it is shaped
into beams at the factory’s rolling mill.
› Nucor then ships the steel in bulk to Canada for fabrication into
the sizes and shapes specified in the blueprints. At the Canam
Steel Corp plant in Québec, project managers for Citi Field and
Yankee Stadium direct crews in the cutting and moulding of the steel
joists, trusses, and other structural members
› For Citi Field, which is to replace Shea Stadium in Queens,
Canam Steel has about 330 people working to fabricate and
install the 13,000t of steel required. Through October, some 9,000t
of steel had been transported to the site near LaGuardia Airport in
tractor-trailer loads of about 20 tons each: over 600 round-trips, and
counting
› For Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, the requirement is for about
13,000 tons of steel, of which some 7,000t has been installed.
According to the project manager in Québec, another 1,500t is in
storage at a holding site in South Plainfield, New Jersey
The large presence of Nucor (Charlotte, North Carolina) in this
extraordinary flux of steel will rejoice the ecology-minded. The
company, believed to be the largest recycler of scrap steel in the
US, has said that its use of electric arc furnaces to melt scrap steel
yields an energy savings of roughly 70 per cent over traditional blast
furnace technology.
Tim Kurkjian, baseball reporter for the sports TV channel ESPN
in New York, had to look harder for the pearl. “I love Yankee
Stadium and see no good reason to replace it,” he said at the 2006
groundbreaking for the new structure. “I love that it is where Babe
Ruth and Lou Gehrig used to play. But I understand progress and
am just glad they are not building it outside of the city.”
Canadian National Railway acquires key
operations of a Chicago-area line owned by
United States Steel
United States Steel Corp (Pittsburgh) and Canadian National
Railway Co (Montreal) announced September 26 that their boards
had approved an agreement under which CN will acquire the major
portion of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway Co. EJ&E is owned
by the USS rail subsidiary Transtar, for $300 million (the Canadian
and the US dollar are about at parity). Transtar will retain the
workforce, equipment, and railroad assets that support the Gary
Works site in northwest Indiana and other USS operations.
CN, which employs approximately 21,700 people in Canada and
the US, generates only 23 per cent of its revenue from Canadian
operations, 77 per cent from US domestic and transborder
operations and other traffic. The Canadian company said it expects
the acquisition of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern to significantly
enhance its rail operations in the Chicago region.
EJ&E operates over 198 main line miles of track encircling the city of
Chicago by way of Waukegan and Joliet, (both in Illinois), Gary, and
south Chicago. The company’s lines serve steel mills, petroleum
and chemical plants, and a number of distribution centres, moving
everything from bulk raw materials to finished products. Coal is also
moved to utility plants in Illinois and Indiana.
CN president and chief executive officer E Hunter Harrison said:
“Chicago is essential to CN’s rail operations, yet it presents us