Crammed into a windowless, unadorned office roughly a third the size of the one he should be in, investment banker Bruce Meyers just wants to get back to work.

On Thursday, Jan. 14, a fire beneath the second floor of the 32-story office tower at 45 Broadway forced Meyers and the 80 or so employees of his banking firm, Meyers Associates, to evacuate the building, along with dozens of other workers inside the tower. The following morning, Meyers and his employees were allowed back into their space and found the floors still damp from flooding water, and most of the computers and other electrical equipment damaged by heavy smoke.

“It’s had a tremendously detrimental effect on our business,” Meyers said in his temporary office, his voice raised slightly to overcome the steady drone of the bulky air purifier just outside his door. His own office, directly on top of the exterior second-floor overhang where the blaze began, was still uninhabitable more than two weeks after the fire.

“I can’t be efficient working like this,” he said, estimating the total cost of the damage his firm has incurred to be around $500,000. “I haven’t really even had time to do any work, because I’ve been so busy with the insurance adjusters and the tech guys. It’s all got to get taken care of soon.” 

Juan Mangual, the firm’s systems integrator, said that he’d spent close to 150 hours holed up in the tiny room that houses the office’s bank of network servers, trying to isolate and repair the chronic technical issues employees have been struggling against since coming back to work.

“We’ve been having major problems just keeping the computers from locking up,” Mangual said. “Thank goodness we haven’t lost any data, but we’ve lost quite a bit of time and productivity. I’ve been treating it like a crime scene.”

It took firefighters just over an hour to put out the Jan. 14 blaze. As many as 30 fire trucks and ambulances responded to the fire, which a Fire Department spokesman said was caused by spray-on foam insulation applied too close to a halogen bulb.

Chunks of charred insulation fell to the ground as a team of firefighters took turns dousing the bottom of the second-floor overhang, where Meyers said crews had been working earlier in the day, apparently repairing a heating and air conditioning problem.

Marc Intriligator, an attorney on the 28th floor, said that smoke began seeping into his offices within minutes of the fire alarm going off. Intriligator said he and his co-workers tried to leave by an emergency stairwell, only to find it filled with smoke and impassible around the 15th floor.

“Some people were a little panicked at that point,” Intriligator said. “On our way down, we saw a few people coming up from the lower floors. They said they couldn’t get through the smoke, and were going to try to go to the roof to get to breatheable air.”

After heading back up a few flights, he said, his group found another stairwell, also “very smoky but passable.”

Steven Balbos, a network engineer working alone on the tower’s 31st floor, said his office was mostly free of smoke, but was told to leave the building anyway a few minutes after firefighters arrived. But with no one directing evacuation, Balbos said, he and a worker from another floor also met a smoke condition in the stairwell. “In the teens, it started getting really bad, really smoky,” Balbos said. “If you got through that, though, around the ninth floor it got better.”

Office life seemed mostly back to normal at 45 Broadway by the end of January, save for the large fans and the lingering smell of smoke in the lobby. 

But Meyers said he did not know how long it would be until cleaning crews could repair his office, or when his firm would be back at full capacity.

“We definitely need some assistance,” Meyers said. “So far, we haven’t gotten many answers out of anybody. I’m just trying to get us back up and operational again.”