(rshsdepot) NYTimes: From 70's Relic, a Possible PATH Station

["Steven Delibert" <stevdel_@_prodigy.net>]

November 13, 2001

THE HUDSON TUBE
-From 70's Relic, a Possible PATH Station
By JAMES GLANZ
 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/13/nyregion/13COLL.html?searchpv=nytToday
The old Hudson and Manhattan Railroad station on the eastern edge of the
World Trade Center site, closed since the early 1970's, could be restored
and reopened as a permanent replacement for the PATH station that was partly
crushed in the collapse of the trade towers, an official at the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey said yesterday.

The plan, which could cost $1.5 billion, is one of several PATH alternatives
under consideration. It would take four to five years and would involve a
temporary reopening of the damaged station in perhaps two years, said the
official, Raymond E. Sandiford, the Port Authority's chief geotechnical
engineer, who spoke yesterday at a forum on the disaster at Columbia
University.

Moving the permanent station to the old Hudson and Manhattan stop - just
west of Church Street, and east of the damaged station - would let the Port
Authority finish the project without interfering in any private developer's
work to raise new buildings at the heart of the trade center site, Mr.
Sandiford said.

"We could do all our work there, where it's clear of what he's doing," Mr.
Sandiford said.

Yesterday's forum, sponsored by the School of Engineering and Applied
Science at Columbia, also offered fresh details on the causes and technical
implications of the collapse of the trade towers.

Both the presentations and the questions from members of the audience, many
of them engineers, exposed the roiling uncertainty that the collapses have
produced in the technical community over whether the standards and codes
that govern building design should be altered to deal with the possibility
of terrorist attacks.

The forum's speakers, including many people directly involved in the
original design of the towers and the cleanup after their collapse, agreed
that no design could guarantee that a building would survive being struck by
a jetliner laden with fuel. But many said it was inevitable that, in the
wake of the disaster, codes covering fire resistance, structure and
emergency escapes for high-rise buildings would be altered.

"That's going to happen," said Charles Thornton, chairman of
LZA/Thornton-Tomasetti, an engineering company that is advising the city on
the cleanup. "You're going to have to change the code."

Mr. Thornton and other structural engineers said many life-saving changes
would not necessarily be extremely expensive. He said that simple measures
like having crossbeams run continuously through a building - rather than
being jointed, or connected as separate pieces, at each vertical column -
could help protect against total collapse if one column is knocked out by a
bomb or another terrorist attack.

Richard Tomasetti, president of LZA/Thornton-Tomasetti, said some of the
company's customers were already asking for such measures, even though they
have not yet been written into building codes and so are not mandatory.

Ultimately, code changes could go beyond structural issues, said Frank
Lombardi, the Port Authority's chief engineer. "As a result of the World
Trade Center, I think you'll see some fire standards be improved," he said.

Each trade tower survived the initial impact of a jet fully loaded with
fuel; both collapsed when fires stoked by the fuel softened the steel that
held up the towers, creating conditions never envisioned in the towers'
design.

Another outcome of the disaster is likely to be the new PATH station. The
final plan will be chosen from several alternatives under consideration,
said Allen Morrison, a Port Authority spokesman.

"From a policy point of view, there have been absolutely no decisions made
on the reconstruction of the PATH station," Mr. Morrison said.

But if engineers can quickly clear debris and secure an underground
retaining wall at the trade center site - a structure often called the
bathtub, since it keeps the waters of the Hudson out - then the existing, da
maged PATH station could be reopened about two years from now, Mr. Morrison
said. New pedestrian entrances could be built near Vesey Street to the north
and Liberty Street on the south.

In one leading plan, that station would then serve as a stopgap, with few
pedestrian connections or amenities, and construction began to reopen the
old Hudson and Manhattan stop, which has remained in a state of ghostly
abandonment since being closed in 1971. For now the structure consists of
little more than an empty concrete box that would have to be lengthened so
as many as 10 cars could stop at the platform at once.

Some Port Authority engineers favor this plan because it avoids the
complications that would arise if the damaged PATH station were being fully
rehabilitated while, in the same area, new buildings were being constructed
on the World Trade Center site. That would require close choreography of
workers and heavy equipment on the two projects.

The new station would eventually have underground pedestrian connections to
all the other subways in the area, including the N, R, E, C, 1, 9, 4, 5, M
and J lines.

Any plan to return the PATH train to service will also involve repairing
water damage to the system. The train tunnels are still plugged with
concrete stoppers on the New Jersey side inserted when water was discovered
to be leaking into the tunnels.

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