Environmental Concerns Over Deutsche Bank Building Surrounded by doubt and concern over environmental hazards lurking inside the shrouded Deutsche Bank building, residents, elected officials and Community Board 1 members are calling for a closer look behind the black veil before the bank is dismantled one floor at time beginning this fall. They want federal and state environmental agencies to study asbestos levels and the dust and debris and other contaminates blasted into the building during the collapse of the World Trade Center. And they want to be certain those subsequent reports are accurate. Congressman Jerrold Nadler and local environmental groups sounded an alarm during a press conference in July when they provided court documents that showed prior testing of the building at 130 Liberty Street showed asbestos levels of 150,000 times the appropriate levels as well as dangerously large amounts of other contaminants. They claimed those results had been deliberately withheld from the public by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. The LMDC dismissed the claim as "political grandstanding" and used a scheduled meeting before a committee of Community Board 1 a week later to quell the concern. Amy Peterson, vice president for development programs and economics for the LMDC, said those results were from Deutsche Bank's own study of the building conducted for insurance purpose and could not be trusted. "We could not rely on those results - we had to do our own testing," she said. That testing was set to begin in August and would include testing for levels of asbestos in the dust and building materials, mold, and any other known contaminants from the World Trade Center, she said. She said the LMDC would consult with the EPA and the city Department of Environmental Protection. Board member Catherine Mc Vay Hughes urged caution during the testing and suggested a second layer of netting should be put in place to protect the neighborhood. "Those contaminants better stay within that perimeter," she said. "Once it's out, it's hard to clean up. We can not have a mistake a second time around knowing what's in there." Community Board 1 adopted a resolution later in the month calling for the pending test results to be made public and that the LMDC throw open its doors to the public and the media for its meetings with an advisory committee of Downtown residents it hand selected to as an advisory group for the process. The 30-member committee of Downtown elected officials, residents and business met for the first time in early July. Pat Moore, a resident of 125 Cedar Street which is directly across the street from the Deutsche Bank building, said she attended that meeting and felt assured that the necessary testing would be done before the plan for deconstruction was determined. "It's not like it's going to happen without oversight," she said, adding that environmental contamination was not her biggest worry, "I am less concerned with that than I am with falling girders."