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Backup monuments { January 4 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/48858p-45900c.htmlhttp://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/48858p-45900c.html
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
U.S. disaster plans
include cloned icons
By DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, January 4th, 2003
A beacon of freedom that has illuminated the New World for 116 years. A symbol of American democracy and the seat of government since the 1790s.
A temple of presidential greatness that has stirred hearts and minds for 75 years.
Imagine New York Harbor without the Statue of Liberty. Or Washington without the U.S. Capitol. Or the heartland of America absent Mount Rushmore.
Unthinkable? In truth, federal officials have spent a lot of time thinking about such nightmarish scenarios since the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11, 2001.
And, quietly, they have been mapping doomsday strategies that could be used to replace or resurrect our national icons in case they are ever damaged or obliterated in terrorist attacks.
The bottom line: Should disaster strike, and a political decision be made to rebuild, exact replicas — or architectural clones — could be constructed fairly quickly. How do you replicate the 225-ton, 305-foot Lady Liberty? The 288-foot Capitol dome? The 60-foot busts of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt?
Deploying high-powered, laser-scanning technology to record the landmarks from every angle, the feds have been creating three-dimensional digital models of their complex exterior features. They also have scanned part of the ornate interior of the Capitol.
By converting the monuments' unique architecture into geometric maps, they are producing digital archives and computerized databases that can be used to manufacture or rebuild those physical objects.
Capturing every nook and cranny, scanning every curve and jowl, officials have recorded millions of measurements — accurate down to 6 millimeters, or 1/4 of an inch — that are being stitched together to produce comprehensive and finished blueprints.
The 3-D images — recording height, width and depth — will be more detailed than the limited drawings left by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi and Gutzon Borglum, the sculptors of Liberty and Rushmore, respectively. They will also be more complete than the unfinished plans left by the eight principal architects who built the Capitol between 1793 and 1868.
And in a worst-case scenario, the scans could provide the means to replace the heretofore irreplaceable.
"If someone comes along with a suitcase bomb or a briefcase nuke and blows up a chunk of Thomas Jefferson, and his nose falls off, the 3-D representation would allow us to perform major reconstructive surgery on the mountain," said Don Striker, superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota.
No blueprints for Liberty
The 21st century, computer-imaging technology is being employed to record the entire surface area of the Statue of Liberty. The world-famous lady has posed for millions of photos, but since her creator left no blueprints and only minimal design sketches, replacing her in the event of a catastrophic loss would have been all but impossible. So a team from Texas Tech University was dispatched to document the tone of her copper skin, the undulations of her flowing gown, the muscles in her outstretched arm, the curve of her lips and the height, width and depth of her wide-open eyes.
Their mission: "Reverse engineering." That's what they call it when a physical object is the source for blueprints — instead of the other way around.
Armed with a Cyrax 2500 3-D laser scanner that can capture 1,000 images a second — and shooting from 13 positions on the pedestal and about the island — they collected some 200 million data points. Shipped back to Lubbock, Tex., these are now being stitched into a precise, digitized model.
Copies of that 3-D map — which potentially could be used to clone the statue — will be stored in the National Archives, the Library of Congress and a secure federal government vault somewhere in the U.S.
"Sept. 11 heightened fears that we could lose this thing — along with other high-profile American icons — to cultural terrorism," said Glenn Hill, an architecture professor at Texas Tech who heads the scanning team.
Participants described the scanning as insurance that everyone devoutly hopes will never be needed. But if any portion of the statue were destroyed, it could be replicated with great accuracy.
As Hill put it, "The Statue of Liberty as a symbol of freedom will always be safe for future generations."
Government officials and private contractors told the Daily News that the mapping grew out of prudent contingency planning by the monuments' custodians, not from official White House policy. The projects are consistent with federal directives to ramp up security at the nation's parks.
The National Park Service, which administers both Liberty Island and Mount Rushmore, describes the 3-D scanning as "routine maintenance and good stewardship," a central part of its mission to help plan for worst-case scenarios and preserve landmarks for future generations.
Urgency after 9/11
Officials note that efforts to document Lady Liberty date to the '70s and '80s, and that the scanning project got underway in the spring of 2001 — after American intelligence received information in March 2000 that Al Qadea might strike U.S. landmarks like Liberty.
But after 9/11, the project won a renewed commitment, increased funding, a speedier timetable and access to government helicopters for overhead photography.
Park service officials acknowledge that, today, worst-case planning can mean preparing for a catastrophic loss due to terrorism — and mulling the feasibility of a phoenixlike rebirth.
"Until Sept. 11, the only time we ever faced battles on our soil was in the Civil War, so most of our preparations, historically, were for natural disasters," said John Burns, deputy chief of the park service's documentation division.
"Since we now face new threats to the touchstones of our heritage, our history and our civilization, we are also now looking at new possibilities in terms of reconstruction."
Those possibilities were first explored in Japan in 1999, said Geoff Jacobs, a vice president at California-based Cyra Technologies, which makes the Cyrax scanner. After vandals torched a giant Buddha, Tokyo University used the laser system to create a historical record of other Buddhas in case they, too, were targeted for destruction. Unfortunately, the 3-D-mapping technology was not permitted inside Afghanistan before March 12, 2001. That was the day the Taliban finished dynamiting the two Bamiyan Buddhas, the fifth century statues carved into a mountainside that, at 190 feet, were the world's tallest Buddhas.
Had the ancient sculptures been scanned in time, enough data could have been collected to create exact replicas.
That is precisely what the stewards of America's treasures are now racing to do. At Mount Rushmore, engineers scanned sculptor Borglum's detailed 1/12 scale model of the four Presidents in February 2002. Since an inch on the model translates to a foot on the mountain, the minute recordings could be used to reconstruct the entire granite monument.
The next step is to scan and digitize the four visages — which are 60 feet high and have 11-foot eyes and 20-foot noses — and compare the 3-D map with the representation produced from the sculptor's model.
"We have that icon status," said Striker, the park superintendent, "and that means we have to be prepared if, heaven forbid, something horrible happens."
Plans for the Capitol
At the U.S. Capitol — one of the world's most symbolically important buildings — officials for 15 months have operated on the theory that the soaring cast-iron dome was the intended bull's-eye of United Flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
Three days after Sept. 11, Alan Hantman, the architect of the Capitol, hired teams of surveyors to do a laser scan of the massive facade, accurate to less than 1/4 of an inch.
Multiple additions and changes over two centuries had rendered the original blueprints inaccurate.
Barely two weeks after the attack, C.W. Over Inc., a Maryland contractor, sent its workers to the roof to scan images below, then down to the grounds to scan images above, and finally atop other federal office buildings to shoot directly across at the columns and colonnades.
The 3-D modeling that was created, and is still being developed, could be used to restore any portion of the Capitol were it damaged or destroyed in an attack.
A C.W. Over exec briefly discussed the firm's work with The News before being asked by Capitol administrators not to talk about the project, apparently for security reasons.
"The architect of the Capitol does not wish to comment," said Eva Malecik, a spokeswoman for the architect.
Originally published on January 4, 2003
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