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Gold9472
03-25-2006, 05:11 PM
Navy ship being built with WTC steel survived Hurricane Katrina

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/104-03252006-631926.html

(Gold9472: That's a disgrace. To use that particular steel for a Naval ship.)

By RICHARD PYLE
The Associated Press
3/26/2006

NEW YORK - With a year to go before it even touches the water for the first time, the U.S. Navy's amphibious assault ship USS New York has already made history - twice. Built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center, it weathered Hurricane Katrina, a more violent storm than it may ever encounter at sea.

That combination of disasters gives the ship a unique standing among the 2,000 workers building it in a shipyard near New Orleans, says Philip Teel, vice president of Northrop-Grumman Corp., and head of its ship systems division.

"Because of 9-11 and Katrina, there is a real bond about this ship," Teel said. "There is a huge commonality of spirit of the people in New York and the Gulf Coast, a commitment to pull together when things get difficult."

While the partly-completed vessel escaped "significant wind damage" at the shipyard, many of its workers have continued on the job despite losing homes and possessions to the category 5 storm last Aug. 29, Teel said.

"Their dedication and devotion to duty has been, to say the least, epic," he told a Navy League dinner audience in New York on March 22.

"It sounds trite, but I saw it in their eyes," Teel said in a separate interview. "These are very patriotic people, and the fact that the ship has steel from the trade center is a source of great pride. They view it as something incredibly special. They're building it for the nation."

USS New York, scheduled to go into Navy service in 2008, is the fifth in a new, state-of-the art class of warship - formally called a landing platform dock - designed for various missions including special operations against terrorist threats. It will carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-equipped Marines to be delivered ashore by a combination of helicopters and surface assault craft.

When terrorist hijackers crashed two jetliners into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, destroying the twin towers and killing nearly 2,800 people, the $700 million ship was already on the drawing board, but had not been assigned a name.

Months later, Gov. George Pataki asked then-Navy Secretary Gordon England to commemorate the disaster by reviving the name New York for a ship whose role would include fighting terrorism. That required an exception to Navy policy of assigning state names only to nuclear submarines, as they had been to battleships in earlier era.

England, since named Deputy Secretary of Defense, announced the decision in September 2002, saying the new USS New York would "project American power to the far corners of the earth and support the cause of freedom well into the 21st century" while acknowledging the "courage and heroism" of New Yorkers.

The ship was named for the city, the state and victims of Sept. 11, and its motto, "Never Forget," is a popular slogan among New Yorkers.

Twenty-four tons of scrap steel from the fallen WTC towers was collected from salvage yards in New Jersey in 2003 and melted down in a foundry in Amite, La., to cast the bow stem, the forward section of USS New York.

As the ship's official sponsor, Dottie England, wife of the deputy defense chief, pulled the lever to pour the steel and will christen the ship at its 2007 launching with a bottle of champagne. "It's a profound honor to sponsor any ship but especially this ship, that will carry the spirit of New York and America around the globe," she said through a spokesman.

When the molten steel was being poured into the molds on Sept. 9, 2003, "those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence," recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who also was present. "It was a spiritual moment for everybody there."

The next big event came on March 14, when cranes at the Avondale, La., shipyard lifted the bow and guided it into place on the 684-foot hull.

"Everybody knew they were dealing with a special piece of steel and that the World Trade Center steel was in it," crane superintendent Tony Quaglino said of the bow installation. "A lot of ceremony and some emotion there, too."

Some steel left over is to be kept in a secure location, said Northrop Grumman spokesman Brian Cullin. "We recognize that this is a sensitive issue and we are treating that steel as a sacred and protected item," he said.

Later ships in the class will include USS Arlington, for the location of the Pentagon, also struck by a hijacked jetliner on 9-11, and USS Somerset, named for the western Pennsylvania county where United Flight 93 crashed after its passengers fought off hijackers apparently planning to attack another Washington target.

USS New York revives a name borne by at least seven previous ships - most recently the nuclear sub SSN New York City, retired in 1997 after 18 years service.

Others were a Revolutionary War "gondola" built by Gen. Benedict Arnold; an 1800 frigate that fought the Barbary pirates in North Africa; a 74-gun ship that was burned during the Civil War; and the Navy's flagship in the 1898 battle of Santiago de Cuba that ended the Spanish-American War.

