By: Steve Strunsky (The Star-Ledger)
Published: Saturday, September 11, 2010

(L-R standing) Brothers, Joe and Jim Moretti, of Service Metal Fabricators of Rockaway, along with project engineers (L-R) Doug Reeve and Brian Wyckoff with drawings of the 9/11 memorial the company will be making for Ground Zero. The company, run by two generations of the Moretti Family, is creating nameplates with all 2,982 names of the victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger

MORRIS COUNTY — In western Morris County, 45 miles from the construction cranes and earth movers at Ground Zero, 160 bronze plates weighing half a ton each are stacked in a corrugated metal building. They are waiting to be formed into nameplates for the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan.

The importance of virtually every aspect of the plates that will eventually bear the names of all who perished in the attacks of 9-11 has not been lost on those entrusted to their completion, from memorial executives to metal etchers.

“They’re singularly the most important aspect of the memorial at some level,” said Joe Daniels, president and CEO of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

“These name plates, this bronze, is where the 2,982 victims’ names will be incised into. And the fact of the matter is that the millions of people that are going to come to this site, they’re going to be invited to interact with the names, to touch the names. Very tactile. So getting these names right is absolutely critical. It is the most, in my estimation, probably the most important feature of the entire process.”

This week Daniels pledged the memorial will be completed by the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, one year from today.

The bronze plates were produced in Germany from brass and zinc and are 5-feet wide, 10-feet long and a half-inch thick.

The critical task of creating the nameplates has been entrusted to Service Metal Fabricating, a family business with plants in Rockaway and Dover. The plates are now awaiting final layout of the names before being cut and folded into panels.

Machinist, Jim Terry, an employee of Service Metal Fabricators of Rockaway, sets up a laser milling machine which he used in the making a one of the protoype of the 9/11 victims nameplate. The company, run by two generations of the Moretti Family, is creating nameplates with all 2,982 names of the victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. With a year to the 10th anniversary and planned unveiling of the memorial portion of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Service Metal has devoted half of its facilities to meeting the deadline. (Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger)

“It’s an honor to be part of something like this,” said Bill Moretti, 37, who runs the company with his brothers, Joe and Jim, after it was founded by their father, Joe Moretti, in 1981.

“The job does have an emotional impact,” said Jim Moretti, 40.

Service Metal’s involvement dates back to the immediate aftermath of the Trade Center attack, when, Jim Moretti said, the company supplied protective gear to firefighters who were sifting through the debris.

“The first few days, the guys were just getting hacked up on all the metal and glass, and so we were bringing boots and gloves and all that stuff,” Jim Moretti said.

Daniels said the firm’s commitment to the Trade Center site early on was one factor in its selection to fabricate the panels.

The design by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker calls for the names of those who died in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania on 9/11 — along with the six victims of the 1993 World Trade Center attack — to be cut through the 152 panels. These panels, backlit so the stencil-cut names can be read, will form parapets along the rims of two square reflecting pools. Each pool will cover about an acre, into which the country’s largest man-made waterfalls will cascade down black granite walls.

The memorial will be set in an eight-acre landscaped plaza, to be shaded by nearly 400 trees, including 16 white swamp oaks that arrived on the site last month from another New Jersey company, Halka Nurseries in Millstone Township.

Like visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., where soldiers’ names are etched in stone, family and friends of 9/11 victims will be able to make rubbings or run their fingers along the contours of their loved ones’ names. Using workplace and other information gleaned from an exhaustive survey of victims’ families, the names will be grouped according to the locations where victims perished in the attacks. Arad said the intent is to let family, friends and co-workers who died together be remembered alongside one another as well.

“What I was hoping to bring to the design was a meaningful adjacency,” Arad said.

It will be up to Service Metal to bring the design to life.

The names will be cut out, or incised, using a water jet. The machine sprays a stream of water, mixed with the kind of grit used in sandpaper, at a force of 55,000 pounds per square inch, through a nozzle measuring one-hundredth of an inch in diameter. The plates will then be hoisted onto another machine that will carve grooves where a third machine will bend the plates into three-dimensional panels, ready for chemical finishing process giving them a blackened, weathered appearance that will deepen with age.

“It’s very, very neat, knowing that you’re going to be doing something that’s going to be here for a hundred years. A thousand years. Forever!” said Jim Terry, 49, a machinist at Service Metal, who recalled explaining the Sept. 11 attacks to his young son. Working on the memorial, Terry said, “makes you feel proud that you can contribute somehow to making things a little bit better.”

Many family members say they are anxious for the memorial to be finished.

“It’s been too long,” said Robert Tirado of Teaneck, whose nephew, 30-year-old Hector Tirado, a firefighter from the Bronx, was among 343 New York City firefighters and paramedics who died that day. “I don’t know the responsible people, but it seems like they’re dragging their feet.”

The Morettis and others say the memorial is part of a project of unprecedented complexity, sensitivity and scale, tied up with the redevelopment of the entire Trade Center site, and the pace of progress should come as no surprise.

Barbara Gorman said she can wait, for the sake of doing the job right. But Gorman, too, is eager for the memorial’s completion. Her husband, Officer Thomas Gorman, 41, was one of 38 Port Authority Police officers who died on 9/11. His remains were never found, and his widow said the National September 11 Memorial would give her husband an appropriate formal resting place. Gorman said she and her three children do visit a local memorial for their father at home in Middlesex Borough, for which she is grateful.

“But it’s a totally, totally different feeling from where the memorial is going to be built on the very ground where his life was taken,” she said. At Ground Zero, she added, “We see the emptiness and we feel the emptiness. And I think when the memorial is complete and we have the reflecting pool and the names are on the panels, I think we’ll be able to feel the life again.”