dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Some 185,101 tons of structural steel have been hauled away from Ground Zero. Most of the steel has been recycled as per the city's decision to swiftly send the wreckage to salvage yards in New Jersey. The city's hasty move has outraged many victims' families who believe the steel should have been examined more thoroughly. Last month, fire experts told Congress that about 80% of the steel was scrapped without being examined because investigators did not have the authority to preserve the wreckage. 1

The bulk of the steel was apparently shipped to China and India. The Chinese firm Baosteel purchased 50,000 tons at a rate of $120 per ton, compared to an average price of $160 paid by local mills in the previous year. 2

Mayor Bloomberg, a former engineering major, was not concerned about the destruction of the evidence:

If you want to take a look at the construction methods and the design, that's in this day and age what computers do. Just looking at a piece of metal generally doesn't tell you anything. 3

The pace of the steel's removal was very rapid, even in the first weeks after the attack. By September 29, 130,000 tons of debris – most of it apparently steel – had been removed. 4

During the official investigation controlled by FEMA, one hundred fifty pieces of steel were saved for future study. 5 One hundred fifty pieces out of hundreds of thousands of pieces! Moreover it is not clear who made the decision to save these particular pieces. It is clear that the volunteer investigators were doing their work at the Fresh Kills dump, not at Ground Zero, so whatever steel they had access to was first picked over by the people running the cleanup operation.

Highly Sensitive Garbage

Given that the people in charge considered the steel garbage, useless to any investigation in this age of computer simulations, they certainly took pains to make sure it didn't end up anywhere other than a smelting furnace. They installed GPS locater devices on each of the trucks that was carrying loads away from Ground Zero, at a cost of $1000 each. The securitysolutions.com website has an article on the tracking system with this passage.

Ninety-nine percent of the drivers were extremely driven to do their jobs. But there were big concerns, because the loads consisted of highly sensitive material. One driver, for example, took an extended lunch break of an hour and a half. There was nothing criminal about that, but he was dismissed. 6

Shielding Investigators From the Evidence

According to FEMA, more than 350,000 tons of steel were extracted from Ground Zero and barged or trucked to salvage yards where it was cut up for recycling. Four salvage yards were contracted to process the steel.

Hugo Nue Schnitzer at Fresh Kills (FK) Landfill, Staten Island, NJ

Hugo Nue Schnitzer's Claremont (CM) Terminal in Jersey City, NJ

Metal Management in Newark (NW), NJ

Blanford and Co. in Keasbey (KB), NJ

FEMA's BPAT, who wrote the WTC Building Performance Study, were not given access to Ground Zero. Apparently, they were not even allowed to collect steel samples from the salvage yards. According to Appendix D of the Study:

Collection and storage of steel members from the WTC site was not part of the BPS Team efforts sponsored by FEMA and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).