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Old Posted Mar 2, 2008, 4:52 PM
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/ny...l?ref=nyregion
Work on Site at Trade Center Is Completed 48 Days Late

By GLENN COLLINS
Published: February 20, 2008
After incurring $14.4 million in late fees, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey completed its excavation of the site for two office towers at the World Trade Center complex on Sunday, and turned it over to Silverstein Properties, the developer.

The site preparation in a 3-acre, 80-foot-deep pit adjacent to Church and Liberty Streets took 48 days longer than anticipated, and the authority incurred penalties of $300,000 a day for missing its deadline.

Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the authority, said Tuesday: “We would have liked to have finished on Dec. 31, but we are talking about six weeks’ delay in a five-year process involving an incredible amount of building on the entire site.”

The excavation, in an area called the East Bathtub, will be the sites of Tower 3 — at 175 Greenwich Street, which will have 2 million square feet of office space — and Tower 4, which will have 1.8 million square feet of office space at 150 Greenwich Street. Silverstein Properties, owned by the developer Larry A. Silverstein, is the leaseholder on the site and will build on it.

“We will be in full construction mode in a couple of days,” said Janno Lieber, the World Trade Center project director at Silverstein Properties, on Tuesday. “And within the next few weeks, we expect to have 50 workers and 30 pieces of heavy-duty construction equipment working on site.”

In effect, the penalty amounted to $4.4 million since the authority did not have to pay contractors a $10 million incentive for finishing on time.

In a statement on Monday, the authority said the project involved the removal of nearly 400,000 tons of concrete, soil and rock, the construction of a concrete bathtub wall to keep water out of the foundations, and the installation “of more than 240 steel tiebacks to hold that wall in place.”

In a 2006 renegotiation that designated Mr. Silverstein the builder of four towers at the trade center site, the authority insisted that construction be completed within five years, and in turn, Mr. Silverstein won the promise of penalties if the authority failed to finish its excavation on time.
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