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• Leading September 11th Family Advocate for 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund Calls for Congress to Reopen the Fund for Ailing Rescue and Recovery Workers at Ground Zero ... (News Release, March 31, 2008)
  
• Exposure to WTC Attacks Associated with preschool behavioral issues. .... Preschool children exposed to both the World Trade Center attacks and another traumatic event were more likely to experience behavioral problems than children exposed only to one event or to none, according to a recent report (Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, February 2008). Young children may be especially vulnerable to the adverse psychological consequences of trauma, according to the study. However, little is known about the effect of terrorism on preschoolers. ... These behavior problems appeared more severe among children who had also experienced another traumatic event. Compared with children who were not exposed to high-intensity WTC events or to other trauma, those who were exposed to both had 21 times the odds of having emotional problems or being anxious or depressed and 16 times the odds of having attention problems. Those who were exposed only to high-intensity WTC events and not to other traumatic events were not significantly more likely to have behavioral problems than those with only less intense exposure to the attacks. The findings are consistent with an allostatic load theory of stress, which holds that accumulated exposure to difficult events increases the risk of psychological effects, the authors noted. "Physicians seeking to assess the impact of terrorism and disaster on very young children should assess for disaster-related exposure and for other trauma," they stated. "More vigorous outreach to trauma-exposed preschool children should become a post-disaster public health policy." ... (Advance for Speech-Language Pathologists & Audologists (3/31/08)
  
• Ground Zero Ruling Could Cost City Billions of Dollars ... "This was the last legal obstacle standing between 10,000 people and their jury, their trial," a lawyer who represents many of the plaintiffs, David Worby, said. Mr. Worby claims that about 550 of those 10,000 have cancer related to their exposure to toxins at ground zero. The lawsuits claim that the city failed to ensure that ground zero was a safe workplace. High among the claims is the assertion that the city failed to enforce rules requiring laborers to wear respirators while working amid the toxins and rubble. New York City and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, both of which are defendants in the suits, have argued that they deserve immunity from the suits because the cleanup effort was part of a response to an unprecedented emergency. They say they should not be liable for paying potentially billions of dollars in damages. The city's corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, said in a statement that he was "confident that as the facts unfold" the city would ultimately be found to be immune from the lawsuits. The first significant ruling in the case came in 2006, when a federal district judge in Manhattan, Alvin Hellerstein, found that the city was not liable for the conditions at ground zero in the days immediately after the terrorist attacks. But Judge Hellerstein ruled that the lawsuits could go forward against the city's wishes to give workers the chance to prove that ground zero remained an unsafe work environment weeks and months after September 11, 2001. The city and the Port Authority appealed to the 2nd Circuit, which yesterday denied their appeal in a highly technical ruling. The appeal was decided by Judges Jon Newman, Sonia Sotomayor, and Richard Wesley. (NYSun, by Joshep Goldstein, March 27, 2008)
  
• CITY STILL SITTING ON 9/11 CASH ... New York will hold on tight to a $1 billion fund to pay the claims of sick Ground Zero workers, despite a federal appeals panel's ruling yesterday that gave their case a boost. The city and the Port Authority had hoped an immunity claim would get them off the hook to compensate the ill emergency personnel and construction workers who cleaned up after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. But the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals said the 8,000 lawsuits can proceed until a final decision on the city's immunity. The city has tried to get all the suits tossed out. The ruling was a blow to the city, and good news for workers who say they have suffered from a host of respiratory ailments, cancer and other illnesses. ... (NYPost, by Leonard Greene & Susan Edelman, March 27, 2008)
  
• Sept. 11 cleanup workers hail federal court ruling ... About 8,000 trade center cleanup workers sued New York City, the Port Authority and almost two dozen contractors, charging they were made to work in unsafe conditions and demanding compensation. Claiming immunity from litigation, the city and the Port Authority asked federal judges to throw out the lawsuits. ... The Second Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday dismissed the request, giving hope to Klein, 49, who said he developed precancerous polyps and post-traumatic stress disorder from working at the trade center. ... (Newsday, by Carl Macgowan, March 26, 2008)
  
