NY Times Publishes Excellent Article on State of WTC Subfloors
Today's New York Times "Science Times" section publishes another excellent article about the exploration of the basements of the World Trade Center. We have followed this aspect of the recovery effort closely. Information about the state of the Concourse and the basements have been found in articles about the 1-9 Subway Reconstruction, the difficulty in initially reaching the debris field of the towers, and the early exploration of the WTC Concourse.
This information is important to putting the devastation in context. Many of us who have worked in Lower Manhattan are very familiar with the layout of the Concourse and the basements. Therefore, diagrams like the one included in today's article make it much easier to visualize the damage. Also, the PATH station for Lower Manhattan is in the basement of the World Trade Center, and full recovery of the area is impossible without restoration PATH service to the former World Trade Center or to a new station.
The diagram of the WTC basements included in this article is the best we've seen in any Web-based newspaper article. By looking at the layer of the cut-away called "Basement 6", you can see the route that the PATH tracks through WTC basements. The rails passed directly under 2 World Trade Center. This is probably the reason that three of the seven cars of an empty PATH train left in the World Trade Center station were crushed.