Government buildings exempt from city codes?

From DNA Info:

Politicians are renewing their call for stricter building and fire codes in the wake of the recent acquittals in the Deutsche Bank fire cases.

Borough President Scott Stringer and State Sen. Daniel Squadron say more than 800 buildings in New York — including the former Deutsche Bank building, which was razed — are exempt from city safety codes because they are owned by the state or federal government.

Those buildings, which include the United Nations and Lower Manhattan's federal courthouses, do not have to allow building and fire safety inspectors inside, nor are they subject to penalties for safety violations, Stringer said.

"It's time we extend basic code protections for all New Yorkers to all of our buildings — so these tragedies become a thing of the past," Stringer said.

State Sen. Daniel Squadron sponsored legislation last year that created a state-city panel to address the loophole. Squadron expects the panel to begin meeting later this year and issue recommendations that would go to the legislature for approval next spring.

More not guilty verdicts in Deutsche Bank tragedy

NEW YORK (AP) -- A toxin-cleanup director and a company have been acquitted of manslaughter in a blaze that killed two firefighters at a condemned bank tower at ground zero.

A judge delivered the verdicts Wednesday in the August 2007 fire at the former Deutsche Bank building.

She found the John Galt Corp. guilty of second-degree reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor. She acquitted worker Mitchel Alvo of all charges. Jurors had acquitted two other construction-company supervisors of all charges last week.

The fire killed Robert Beddia and Joseph P. Graffagnino. It also revealed poor regulation of the damaged building. It was being dismantled in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

2 not guilty in Deutsche Bank deaths

From the Daily News:

A construction supervisor charged with the deaths of two firefighters in the Deutsche Bank building blaze was acquitted of all charges Tuesday.

Salvatore DePaola was cleared of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment on the eighth day of deliberations.

Graffagnino's family had no comment. But his father has said the wrong people were on trial.

"I couldn't care less if they find them guilty or not," said Joseph Graffagnino Sr., who boycotted the proceedings.

"Most%A0of the people that should be on trial are not on trial - the City of New York, the Buildings Department, the Fire Department ... all the people that let this slip through their fingers."

The jury is still deliberating in the case of DePaola's colleague, site safety manager Jeffrey Melofchik.

Supervisor Mitchel Alvo and the John Galt Corp., the site's demolition contractor, opted for a bench trial. DePaola is the least senior of the three men.

From the NY Times:

A site safety supervisor was acquitted of all charges on Wednesday in the fire at the former Deutsche Bank building near ground zero that killed two firefighters four years ago.

The supervisor, Jeffrey Melofchik, was one of three workers who were accused by prosecutors of ignoring the removal of a 42-foot section of the standpipe — preventing firefighters from quickly getting water onto the blaze — as they rushed to finish the abatement work on time. He was the most senior official among those charged in the case.

Distractions causing dereliction of duty

From the Daily News:

Mayor Bloomberg loves to think big...

All this attention to big projects comes at a price, though.

Some of the price comes out of your pocket - water and sewer rates have skyrocketed under Bloomberg, and the city's construction debt is higher than ever before.

Some of the price comes in the changed character of a city marked by giant footprints - neighborhood haunts like Freddy's Bar and some apartment buildings replaced by a new Brooklyn arena.

And some of the price comes in opportunities lost, inattention to detail, small problems that could have been fixed before they became big ones.

While billionaires fought over what to build at Ground Zero, two firefighters lost their lives in the former Deutsche Bank building in a scandalous breakdown of administration.

Bloomberg brags about installing GPS monitors and credit card readers in taxis, but nobody bothered to program them so they couldn't rip off $8.3 million in excess fares.

The man who made his billions on technology admitted Friday that he should have paid more attention to the CityTime technology program, which will eventually computerize city workers' time sheets but is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.

History doesn't worry much about a few hundred million extra here and there. It's the taxpayers' job to look at the price tag.

Deutsche Bank demo faces more delays

Deutsche Bldg. faces new snags
By TOM TOPOUSIS, NY Post

The Deutsche Bank Building is finally coming down -- but at a snail's pace.

More than two months after the city gave the long-stalled deconstruction project the go-ahead, workers have removed just two floors from the remaining 26 stories of the toxic tower, officials confirmed yesterday.

At the current rate, the deconstruction project would be hard pressed to meet its latest deadline at the end of 2010, jeopardizing crucial construction projects needed to continue work at the World Trade Center across the street.

