Ground Zero Site Needs Less Planning, More Action

"Measure twice, cut once" is an adage useful to more people than only the tailors who first uttered it. There are very few situations in this life that are not better for planning and forethought. But planning, like many other things, can be carried to extremes. Aperfect example is Ground Zero, the site where the World Trade Center Towers stood until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Next Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the greatest loss of life due to enemy action on American soil in the history of this nation. Five years ago the World Trade

Center was leveled and the Pentagon severely

damaged when terrorists used passenger jetliners as weapons of mass destruction. A third aircraft, United Airlines' Flight 93, crashed into an abandoned strip mine in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, after passengers and crew attempted to wrest control from another gang of terrorists who intended to use the airplane as their partners in crime had the other three, with their intended target either the United States Capitol or the White House.

A little more than a year later, the Pentagon had been rebuilt and restored to full active service as DoD headquarters. In almost five years, grass has grown over the scars in the earth left when Flight 93 crashed, but a scale model of the memorial planned to be built at the site stands in temporary quarters.

The planners and volunteers in charge at the Flight 93 memorial site have a clearly thought out objective: the completion of a

permanent memorial by Sept. 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, and are moving steadily toward attaining it. More than $10 million of the $58 million needed to complete the memorial, which will use every square inch of the nearly 400-hectare site has been committed by several sponsors and a fundraising campaign is well underway. Aware that the plans have been agreed upon, some of the more than 130,000 people who visit every year leave mementoes in honor and tribute to the 40 passengers and crew, knowing these objects have a place in the plan and will be included in the permanent visitors' center that will eventually be built.

A fence also surrounds the Ground Zero site, but the similarities end there.

We do not deny that some progress has been made. Construction has started on the 1776-foot Freedom Tower, the first of five towers which will comprise millions of square feet of office space at the site. Seven World Trade Center, the last of the buildings in the World Trade Center complex to fall and the first to be rebuilt, has been completed in time for the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Construction has also begun on the World Trade Center Memorial Museum, an underground gallery of exhibits planned next to the memorial that marks the footprints of the North and South Towers.

However, although the 110,000-squarefoot underground museum is expected to be one of the most visited in the world when it opens in 2009, the estimated $1 billion cost of the project still gives rise to contention and

could mean changes to the design along the way. The worldwide design competition inspired tremendous public passion but brought too few contributions to the cost. The Deutsche Bank Building, where human remains are still being found, is still shrouded in black plastic. Four years of planning-too much planning, perhaps-have left Ground Zero nowhere nearly as far along as it should be.

While the mayor of another city, one visited by the worst natural disaster in American history, may have been less than elegant in his choice of words to describe the Ground Zero site, we are forced to admit he has a point. Contrasting the progress of rebuilding largely residential neighborhoods with reconstruction of a major commercial site-some 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center complex, while another 200,000 visited or passed through every working day- may be an apples-to-oranges comparison, but there's more than one grain of truth in the concept. In almost four years the plan for the Twin Towers had been completed. Construction of the North Tower began in 1966; the building was opened four years later, in December 1970. The South Tower, on which construction began while the North Tower was still a-building, opened in January 1972. Almost five years after 9/11 plans are still being squabbled over while most of the Ground Zero site stands empty and idle.

We can do better than this, and we know it. What is taking so long?