|
Men of Steel
Thank
you for the article reviewing my book, Men of Steel: The Story
of the Family That Built The World Trade Center (ENR 9/30
p. 14).
When my uncle and our chief engineer
failed to require the fabricator to install beam seats to
double connections at columns in the Port Chester job in 1964,
I believe it was a careless if not thoughtless oversight on
their part, certainly not a deliberate "safety shortcut,"
as ENR has written.
Today beam seats are required by
law (OSHA). Back then, prudent men like my late father, Karl
Koch Jr., demanded their inclusion. I did not lie, as Jack
Daly stated. That inept oversight had a severe price and I
am still paying for it 38 years after the accident crushed
my legs.
ENR quoted Jack Daly as saying
the forced sale never took place as I have described in Men
of Steel. Any interested party is welcome to read for themselves
all the facts as I have laid them out in my book. The legal
cite is The Supreme Court of the State of New York, County
of Nassau, Index No. 1165/73.
There, the public may read the
heartbreaking details pertaining to the forced sale of my
father’s company from January 1972 through November 1974--not
a word of fiction. Finally, the Swedish-owned Koch-Skanska
may have 15 members of the Koch and Daly families (Daly refused
my son) working for it today but they are employees, not owners.
I fought and lost for the continuance of an American family-owned
enterprise, which included all branches of the Koch family.
This inclusive vision was not shared by my uncles, nor apparently,
Jack Daly.
Helping Hands
On
behalf of the SEI/ASCE Standards Committee on Design Loads
on Structures During Construction, I want to thank ENR for
the informative article on the new and first-ever SEI/ASCE
37-02 Standard on construction loads (ENR 10/7 p. 10). It
is a welcome piece for raising awareness about it in the design-construction
industry and for inviting questions and comments from eventual
users.
I am gratified by the credit given
to me in the subsequent editorial (ENR 10/14 p. 64) for my
perseverance in leading the standard’s development for
14 years. However, public acknowledgment also is much deserved
by those chairs of the subcommittees whose expertise--and
equal perseverance--made this milestone document a reality:
Charlie Culver, John Duntemann, Connie Crawford, John Deerkoski
Sr. and Don Dusenberry. Space does not allow naming all the
others of the 80-member committee who made important contributions,
but we have to cite at least Al Fisher, Gil Harris, Jim Harris,
Dan McGee, Dave Rosowsky, Cris Subrizi and Rubin Zallen.
CORRECTION
FIATECH, an industry-led consortium working
to develop and deploy technology to improve the construction
of capital projects, was incorrectly identified as a bidder
for a contract to conduct a study sponsored by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (ENR 10/14 p. 24). The
study is to analyze the inefficiencies and costs to the industry
that result from a lack of interoperability in software. FIATECH
proposed the study and successfully lobbied NIST to commission
it, but FIATECH itself was not a contender for the work.
|
