EoW March 2013

Transatlantic cable

“A lot of people have touched it just to say ‘I touched it,’” said Mr Floyd. He told the Record that the spire receiving nishing touches in January was very di erent from the 360-foot telecommunications antenna that once topped the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The spire is taller by about 420 feet, and it will contain far fewer communications components. Even so, it will boast weather cameras, satellite equipment, and electric supply lines running all the way to the cylindrical portion at the top, which is only a few inches across. Massive aircraft warning lights will be installed about 10 feet from the pinnacle, with access by way solely of a combination of ladders and struts. Some of these are nothing more than simple steel steps on the exterior of spire sections 1,600 feet o the ground. “I don’t want to be the guy changing this light bulb,” said Mr Floyd. The bulbs, weighing 25 pounds apiece, typically stay lit for about six years each. Shipment via atbed trailers to the World Trade Center site of the 18 remaining spire segments was expected to take two weeks; hoisting to the top of the skyscraper and installation, another three weeks. But Mr Floyd noted that the process would proceed at the pleasure of Mother Nature. Winds at the top must be below 15 miles per hour for work to go forward. The winning bid submitted by MRP in 2008 for a large portion of the steel work at the World Trade Center site included construction work from oors one to 104 at One World Trade Center. One of many Manhattan-based projects for MRP over the last decade, this one meant hundreds of jobs for local construction workers during the worst parts of the economic downturn that started late in 2007. Only about two dozen remain. “One piece a day would be a great day,” said Mr Floyd. ‘Unique redundance’

† But another battery expert, Donald Sadoway, a materials chemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, disagreed. He said that an older type of battery instead of the lighter-weight lithium-ion battery would not have made much of a di erence to the 787, adding only about 40 pounds – or the equivalent of an extra suitcase per battery. “So you will risk the plane for something that’s tantamount to one guy’s suitcase?” Mr Sadoway said. “Who’s making the calculation here? It’s absurd. It doesn’t add up.”

OneWorld Trade Center

Thousands, including President Barack Obama, signed their names to a steel beam. Now, ‘FreedomTower’awaits only its spire. On 31 st January, a dozen or so workers from a New Jersey steel fabrication and engineering rm were focused on the approximately 50-foot “lighting mast” – the spire segment to be installed last at One World Trade Center in New York City, topping out the skyscraper informally known as Freedom Tower at its planned 1,776 feet. Only a few hundred feet of steel, in 18 separate pieces weighing about 620 tons, remained to be installed before the spire was in place and marking the highest point of any man-made structure in the western hemisphere. Writing in the Morristown (New Jersey) Daily Record 3 rd February, Mark Spivey did not have to explain the signi cance of the building that would be “ lling in a gap in the Lower Manhattan skyline that has existed since the twin towers fell 11 th September, 2001.” Nor did David Floyd, the president of MRP LLC, need to explain a ritual that had sprung up around the lighting mast taking shape in an immense warehouse near the company’s South Plain eld headquarters.

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March 2013