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Insurers Agree to Pay Billions at Ground Zero
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: September 8th, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/nyregion/24insure.html
The Spitzer administration announced the settlement of all insurance claims at ground zero yesterday, ensuring that $4.55 billion will be available for rebuilding the World Trade Center site. The agreement, which the insurers described as the largest single insurance settlement ever undertaken by the industry, ended a protracted legal battle with insurers over payouts related to the terrorist attack. All the parties to yesterdays settlement signed confidentiality agreements barring them from saying how much each insurance company would pay. The train is now moving down the tracks, said Larry A. Silverstein, the 76-year-old developer who had leased the World Trade Center complex six weeks before the Sept. 11 attack. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land at ground zero and built the trade center, will get about $870 million from yesterdays settlement, which is to go toward the cost of erecting the $3 billion Freedom Tower. Mr. Silverstein will get the remaining $1.13 billion. The insurance battle has been complicated from the start by the circumstances of Mr. Silversteins lease of the trade center and the destruction of the complex by terrorists six weeks later. At that time, two dozen insurers had signed binders pledging to provide $3.5 billion in insurance coverage, but had not finished the documents. An ugly dispute developed over which insurance policy was in effect at the time of the attack.
Note: In a PBS documentary on 9/11, Mr. Silverstein, commenting on the collapse of World Trade Center 7, stated that as the building was burning, he told the chief of the New York fire department, "maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it. And they made that decision to pull, and then we watched the building collapse." Watch this video clip here. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on 9/11 from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our 9/11 Information Center.
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