In NYC, special police unit will protect ground zero

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Few New Yorkers noticed earlier this summer when a dozen police horses boarded in a stable located in lower Manhattan for most of the 20th century were loaded into trailers and moved uptown.

The New York Police Department relocated the horses — a quaint curiosity to neighbors living in high-end Tribeca lofts and townhouses — to build a temporary staging area for 220 officers newly assigned to protect ground zero.

The lower Manhattan force eventually will rise to 670 — larger than any of the 76 precincts in the five boroughs and entire departments across the country. The multiple thousands who will visit the Sept. 11 memorial after it opens this fall will endure airport-style screening and be watched by hundreds of closed- circuit cameras as part of the security when the attack site opens publicly for the first time since 2001.

Securing the World Trade Center site from terror attacks has been one of law enforcement’s most pressing problems long before the al-Qaida attack that destroyed the towers. In 1993, Islamic extremists exploded a rented van rigged with fertilizer bombs in a trade-center parking garage, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others. And in 2006, authorities alleged a Lebanese man loyal to Osama bin Laden plotted to flood ground zero and the rest of lower Manhattan by exploding backpacks in commuter train tunnels under the Hudson River.

While New York leaders call the resurrection of the 16-acre property a triumph of the nation’s resolve, law enforcement believe terrorists see it as another chance to prove their tenacity.

“Without question, it is a target, because it has tremendous symbolism,” said James Kallstrom, a former top FBI official who headed the New York City office in the 1990s. “Going back and attacking a landmark that was already attacked once is the ultimate challenge.”

Fears of a repeated plot against the site years ago moved its signature skyscraper several feet from its original spot.

An original plan putting 1 World Trade Center 25 feet off a state highway near the Hudson River raised concerns by the NYPD that it could be vulnerable to car or truck bombs. A redesign moved it farther off the street and incorporated a windowless 200-foot base.

To make the base of the 1,776-foot tower less bunkerlike, the new plan called for a fa ßade of 2,000 glass panels attached to aluminum screens. But tests showed that the glass failed to shatter into harmless bits as hoped, and the Port Authority, which owns the site, had to send architects back to the drawing board.

Developers and law enforcement also have grappled with how to best police the anticipated steady flow of tourists, workers and commerce at the site without turning it into an inhospitable, armed camp.

Kallstrom, while the top counterterrorism adviser to former Gov. George Pataki in the mid-2000s, was an architect of an ambitious security plan for 1 World Trade Center — scheduled to be finished in 2013 or early 2014 — the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and other office towers and transit at the site.

The measures — combining architectural innovation, high-tech gadgetry and good old-fashioned manpower provided by the NYPD, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police and private security firms — will make it “a very, very secure site,” Kallstrom said.