The battleship USS New York, commissioned in 1914, saw action in both world wars and became a target ship afterward, surviving two atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 before being sunk off Hawaii two years later.

Despite this history and the annual Fleet Week visits by American and foreign warships, New York City has not made the Navy feel especially welcome in recent years.

City officials closed down the Stapleton naval base on Staten Island shortly after it was established in the early 1990s, and they prohibit nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed warships from entering the harbor for any purpose. The Navy refuses as a matter of policy to say whether any ship has nuclear warheads aboard.

Whether this might spoil Navy plans to commission USS New York in its namesake city in 2008 is unknown.

At the Navy League dinner, Teel unveiled a painting by noted military artist Tom Freeman showing the future USS New York slicing up the Hudson River with the proposed Freedom Tower in the background - a perhaps fanciful rendering in view of ongoing political wrangling over reconstruction of the ground zero site.

"There is no other ship like USS New York nor ever will be," he said. "It is a national treasure and will be a living and breathing reminder of the price we pay as a people for our freedom."

Gold9472
05-22-2006, 01:31 PM
Twin towers steel for New Orleans warship

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19226215-2703,00.html

Tom Baldwin, New Orleans
May 23, 2006

IN a city still emerging from the floods of Hurricane Katrina, a ship has begun to rise from the ashes of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Bringing together the US's two great calamities of the 21st century, the USS New York is being built in New Orleans with 24 tonnes of steel from the collapsed World Trade Centre.

There is no shortage of scrap metal in New Orleans these days, but the girders taken from Ground Zero have been treated with a reverence usually accorded to religious relics. After a brief ceremony in 2003, about seven tonnes of steel were melted down and poured into a cast to make the bow section of the ship's hull.

Some shipworkers say the hairs stood up on the backs of their necks the first time they touched it.

Tony Quaglino postponed his retirement over the ship: "I was going to go in October 2004 after 40 years here, but I put it off when I found out I could be working on New York. This is sacred and it makes me very proud."

Glen Clement, a paint superintendent, said: "Nobody passes by that bow section without knocking on it. Everybody knows what it is made from and what it's about." The ship, being built by Northrop Grumman on the banks of the Mississippi, should be ready to join the US Navy next year.

Later vessels in its class will include USS Arlington - named after the section of the Pentagon that was also hit by an airliner on September 11, 2001 - and USS Somerset, in memory of United Flight 93, which crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, as passengers struggled with al-Qa'ida hijackers.

Mr Clement said it would be fitting if USS New York's first mission was to capture Osama bin Laden. He said: "They hit us first, but out of a tragedy a good thing has come, in that we're building a ship which can help take those people out."

The $US1 billion ($1.32 billion) vessel is one of a new generation of amphibious assault ships capable of landing 700 marines on a coast almost anywhere without the need for a port.

Although the hurricane smashed its way through the shipyard, the half-completed New York survived intact. The same cannot be said for the homes of some of its builders. About 200 are still living at the shipyard in the hastily set up "Camp Katrina".

They include Earl Jones. More than eight months after Katrina, he does not know if his home in the Lower Ninth ward will be rebuilt. "The insurance company won't even talk to us," he said. "We're having to hire lawyers to chase 'em."

Mr Jones's wife was evacuated to Baton Rouge and is seriously ill with breast cancer and pneumonia. "She ain't handling very well me being away all the time," he said.

Katrina and 9/11 are two disasters that continue to produce very different responses from the US. Mr Jones does not want his old home enshrined in a $US1 billion fighting machine, but a small insurance cheque might help.

thumper
05-22-2006, 03:03 PM
sounds like an illuminati ritual

princesskittypoo
05-22-2006, 03:40 PM
i tink it's ok... what where they going to do with the steel anyway? let it go to waste?

jetsetlemming
05-22-2006, 03:44 PM
I think using the steel from the reckage to make a ship sounds cool, I'm sure people who believe that terrorists destroyed the towers (Ha, chumps :P) like the sound of wtc steel going into a navy ship.

princesskittypoo
05-22-2006, 10:33 PM
I think using the steel from the reckage to make a ship sounds cool, I'm sure people who believe that terrorists destroyed the towers (Ha, chumps :P) like the sound of wtc steel going into a navy ship.
i think it sounds good no matter how it happened. it won't be filling up landfills if it's made into something else. we need to recycle more anyway.