Officials at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which is overseeing the deconstruction, said they are pressing the contractor, Bovis Lend Lease, to find safe ways to speed up the project.

"We have told the contractor to improve efficiency, but not at the expense of safety," the LMDC said in a statement.

But officials yesterday refused to set a timetable for completing the project, which was initially scheduled to be done by the end of 2008.

Photo from the NY Times

Toxic-tower law passes

AP/NY Post:

The City Council has voted to bar building crews from performing demolitions at the same time as asbestos abatement.

The bill addresses problems discovered after the deaths of two firefighters responding to a 2007 fire at the condemned Deutsche Bank building, which was undergoing both demolition and abatement due to damage on 9/11.

Officials later said doing both made the building a death trap.

Firefighters' union has had enough of Bloomberg

From the Neighborhood Retail Alliance:

The mayor is touting the record level response times of the FDNY-but the quickest response came from the UFA, which yesterday wasted little time in jumping in to endorse Bill Thompson for mayor. As City Room reports, a great deal of the union animosity can be traced back to clueless Nicholas Scoppetta: "Stephen Cassidy, the president of the Uniformed Firefighters’ Association, which represents 8,900 firefighters, praised Mr. Thompson as “smart, tough and fair’’ and directed harsh criticism at Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, who was appointed by Mr. Bloomberg. “The Fire Commissioner of the city of New York has always set accountability for firefighters but not for himself,” Mr. Cassidy said. “Eight years under Mike Bloomberg we’ve heard Nick Scoppetta say, ‘It’s not my fault.’”

The biggest point of contention, as Wayne Barrett (as well as ourselves) has pointed out, revolves around the Deutsche Bank fire: "Mr. Cassidy said he held Mr. Scoppetta accountable for the deaths of two firefighters two years ago at a fire at the Deutsche Bank Building in Lower Manhattan. A report by the Manhattan district attorney’s office said several city agencies had failed to properly monitor the building, where a basement standpipe meant to deliver water to firefighters had been disabled, apparently without the Fire Department’s knowledge.

In addition, the UFA takes issue with the planned spate of firehouse closings-and hits at the term limit over turn as well: "As rows of firefighters stood behind him, Mr. Cassidy criticized the mayor for his plan, a budget deal with the City Council, to close 16 firehouses. He also criticized Mr. Bloomberg for his push to persuade the City Council to change the term limits law so he could run for a third term."

The defensive despot

From the Daily News:

Plenty of New Yorkers knew the Buildings Department was failing to protect them long before Bloomberg cracked down and pushed out former Commissioner Patricia Lancaster.

And many critics questioned the safety of demolishing the Deutsche Bank building long before Bloomberg went to the funerals of two firefighters who died there.

The Democrats who want to dethrone him, city Controller William Thompson and Queens Councilman Tony Avella, say Bloomberg is blind to other problems that New Yorkers see clearly - like neighborhoods handed over to developers and schools obsessed with testing instead of learning.

His defenders point out that Bloomberg has put city data online so anyone with a computer can see which agencies aren't measuring up. He really does ride the subway around town, and regular New Yorkers really do walk up to him with problems and complaints.

Yet in the recent battle over how to run city schools, he brushed away even the most well-intentioned criticism, dismissed every question about the statistics that support his claims, and accused anyone who questioned his plans of trying to hurt children.

Why wasn't the Deutsche Bank tragedy Bloomberg's downfall?

From the Village Voice:

Mike Bloomberg's worst scandal cost two firefighters their lives. If we lived in a media world in which facts and memories mattered, the nonchalance at the highest levels of the Bloomberg administration about the hazards and warnings at the Deutsche Bank building, where Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino died on August 18, 2007, might cost him his re-election.

Our billionaire mayor will never be tarnished by the traditional pay-to-play and influence-peddling schemes that compromise politicians with ordinary bank accounts. Instead, his defining debacle is a failure of leadership, accountability, and transparency, revealed in one law enforcement report or news story after another, ever since Beddia and Graffagnino succumbed to smoke on the 14th floor of the city's most toxic building, just 118 feet from where 343 of their brothers perished six years earlier. Even Bloomberg's Department of Investigations (DOI) found last month, in a report barely noticed by the press, that it was a case of death by official dereliction.

Deadly mismanagement cost one mayor his job. Yankel Rosenbaum's murder in a Crown Heights race riot mishandled by the NYPD finished David Dinkins in 1993, when the media refused to give a culpable administration a pass simply because its breakdowns were two-year-old news. But we are now in an era when media moguls get together to reverse two public referendums in an undisguised effort to keep one of their own in office, a time when the mayor may be the biggest new ad buyer in town. The question now is whether the press will hold accountable a mayor who has refused to hold any of his own appointees accountable for an avoidable disaster.

