The U.S. was desperately in need of resources and held innumerable scrap drives. Why would they just dispose of all that steel like that? Why wasn’t it hauled back to mainland steel mills?
The size of the scrap pile was astonishingly small in 2008, considering the amount of material removed. May well have used some for shipbuilding. There was zero evidence of movement, so if anything large was removed, it was a long time ago.