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WTC steel to rise again in Indian buildings

Indian construction engineers will soon be using steel that once framed New York's towering World Trade Center before the deadly hijacked aircraft attacks felled the twin towers on September 11.

An Indian metals trader told Reuters in Madras on Monday that he had imported a shipload of steel scrap from New Jersey, including thousands of tonnes of scrapped structural steel salvaged from the mangled remains of the WTC.

"It includes about 5,000 tonnes of HMS (heavy melting steel) scrap from the WTC," said the trader, who did not wish to be named. "We will be selling the scrap to local steel mills who will smelt and recycle them into angles and bars for the building industry," he added.

The collapse of the 110-storey twin towers created a pile of more than one million tonnes of rubble and twisted steel which work crews have been clearing and hauling to a landfill on Staten Island after rescue teams gave up the search for survivors.

The scrap trader said the steel consignment of 33,000 tonnes had been imported on his behalf by an Indian state-owned metals trader PEC Ltd and shipped on the Maltese-registered M V Borzna.

"We have almost finished unloading the steel scrap, which arrived late last month and the vessel is due to leave port in the next couple of days," he said.

Earlier on Monday, New York-based steel recycling firm Metals Management told Reuters it had bought 70,000 tonnes of steel from Ground Zero, some of which had already been shipped to southeast Asia.

Metals Management president Alan Ratner said four or five ships had sailed from New York carrying scrap steel, among it "very dense" steel girders from the collapsed twin towers. He said the towers were expected to yield somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 tonnes of scrap for recycling.

The Indian trader said he had bought the scrap at $120 per tonne CIF (cost, insurance and freight).

He said a second ship carrying a similar cargo was headed for the western Indian port of Kandla.

Shipping sources told Reuters three more vessels were on their way to China.

Ratner said the City of New York would be keeping some of the scrap to build a memorial to those killed on September 11. The current death toll for the WTC collapse is 2,893.

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