DOI: FDNY & DOB share blame for Deutsche Bank tragedy

From the NY Times:

Though an inspector warned in June 2007 that a breach in a standpipe at the former Deutsche Bank building had to be fixed and tested, the test was never done.

Thus a chance to learn of a much larger break in a pipe in the basement — meant to deliver water in case of a fire — was missed.

That was one problem identified in a report by the city’s Department of Investigation. It paints a scathing portrait of how the Fire Department and the Department of Buildings inspected — or failed to inspect — the bank building in the months before a fatal fire on Aug. 18, 2007.

Two firefighters died battling the blaze in the building, which was being both decontaminated and deconstructed. The building, at the edge of ground zero, was damaged on 9/11.

The report found failures by fire officers, at several levels, to conduct basic inspections of the site every 15 days, as department rules require when high-rise buildings are being built or demolished. The frequency is important because the inner workings of such sites are usually changing.

It also found a “lack of communication up and down the chain of command,” meaning that the importance of compliance with the 15-day rule was not reinforced among the lower ranks.

The report also noted that firefighters had gone into the building in the period before the fire to help injured workers and that, on May 17, 2007, a pipe fell from the building through the roof of an adjacent firehouse, Engine No. 10, but none of that was enough to prompt anyone to ask for inspections.

Bovis Lend Lease probed by U.S. Attorneys

From the Daily News:

Early this month, mega-builder Bovis Lend Lease was on track to win a contract to build a new 1,200-student high school in Brooklyn.

But then came word that prosecutors had hit the Australian-based giant with subpoenaes in an expanding criminal probe of payroll and billing irregularities.

The School Construction Authority quickly rejected Bovis' $72.7 million bid, saying it will move to hire the next lowest "responsible" bidder.

That bidder has yet to be chosen, but the cost to taxpayers will jump by at least $62,000.

The cost for Bovis - one of the biggest players in the construction industry in the world - could be far steeper.

Government agencies could bar them from future contracts. Some could even cancel ongoing jobs if wrongdoing is found to have taken place at those sites.

Investigators are now scouring records to see if Bovis employees schemed to inflate bills or pay ghost employees, according to several sources familiar with probes by U.S. attorneys in both Manhattan and Brooklyn.

At the moment, prosecutors are looking at what went on at five New York City jobs, some of which are ongoing: the Sept. 11th memorial, a new wing of New York University Hospital, the new Citi Field stadium, a mall in Rego Park, Queens, and demolition of the former Deutsche Bank tower at Ground Zero, the sources said.

Deutsche Bank Building work stopped again

From the Daily News:

Demolition work on the former Deutsche Bank building was halted Tuesday because of a broken safety switch discovered after a smoke condition, authorities said.

For the second time in a week, the FDNY responded to a call of smoke at 130 Liberty St., the cursed skyscraper ruined on 9/11.

It turned out the smoke was from a battery-powered forklift that overheated about 4 a.m. Firefighters simply unplugged it.

Workers at the site hit a switch on an air-filtration system - designed to keep contaminants inside the work site - but it malfunctioned.

Firefighters and Buildings Department workers confirmed it was busted, and a stop-work order was issued for asbestos removal from the cellar to the third floor.

The order was lifted last night and work will resume today.

City Council passes 12 construction safety bills

From the Daily News:

Prompted by the fatal Deutsche Bank building fire, the City Council passed a dozen bills Monday increasing oversight at demolition and asbestos abatement sites.

The new laws require color-coded standpipes and an alarm system in dry standpipes during construction and demolition.

The bills also require special permits for high-risk asbestos abatement and prohibit simultaneous asbestos removal and demolition at most sites.

The new legislation does not apply to federal and state buildings, Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler said.

The mayor's office is pushing for legislation in Albany that would bring state buildings under the new rules, Skyler added.

Construction delayed at Deutsche Bank building

From Crain's (AP):

The long-delayed project of dismantling a toxic tower across from ground zero has fallen behind schedule again because of an electrical fire.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. says the small fire in a power distribution box stopped work for most of April at the former Deutsche Bank tower. Contractors now say it will be January 2010 when the tower is completely dismantled, about three months behind its latest schedule.

More problems at Deutsche Bank site

From the Daily News:

A severed standpipe that turned the Deutsche Bank building in lower Manhattan into a deathtrap for two firefighters in 2007 was found disabled again Thursday.

