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Safety Pledged for Deutsche Demolition
At a special meeting of Community Board 1 on Jan. 24, officials of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which owns the site, said work to remove floor slabs damaged in the fire would begin in a matter of days, continuing for eight to 10 weeks before the building’s remaining floors are cleaned of toxins and dismantled, with the entire project complete by the end of the year. The work will be performed by LVI Group, Inc., hired last month by the project’s main contractor, Bovis Lend Lease. LVI replaces the inexperienced and little-known John Galt Corp., which was fired after a string of safety lapses culminating in the August disaster. At the meeting, LMDC Chairman Avi Schick said many safety improvements are already in place, including the removal of wooden barriers and hatches—meant to keep contaminants inside the building—that made it difficult for firefighters to navigate through the structure. At the Fire Department’s request, he said, fire-safe entrance and exit routes to the building and two access stairs up to the 20th floor were put in place. Bovis and LVI are to add a fire suppression system in the building and a mechanism to detect any breach in the standpipe, which allows firefighters to pump water to upper floors. A partially dismantled standpipe contributed to the deaths of two firefighters at the scene. Five fire-fighting water connections from the street have been installed. Because the positive-pressure air system, designed to keep contaminants inside the building, exacerbated the August fire, there will now be a ground-floor master switch to shut it down. Schick also touted the reassignment of Bovis’s regional safety director to focus only on the Deutsche Bank building project, and praised the hiring of LVI, a remediation firm with a good safety record and years of experience, including work at the Pentagon since Sept. 11. Bovis and LVI executives pledged to make sure cleaning and deconstruction happens without a single safety incident. (Five days after the hearing, Newsday reported that three workers were trapped and one killed when a San Francisco power plant LVI was deconstructing collapsed. An LVI spokeswoman said the event does not affect the company’s work on the Deutsche Bank building.) Safety advocates were concerned that although Schick repeated that the LMDC is “leaning towards” completing the clean-up of the building before deconstruction resumes, he refused to commit to doing so, citing the complicated and ongoing back-and-forth between his agency and government regulators. David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, complained that the LMDC remains too closed off to the community. “LMDC has yet to take seriously its obligations to be honest and open with the public,” Newman said. “[Freedom of Information Act] requests go unanswered. The LMDC has held only one community advisory meeting since June of 2007.” When Kimberly Flynn of the 9/11 Environmental Action Group asked the LMDC officials for draft versions of a new abatement plan for the site, Schick told her that the plans are still being reviewed by regulatory agencies. “Even in the bad old days of the Pataki administration, the public had a chance to look at plans before they were finalized,” Flynn said. “The sky isn’t going to fall if we get a chance to look at those plans.”
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