• Meet Avi Schick, New York's New Steamroller .... Officials and people who have worked with him, who insisted on anonymity given the powerful post Mr. Schick currently has and could have, point to his handling of downtown’s Deutsche Bank building deconstruction since a fatal fire last summer as an example of his unnecessarily argumentative nature. Over the months that followed the August fire, Mr. Schick engaged in numerous battles, often public, with the Environmental Protection Agency, repeatedly attempting to loosen the heavy regulations on the tower despite resistance from Mayor Bloomberg, U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler, members of the community and others. The E.P.A. held the line and ultimately won many of the fights, and those involved with the deconstruction say Mr. Schick’s resistance slowed the project down substantially. He once said deconstruction would begin by November 2007, but today the building still stands the same height as it did last summer, though abatement work is under way. “The prosecutorial lawyer’s approach has impeded the ability to reengage in the demolition of the Deutsche Bank building,” said an official involved in redevelopment downtown. Others say delays in downtown reconstruction, which happened both before and after Mr. Spitzer took office, are extremely frustrating, and the state has not done enough to avoid them. ... (The New York Observer, by Eliot Brown, March 25, 2008)
  
• 9/11 dogs seem healthy .... While evidence continues to suggest that ground zero rescue workers are suffering from their exposure to World Trade Center air, W.T.C. search and rescue dogs appear to be as healthy as the average canine, according to an ongoing study at the University of Pennsylvania. The American Veterinary Medicine Association News reports that there are no clinically obvious differences between the Downtown dogs and a control group. Thirty-five of the 97 rescue dogs under study have died compared to 15 in the smaller control group, but researchers say the difference is not statistically significant. (Downtown Express, March 21-27, 2008)
  
• New York landmark's storied past: The neighborhood surrounding the Deutsche Bank building near Ground Zero has a rich history. ... For all the delays in rebuilding New York's Ground Zero site and the tortured process to bring down the wounded tower that used to belong to Deutsche Bank (DB) (see related article), there are increasing signs of progress at the site. ... (Fortune/CNN, By Nicholas Varchaver, March 21, 2008)
  
