Impossible. Unbelievable. And hilarious, if you find the idea of blowing up 1 World Trade Center just by crawling under a fence funny.
Justin Casquejo, 16, fortunately had no bomb, just a 100-megaton adolescent ego.
But another intruder easily might have — a fact well known to the NYPD, which is battling the Port Authority to have the final say on who’s in charge of protecting the WTC.
That 1 WTC “security” proved so porous is beyond incredible, given the years of anguished planning and rethinking of the project to prevent a second 9/11.
In 2005, Ray Kelly famously convinced Gov. George Pataki, the PA and its then-partner Larry Silverstein to move the “Freedom Tower” from its original planned site and redesign it from top to bottom.
That was to protect the “iconic” structure from truck bombs driven into the tower from West Street, among other threats. The reboot set construction of the skyscraper back by two years, complicated rebuilding the whole 16-acre WTC site, and cost a fortune.
But it was that important. The 1,776-foot-tall skyscraper has been viewed as vulnerable since even before ground was broken. Donald Trump called it “Terror Target No. 1 with a bull’s-eye around its neck.”
To guard against disaster, architects and engineers devised a fortified tower base made with tons of blast-resistant concrete. The redesign required an unprecedented 45,000 tons of steel. Even after that, security issues tied up the PA and the tower’s main tenant, Condé Nast, for two years.
Now a clever kid from Weehawken has exposed all the heaven-and-earth-moving efforts at protection as a joke.
Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota — remember him? — took heat when he compared PA police to “mall cops.” That might have been an insult to the guys who break up food court Snapple fights.
If the PA can’t build a fence without holes for a kid to crawl through, it must turn the job over to the NYPD for good.
And the Durst Organization, the PA’s partners who are responsible for protecting 1 WTC from inside, can do a lot more than just fire the guard who dozed through Casquejo’s invasion.
The Dursts fought off a bunch of rugged real-estate rivals for a piece of the WTC action. They’d better start playing hardball with their hired help, too.