This came in my e-mail this morning - appropriate for our thread today, I think.
| With a year to go before it even touches the water, the Navy's amphibious assault ship USS New York has already made history. It was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center. USS New York is about 45 percent complete and should be ready for launch in mid-2007. Katrina disrupted construction when it pounded the Gulf Coast last summer, but the 684-foot vessel escaped serious damage, and workers were back at the yard near New Orleans two weeks after the storm. It is the fifth in a new class of warship - designed for missions that include special operations against terrorists. It will carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-ready Marines to be delivered ashore by helicopters and assault craft. "It would be fitting if the first mission this ship would go on is to make sure that bin Laden is taken out, his terrorist organization is taken out," said Glenn Clement, a paint foreman. "He came in through the back door and knocked our towers down and the New York is coming right through the front door, and we want them to know that." Steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite, La., to cast the ship's bow section. When it was poured into the molds on Sept. 9, 2003, "those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence," recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. "It was a spiritual moment for everybody there." Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the tradecenter steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the "hair on my neck stood up." "It had a big meaning to it for all of us," he said. "They knocked us down. They can't keep us down. We're going to be back." From Wikipedia.... Shortly after 11 September 2001, Governor of New York George E. Pataki wrote a letter to Secretary of the Navy Gordon England requesting that the Navy bestow the name USS New York on a surface warship involved in the War on Terror in honor of September 11's victims. In his letter, the Governor said he understood state names presently are reserved for submarines but asked for special consideration so the name could be given to a surface ship. The request was approved 28 August 2002. 24 tons of the steel used in its construction came from the rubble of the World Trade Center, with seven tons melted down and cast to form the ship's "stem bar," part of the ship's bow. The construction workers reportedly treat it with "reverence usually accorded to religious relics," touching it as they walk by. On 9 September 2004, the Secretary of the Navy announced that two of her sister ships will be named Arlington and Somerset, also to commemorate the attacks. The contract to build New York was awarded to Northrop Grumman Ship Systems of New Orleans, Louisiana in 2003. The ship also survived Hurricane Katrina. |