TPT January 2008

From the Americas

› Nucor then ships the steel in bulk to Canada for fabrication into the sizes and shapes specified in the blueprints. At the Canam Steel Corp plant in Québec, project managers for Citi Field and Yankee Stadium direct crews in the cutting and moulding of the steel joists, trusses, and other structural members › For Citi Field, which is to replace Shea Stadium in Queens, Canam Steel has about 330 people working to fabricate and install the 13,000t of steel required. Through October, some 9,000t of steel had been transported to the site near LaGuardia Airport in tractor-trailer loads of about 20 tons each: over 600 round-trips, and counting › For Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, the requirement is for about 13,000 tons of steel, of which some 7,000t has been installed. According to the project manager in Québec, another 1,500t is in storage at a holding site in South Plainfield, New Jersey The large presence of Nucor (Charlotte, North Carolina) in this extraordinary flux of steel will rejoice the ecology-minded. The company, believed to be the largest recycler of scrap steel in the US, has said that its use of electric arc furnaces to melt scrap steel yields an energy savings of roughly 70 per cent over traditional blast furnace technology. Tim Kurkjian, baseball reporter for the sports TV channel ESPN in New York, had to look harder for the pearl. “I love Yankee Stadium and see no good reason to replace it,” he said at the 2006 groundbreaking for the new structure. “I love that it is where Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig used to play. But I understand progress and am just glad they are not building it outside of the city.” Canadian National Railway acquires key operations of a Chicago-area line owned by United States Steel United States Steel Corp (Pittsburgh) and Canadian National Railway Co (Montreal) announced September 26 that their boards had approved an agreement under which CN will acquire the major portion of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway Co. EJ&E is owned by the USS rail subsidiary Transtar, for $300 million (the Canadian and the US dollar are about at parity). Transtar will retain the workforce, equipment, and railroad assets that support the Gary Works site in northwest Indiana and other USS operations. CN, which employs approximately 21,700 people in Canada and the US, generates only 23 per cent of its revenue from Canadian operations, 77 per cent from US domestic and transborder operations and other traffic. The Canadian company said it expects the acquisition of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern to significantly enhance its rail operations in the Chicago region. EJ&E operates over 198 main line miles of track encircling the city of Chicago by way of Waukegan and Joliet, (both in Illinois), Gary, and south Chicago. The company’s lines serve steel mills, petroleum and chemical plants, and a number of distribution centres, moving everything from bulk raw materials to finished products. Coal is also moved to utility plants in Illinois and Indiana. CN president and chief executive officer E Hunter Harrison said: “Chicago is essential to CN’s rail operations, yet it presents us

Steel Undergirding Yankee Stadium II is the work of many hands – mainly Nucor’s Two new baseball stadiums are under construction in New York City, one of them the successor to Yankee Stadium – “the house that [Babe] Ruth built,” on which ground was broken on August 16, 1921. On that date in 2006, the first shovelfuls of earth were turned for a new Yankee Stadium. In a recent issue of the New York Sun, Christopher Faherty furnished ample evidence that the $1.02 billion state-of-the-art structure going up across the street will be the house that Nucor built. Of the thousands of tons of steel that have already been hauled to the Yankee Stadium site and to Citi Field, the new home of the New York Mets, about 60 per cent was once ferrous scrap: steel goods collected from junk yards, town dumps, and the back rooms of automobile repair shops. Amassing this steel scrap was the first step in the creation of the steel beams and trusses forming the backbone of the stadiums, both set to open in 2009 (“Steel makes its way to new city stadiums,” October 26). Mr Faherty noted that this aspect of the project was in the hands of America’s largest scrap broker, David J Joseph Co (Cincinnati, Ohio), which is providing most of the steel goods to be melted down and fabricated into usable forms for the two huge arenas. The company buys its material from scrap dealers and large manufacturers selling steel left over from their own production operations. From there, the action moves to Nucor, the highly successful minimill operator that has turned the rising costs and environmental hazards of manufacturing virgin steel to its advantage. At the US headquarters of Nucor-Yamato Steel Co, in Blytheville, Arkansas, the scrap steel for the New York stadiums, much of it broken down into fist-size pieces in a shredder, is recycled by Nucor into steel beams for further fabrication elsewhere (see below). Besides working with the contractors in charge of building the stadiums, Nucor makes steel beams for the new Meadowlands Stadium, in New Jersey, and the World Trade Center Memorial in lower Manhattan. For their part, the managers of the two stadium projects said they are excited about building what the architects say is the unique part of each structure: made from steel, of course. Mr Faherty writes, “In the coming months, the Yankees will build a steel replica of the famous white fence in the outfield of Yankee Stadium. And the Mets will begin constructing the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.” Arkansas-Québec-New York Paul Lester, a sales analyst at Nucor who leads tours of the company’s huge Blytheville plant, traced for Sun readers the progression from scrap heap to the outfields and concourses of the new stadiums rising in New York: › The scrap is first melted down and turned into a single semi- finished piece of steel, a process which takes about 35 minutes. The piece is then stored for two to three weeks before it is shaped into beams at the factory’s rolling mill.

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J anuary 2008

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