Workers ripping out drywall on the second floor of the cursed tower across from Ground Zero apparently fractured the pipe, investigators said last night.

The accident caused an evacuation at 130 Liberty St. Officials ordered all work stopped until the standpipe is fixed.

4 contractors indicted for manslaughter

Three construction supervisors and a subcontractor have been indicted on manslaughter charges in the 2007 deaths of two firefighters at a Ground Zero skyscraper, capping a complex 16-month investigation that exposed numerous failures by city officials.

The people charged include two senior officials at subcontractor John Galt Corp. and a manager with general contractor Bovis Lend Lease, the District Attorney's office in Manhattan said. The Galt company is also being charged. They are all charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment.

4 charged with manslaughter in Deutsche Bank fire

Construction companies fined for smoking

CIG-RULE VIOLATORS $LAMMED
By DAVID SEIFMAN, NY Post

Buildings Department inspectors blitzed construction firms with nearly 250 summonses in just three months for violations of a tough smoking law enacted after the deadly fire at the Deutsche Bank building, The Post has learned.

Investigators determined that the blaze, which took the lives of two firefighters, was started on Aug. 18, 2007, by a cigarette discarded as the toxic tower was being dismantled.

"Smoking on any construction site puts people's lives in danger, and the construction industry must step up to the plate," Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri said.

Officials said that inspectors handed out 247 summonses between Sept. 1 and last Friday for smoking at building sites, for cigarette butts found on the sites, and for failure to post legally mandated "No Smoking" signs.

Fifty-three cases have been adjudicated at the Environmental Control Board, which levied $245,000 in fines after 42 cited firms didn't show up for hearings.

Deutsche manslaughter charges pending

Manhattan prosecutors won't charge the city or state in the Deutsche Bank blaze that killed two firefighters - although several agencies were supposed to ensure the Ground Zero building was safe.

Instead, the district attorney's office plans to ask a grand jury to bring manslaughter charges against a mob-tied subcontractor, John Galt Corp., and corruption charges against 14 individuals hired to demolish the toxic tower, three reliable sources said.

District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is negotiating with the city to make some admission of guilt in the August 2007 blaze, including admitting the Fire Department failed to inspect the building every 15 days, as required.

None of the agencies that was supposed to inspect the tower - including the Fire Department and the Department of Buildings - will be directly implicated.


In Deutsche bank blaze, DA to charge mob-tied subcontractor John Galt Corp. with manslaughter

State pushed for shady contractor at Deutsche

In early 2006, New York State development officials approved the hiring of an unknown company, the John Galt Corporation, to help demolish the Deutsche Bank building near ground zero.

Before Fire, a City Warning Over a Contractor

More than a year later, a blaze in the building killed two firefighters, and questions immediately emerged about Galt. Some of its top executives, it turned out, had worked at another company, the Safeway Environmental Corporation, which officials in the city’s Department of Investigation said had a history of problems with integrity, competence and financial issues.

A recently obtained document shows that on April 11, 2006, city investigators accused state development officials of not only knowing about Galt’s questionable ties before they approved its hiring, but also misleading the investigators about the subcontractor, possibly to avoid questions that might have slowed or blocked its hiring.

Beer and butts found at Deutsche site

A year after the deadly Deutsche Bank inferno - sparked by a tossed cigarette - inspectors have found evidence that workers are smoking and drinking inside the troubled tower.

"It is shameful that they would be smoking there. It is a shameful act," FDNY spokesman Jim Long said. "We will take the necessary actions to prevent any further incident."

Deutsche disgrace: Butts, beer found despite fire regulations

On Aug. 26, an inspector for subcontractor Site Safety Inc. found two empty Newport packs and Budweiser cans in a third-floor bathroom. How they got there - where smoking and drinking are strictly prohibited - remains an open question. There are more than 400 workers and about 20 security guards on site daily.

The LMDC and contractors alerted the city, and last Thursday Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta ordered the fire marshals to investigate Aug. 28.

Skyler was kept up to date as the marshals did a sweep of the building and on Aug. 29 began interviewing hundreds of workers, sources said.

An FDNY source said marshals also found cigarette butts, empty packs and beer cans on other floors in the tower.

The tower was badly damaged in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and since then has undergone a drawn-out demolition.

The demolition was stopped after last year's fire but resumed a few months ago. Workers must clean out the dust created during the Trade Center collapse before final demolition can begin.