The Battle for Ground Zero, Part 182

A block by block search will commence on Monday to search for additional remains in the vicinity of Ground Zero. This comes as a result of the discovery of hundreds of remains in an underground utility vault by ConEd workers last week.

The new searches are expected to take up to a year to complete.

Skyler and Charles Maikish, head of the state Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, said the search will include:

Some 400 manholes from Barclay St. to Albany St. and from Broadway to the western edge of the World Financial Center.

The roofs of the Millenium Hotel and 1 Liberty Plaza. Both contain roof ballast, large rocks that were cleaned but not searched for human remains.

Two Verizon manholes in the middle of West St. next to the Trade Center site. Skyler promised to minimize traffic headaches by "doing this in the middle of the night if we have to."

The site of the former St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at 140 Liberty St. Trade Center debris may be compacted under asphalt that was laid down after the disaster.

Three buildings that were abandoned after the attack: the former Deutsche Bank, the Borough of Manhattan Community College's Fiterman Hall and 130 Cedar St.
The searches at Deutsche and Fiterman already were planned before the new initiative. More than 700 bone fragments were found in the ballast of the Deutsche Bank tower in September 2005, years after the building had been pronounced clear.

Meanwhile, the WTC staircase, which many survivors used to escape from the WTC before the towers' collapse, will not be returned to its current location. That's upset preservationists and some families who wanted it preserved at its current location. The staircase is being moved to make way for the new office towers that will occupy that portion of Ground Zero.

$40 million has been set aside by the federal government to provide screening and medical treatment for workers affected by their service at Ground Zero during the recovery efforts.

The medical aid will be distributed to the FDNY, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Bellevue Hospital/NYU School of Medicine, Queens College, the Long Island Occupational and Environmental Health Center and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of New Jersey.

"Continued screening and monitoring will promote further scientific understanding of the nature of WTC health effects and will inform our work going forward," said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.

UPDATE:
There are more concerns about the design of the memorial and whether a small group of people are affecting the outcome, much to the detriment of the entire memorial and how funds are used. This latest discussion is over the location where box girders held up the Twin Towers. No one ever expressed an interest in these locations, as the attention was on Koenig's Sphere, which was damaged but not destroyed by the collapsing towers, the staircase, and the portions of the facade that survived. The latest suits are designed to force the expenditure of potentially millions of dollars for subsurface features that few would recognize as integral to the Twin Towers.

Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center, spitzer, silverstein, mount sinai, respiratory ailment, wtc cough, bloomberg.