• Delayed 9/11 Victim? Honor Para Who Died Young ... Ms. Reeve died on March 15, 2006 at age 42 from mesothelioma, a deadly cancer her friends and family believe was contracted during her time working at Ground Zero, where many responders, often lacking respirators, were exposed to toxins such as benzene, asbestos and pulverized concrete, in addition to particles of human remains. ... (Chief Leader, by Ari Paul, 03/21.08)
• The tombstone at Ground Zero: More than six years after 9/11, the toxic shell of the Deutsche Bank building remains standing. A tale of dysfunction that has cost taxpayers over $150 million - and taken the lives of two New York City firefighters. ... The deaths of two firefighters near hallowed ground prompted rage among residents and in the media. The news that emerged - that the fire had apparently been caused by a worker's cigarette and that a contractor had cut the standpipe - only stoked the fury and highlighted how unnecessary the deaths were. How could such a fire have occurred? More fundamentally, why was this wounded building still standing? Six months later those questions remain a subject of bitter dispute. The Manhattan district attorney has convened a grand jury as part of a broad investigation that is probing negligence and possible kickbacks or other financial chicanery. In the meantime the often delayed deconstruction of the 40-story office tower has been stalled since August, and the structure, now 26 floors tall, stands boarded up, a macabre and depressing contrast to the building foundations that are finally beginning to rise out of the Ground Zero pit. The story of the Deutsche Bank tower, gleaned from interviews with nearly 50 participants involved in every aspect of the process, is a tortured saga. It's a monumental environmental, technical, and political challenge that overwhelmed the public and private mechanisms charged with resolving the building's fate. From a dispute between Deutsche Bank and its insurers, to battles between an overmatched agency assigned to revitalize lower Manhattan and environmental regulators, to the pressure from residents, to the brief presence of a Mob-connected contractor that was followed by a shadowy replacement with a name borrowed from an Ayn Rand novel, it's been a miasma - a toxic project. It's also a case study in what happens when good intentions collide with a paralyzing fear of making mistakes. The paradoxes are endless. How did this project manage to be simultaneously hyper-scrutinized - with armies of regulators and monitors on the premises daily - and sloppy and out of control? And how is it that this skyscraper, the subject of tens of millions of dollars' worth of environmental studies, is today described by some as a toxic nightmare and by others as only marginally contaminated? Then there's this maddening bit of irony: Many of the calamities along the way were not only foreseeable but actually foreseen. ... Then came 9/11. The attack on and subsequent fall of the Twin Towers not only killed some 2,800 people, but caused a chain reaction of devastation. Five other office and residential buildings were destroyed or so badly damaged that they had to be demolished soon after; another 56 structures were damaged. The towers fell so violently that the nearest seismographs, 21 miles north of the site, registered earthquakes of 2.1 and 2.3 on the Richter scale, respectively. The collapse unleashed tornado-force winds, estimated between 158 and 206 miles an hour, which shattered some 1,500 windows in the Deutsche Bank building. ... A hazard to human health. Surviving was one thing. Reopening was another. Like other tenants in close proximity, Deutsche Bank was prohibited from, say, bringing workers to mount a major cleanup for two months after 9/11. The tower was simply too close to Ground Zero to allow actions that might interfere with the rescue and recovery operations. That meant that the World Trade Center dust, laden with everything from asbestos to mercury from the thousands of incinerated computers, simply sat, mixing with the rain that would occasionally blow in through the broken windows, for much of the fall. Toxic mold infested the structure. By the end of 2002, Deutsche Bank decided the building was unsalvageable. After spending $33 million to test roughly 60,000 samples throughout the building, the bank's experts, RJ Lee Group, concluded that, as a Deutsche Bank legal filing later put it, "a combination of contaminants known to be hazardous to human health, in quantities and concentrations unparalleled in any other building designed for office use, permeates the entire structure at levels which exceed by up to thousands of times the levels considered appropriate for Class A office buildings." The list was scary: asbestos, lead, mercury, dioxin, and other toxins. Even the mold, which Deutsche Bank had vanquished, reappeared. Deutsche Bank demanded that its four insurers pay its total policy value of $1.7 billion. Two of them, Chubb (CB, Fortune 500) and Zurich, quickly settled, but two others, Allianz (AZ) and AXA (AXA), resisted. Other buildings near Ground Zero had been cleaned and reoccupied. Why, they wondered, was the Deutsche Bank building beyond salvation? In August 2003, Deutsche Bank sued Allianz and AXA to force them to pay the full policy. The fate of the building now seemed destined to be yet another intractable fight disappearing into the maw of the courts. .... By the fall of 2003 the entire World Trade Center redevelopment was stymied by political, emotional, and design conflicts over various redevelopment plans. ... Sure enough, in February 2004, Mitchell announced a deal. The LMDC would buy the building for $90 million and assume responsibility for a $45 million contract to take it down. The insurers paid Deutsche Bank $140 million and agreed to cover 75% of any costs above the $45 million assumed by the LMDC. ... What had been a private failure was about to become a public liability. Meanwhile, on paper at least, the arrangement has proved to be lucrative for Deutsche Bank. Fortune's review of six years of SEC filings, including a footnote in one dated March 27, 2007, shows that Deutsche Bank "received aggregated payments from the four insurers and the [LMDC] totaling U.S. $1 billion" for its damaged building (and one much smaller satellite office behind it). ... The bank paid out massive costs for "write-offs of fixed assets, expenses incurred to replace fixed assets that were damaged, relocation expenses, and expenses incurred to secure and maintain the damaged properties." But the final tally resulted in a total "benefit" of 215 million euros from 2004 to 2006. ... 