JUST when you thought Ground Zero couldn’t become any more of a national embarrassment, the Port Authority went “probabilistic” yesterday.
Forget “probable” or even “possible” – that’s the wacky word the PA dug up to describe the World Trade Center rebuilding debacle that’s even further behind schedule than we feared.
The public has every right to be disgusted. PA Executive Director Chris Ward’s long-awaited “roadmap” was disheartening to the point of making you cry – or scream.
The memorial and museum might be done by mid-2013 – if we’re lucky.
The Freedom Tower, which the PA started work on last year, might be finished by the end of 2013 – if we’re lucky.
Seven years to put up one building?
When the smaller but highly complicated New York Times and Bank of America towers took just over two years each?
When a tower in Dubai more than twice as tall as the Freedom Tower is taking less than five?
Yup, seven years – because the PA hates the Freedom Tower and is dragging its tail every way it can.
For months, many were hoping Ward, a crack engineer and executive, would find a way to undo the straitjackets that continue to stall progress at the site.
One is the Daniel Libeskind/George Pataki master plan that crammed in a too-big memorial and too many other things.
The other is the New Jersey-dominated PA’s toxic commitment to the site’s trillion-ton gorilla – the Santiago Calatrava-designed PATH terminal, fraudulently called a “World Trade Center Transportation Hub.”
Ward failed to loosen either set of bonds by even a smidgen. “We found no rewind button” to “reverse the trajectory,” he said.
As a result, the PATH project will continue to hold up the works on everything around it, because its sprawling underground tentacles are in their way.
Its cost has swelled to $3.2 billion – first predicted by The Post’s Tom Topousis in February 2007, but long denied by the PA. Yesterday, its “probabilistic” finish line was pushed back to 2014.
Ward gamely claimed, “It’s far more than simply a PATH station” and akin to a “Grand Central” for downtown. But the real Grand Central took just 10 years to complete, not 13.
The Calatrava job is no Grand Central, but basically a fancy portal for a relative handful of New Jersey commuters.
Ward said it will link up with nearby subway lines – as if transit riders were otherwise incapable of getting between stations one block apart.
He even boasted it will connect to the Fulton Street Transit Center – the MTA’s dead-in-the-ground fiasco without a budget, design or timetable – and the closed Cortlandt Street station, which the MTA has no schedule for reopening.
The PA is making minor cuts to the Calatrava scheme – like trimming its “wings” and using columns rather than trusses.
But those are nail-clipping measures when Ward needed a chainsaw.
He made a fuss over how many workers, “trucks, tower and crawler cranes” will be swarming over Ground Zero by 2011. But will they finish much to be proud of by 9/11/11?
Probabilistically not. [email protected]