Patrick Askew, Construction Manager, Port Authority of NY & NJ

>> My name is Patrick Ascu. I'm currently a program manager for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. I'm also an adjunct professor over at NYU, and I basically work at the Port Authority in the capacity of doing the management for the new World Trade Center design and construction. It's a huge site with a number of different construction projects going on, namely with, probably everybody's familiar with is the Freedom Tower, most commonly known, or Tower One. The tallest building in the country at this point. So that is essentially being built and finished off along with a number of other towers on the site, Towers Three, Four, Five, and there's, of course, the major oculus is what we call, or the hub transportation station. So it's a major site with major infrastructure going on, and my role is essentially to manage the design and construction [inaudible] Port, the management and design and construction and in that capacity as a, you know, a civil engineer as my background. Well, certainly, my specific role is logistics manager for the eastern portion of the site. So I deal with a lot of stakeholders to develop the Silvertstein New York City Transit Authority, the Department of Transportation, all the people that have a stake in the building and the infrastructure. I coordinate with them. I coordinate the design and construction and to basically implement the components of the project into the surrounding infrastructure, say, the New York City Transit Authority, which we have a train system that runs right through the site. DOT, which there are highways and roadways. Again, Silverstein is the developer that is building the towers. So I have to sort of incorporate the Port Authority's primary role, which is to build a transportation hub into their infrastructure, which is their development of their office buildings. Along with that, I manage the overall construction logistics in and around the site in terms of making sure cranes and all these sophisticated construction, I guess, equipment gets in and out the site, manage all the contractors in terms of how they get into the site and how they build their infrastructure with competing other infrastructure going on in the site. So it's like a logistical maze. Typically, I'm dealing with competing interests in terms of contractors, in terms of stakeholders in trying to sort of facilitate making sure the interest of the Port Authority and the buildings get built while dealing with all the other, you know, competing stakeholders.