The city is giving huge chunks of the mangled steel from the former World Trade Center to dozens of cities all over the world for use in Sept. 11 memorials, officials said.
The steel has also been given to museums for exhibits about the trade center and the terror attacks that destroyed it, city officials said.
“We’re going to accommodate as many people as we can,” said Office of Emergency Management head John Odermatt. “We try to see what we have from the site. We give them what is generally available and what we think may be appropriate.”
Officials at OEM and the city’s Community Assistance Unit started giving out the steel two weeks ago, Odermatt said.
The requests started pouring in for some of the 190,000 tons of steel about a month after the terror attacks, Odermatt said.
“We had other priorities during that time,” Odermatt said, adding that as the recovery effort was wrapping up, city officials decided to start sifting through the requests – setting up a process to ensure that those who are asking aren’t going to try to profit from the tragedy.
Those who want the steel are responsible for shipping it and must sign a waiver saying it won’t be used for profit – and only for historical, memorial or educational purposes.
The rules were strengthened after a Georgia-based company bought 500 tons of trade center steel to melt into “commemorative medallions,” each with a $30 price tag.
So far, the city has had 73 formal requests for memorial steel, from places as nearby as Long Island to as distant as Rome. There are also talks of giving a sliver of steel to the relatives of the trade center victims, sources said.
The Smithsonian has taken several pieces. The Houston Fire Department also asked for a hunk of the metal, as did officials in Hoboken and Chatham, N.J.
In many cases, the requests come from towns that lost a resident in the terror attacks, said Alan Ratner, president of Metal Management Northeast, which, along with the firm Hugo Neu Schnitzer, processed almost all the trade center steel that wasn’t preserved for a memorial or investigation.
Two 12-foot-long pieces arrived about 10 days ago in Bethpage, L.I., a town that lost nine residents – including FDNY Capt. Brian Hickey of Rescue Co. 4.
Bethpage Fire Commissioner Bill Zura said it will be used for a memorial – probably in front of the Bethpage firehouse where Hickey was a volunteer – to honor all of the town residents who perished.