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Community Questions Officials Over Fire
At an emergency meeting of Community Board 1 on Tuesday, Aug. 21, angry, frightened and frustrated residents packed a hearing room on Broadway to grill a slew of top city and state officials. They demanded to know how the fire at the Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty St. had been allowed to happen, and why the official response showed so little improvement over that of Sept. 11, 2001. Some residents noted with irony that the meeting took place in the same New York State Assembly Hearing Room where, at many meetings in recent years, CB1 members and neighbors of the Deutsche Bank building repeatedly raised concerns to officials about safety at the site This time, agency chiefs faced elected officials as well: U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and City Councilman Alan Gerson.
“This was not self-certification,” Schick insisted. Sally Regenhard, the mother of a firefighter who died on Sept. 11 and a leading activist on 9/11 issues, was unimpressed by Schick’s long list of regulators and overseers. “It is despicable that all these people failed in their jobs,” she said. CB1 member Allan Tannenbaum said the tangle of bureaucracies and contractors working on the site did not diminish the central responsibility of the LMDC, which owns the building. “Your corporation is ultimately responsible for anything that goes on at the site,” he told Schick. “The deaths of the two firefighters are your responsibility. A community that is totally freaked out is your responsibility.” Schick conceded the point. “Who is ultimately responsible is the LMDC,” Schick said. “As chairman I make decisions and as [LMDC] president David Emil helps implement them.” But Kimberly Flynn of the 9/11 Environmental Action group pointed beyond Schick and the LMDC in assigning blame. “The LMDC was created as a buffer zone for the governor and the mayor,” she said. “But the buck stops with the governor and the mayor. No more buffer zone.”
The cause of the fire and work at the building site are now the subject of several separate investigations by the Fire Department, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. A review released the next day by the Mayor’s Office showed the Building Department issued contractors 19 citations for unsafe conditions on the site, including two as recently as this month – one for allowing combustible material to accumulate near falling sparks and another for an expired permit to use acetylene torches. Salvatore Cassano, Chief of the Department, told the meeting that his department’s investigation into the blaze would likely be concluded by the end of the week. Air quality testing from around the site has found no unsafe levels of asbestos or particulate matter, but data on dangerous metals and organic compounds were not yet available at the time of the meeting. Again and again, officials appeared unable to offer clear answers to many of the residents’ questions: How often was the standpipe inspected? How many fire safety drills had been conducted on the site? Was a fire-protection engineering firm hired to oversee the site? They did offer some assurances, however: Emil reported that the Deutsche Bank building is in no danger of collapse. And Schick said air testing revealed no dangerous levels of asbestos or particulate matter in the area. But he said it will be several days at least before officials know whether the fire released dangerous metals or organic compounds into the neighborhood. Craig Hall of the World Trade Center Residents Coalition asked a question on the minds of many: with 130 Liberty Street no longer under negative air pressure in the wake of the fire, what is the risk of re-contaminating the neighborhood?
Nadler pressed Evangelista: What if the monitors do register air pollution? he asked. The EPA official conceded that in that case it would still take several weeks to re-seal the building. The answer dismayed residents in the audience, and Nadler as well. “It is unacceptable to learn that even if monitors showed that contamination is coming out into the community that it will take weeks to stop it,” he said. Residents were also frustrated that after six years of calling for an effective system to communicate with residents, the city has yet to create one. “Nobody came to tell anyone in our building whether or not to evacuate,” said Kathleen Moore, who lives across the street from the Deutsche Bank building at 125 Cedar St. Mary Dierickx, who lives in the same building, said the first communication she had from the LMDC didn’t come until the afternoon after the fire.
Jean Grillo, a member of the Battery Park City Community Emergency Response Team, said she was upset that CERT teams were not activated to help deal with the emergency, and that CERT members who did show up to help were not recognized by police and fire units. Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler told Grillo that the city would try to make better use of CERT teams in the future. CB1 chairwoman Julie Menin pointed to a letter from the board to the LMDC in October 2005 asking for a community notification plan. The letter was never answered and the notification plan never materialized, Menin said. In another neglected letter to the LMDC, the board voiced its objections to the hiring of the John Galt Corporation as a subcontractor on the building demolition, noting the company’s poor safety record, questionable qualifications, and reported mob ties. Rhoda Rice of the Battery Park City Seniors noted the conspicuous absence from the meeting of Bovis Lend Lease as well as John Galt Corporation. Schick said Bovis had told him they would attend the meeting, but Menin said the Community Board had received no reply to their invitation. “Bovis will be answering questions soon enough,” Nadler assured the audience. “They will be answering questions under oath.” |
