After months of scooping dirt and blasting bedrock, the Port Authority finished excavating the sites for Towers 3 and 4 on Sunday and turned them over to developer Larry Silverstein.
The transfer happened 48 days after the Dec. 31 deadline, during which time the Port Authority paid Silverstein $14.4 million in late fees, at a rate of $300,000 a day. If Port contractors made the deadline the agency would have owed them a $10 million bonus.
“We will be in full construction mode in a couple of days, and within the next few weeks, we expect to have 50 workers and 30 pieces of heavy duty construction equipment working onsite,” Janno Lieber, president of Silverstein’s World Trade Center Properties, said in a statement. The cherry pickers in the background belong to the Port Authority.