'No one is in charge' Deutsche Bank and its insurers receded from the stage in the summer of 2004, but they left one final delay behind: The insurers agreed to cover their share of costs only if the charges stemmed from legally mandated procedures to remove 9/11 contaminants. That meant the LMDC, which officially took possession of the building from Deutsche Bank on Aug. 31, 2004, had to launch a whole new study to determine the building's toxicity. The report found that the ubiquitous dust in the structure contained elevated levels of asbestos. That was only the beginning: 99% of the dioxin samples taken exceeded EPA levels that would mandate a residential cleanup, as did 97% of the lead samples. The news scared local residents. Indeed, the political climate had shifted dramatically in lower Manhattan. In the urgent days after 9/11, the authorities were willing to forgo certain regulations. There was no time, for example, to put contracts out to bid for the demolition companies that spent months removing debris from Ground Zero. But if people had been willing to err on the side of expediency shortly after the attack, by 2004 the opposite was true. The government unintentionally contributed to that feeling. The federal Environmental Protection Agency had made what became infamous statements; in particular, its Sept. 18, 2001, press release assured residents that "the air is safe to breathe" in lower Manhattan. As the veracity of that statement became increasingly dubious, the EPA was flayed by countless critics. By the summer of 2004 the EPA had lost the trust of many New Yorkers, especially those who lived near Ground Zero. But for all the resentment toward the EPA, people were even more afraid of seeing a contaminated building come down near their homes without strong government oversight. So they pushed the EPA to play a lead role. The local congressman, Jerrold Nadler, and a long list of community groups lobbied in every way they could. The campaign succeeded - and then some. The EPA signed on, along with eight other regulatory agencies from the city, state, and federal governments. Together they jumped right into the fray, greeting the LMDC's plan to decontaminate and demolish the building with 23 pages of comments and criticisms. The plan, the EPA wrote in January 2005, didn't ensure against a "significant potential for releases of contamination." Residents reacted even more harshly, and some of their ominous words would prove prescient. "LMDC is in over their heads," said Kimberly Flynn of activist group 9/11 Environmental Action at a public forum with the LMDC in January 2005. "The demolition is staggeringly complex and risk-ridden. Responsibility and accountability are currently diffuse, distributed across the patchwork of contractors and subcontractors and a list of regulators. Everyone is in charge, and no one is in charge." .... Who is John Galt? In fairness, the cleanup and demolition was a daunting project, especially for a government entity with no construction experience. "We were a planning agency," says Rampe, the LMDC president at the time. "This really didn't fall into our mission statement." But with Deutsche Bank, the insurers, and other government agencies backing away, the LMDC volunteered to tackle the myriad obstacles. For starters, the proximity of other structures meant the building would have to be taken apart piece by piece - "deconstructed" - rather than demolished or imploded. But that was simple compared with the cleanup. There are established protocols for removing asbestos in, say, pipe insulation. But how to remove the World Trade Center dust, laden with contaminants that had been blown into the walls, the elevator shafts, and the innards of the heating system, was quite another matter. It was something that neither the LMDC and the contractors nor the EPA knew much about. Not surprisingly, the process bogged down again. The first half of 2005 slipped by as the LMDC selected a new contractor for what was clearly going to be a more demanding mission than originally conceived. In August 2005, LMDC announced that Bovis Lend Lease, the U.S. subsidiary of the Australian property company Lend Lease, would lead the project. Bovis was no stranger to Ground Zero. It was one of four construction managers that oversaw the speedy dismantling of the colossal pile of debris. Soon after, a bizarre drama began to unfold. Bovis wanted to hire Safeway Environmental, a New York operation with experience in asbestos demolition, as its main subcontractor. It seemed a logical choice: The LMDC had already hired the firm to do asbestos-related preparatory work on the building. But a construction accident in July of 2005 brought intense scrutiny to Safeway, which was already under a monitoring agreement with the city's Department of Investigation (DOI). The terms required, among other things, that Safeway sever ties to a former owner who was a convicted felon. Safeway was later banned from city contracts for failing to abide by its agreement with the DOI, including the fact that the former owner was still a director and had been fingered in the trial of John Gotti Jr. as "an associate" of former Gambino family hit man Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano. (A lawyer for Safeway declined to be interviewed.) The DOI advised against hiring Safeway and suggested several alternatives. Finally, early in 2006, Bovis chose an unknown entity called John Galt Corp. Beyond the oddness of its name - John Galt is the protagonist in the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged - the company was little more than a shell. It did, however, have as two of its key figures executives who had until that moment worked for Safeway. And Galt would be leasing Safeway's construction equipment. To the DOI, Galt appeared to be Safeway (SWY, Fortune 500) in new clothing. (Greg Blinn, Galt's president, declined to be interviewed, as did a lawyer for the company.) But according to Bovis, Galt was the only bidder that fulfilled all qualifications, so Galt was in. The choice rankled residents, who marched in front of the LMDC in May 2006 carrying placards that read NO MOB ON THE JOB and WHO IS JOHN GALT? (the latter quoting the opening words of Atlas Shrugged). Meanwhile, tensions escalated between the regulators and the regulated. "It was like they were just talking past each other," says one source who represented a government entity other than the EPA. "To say it was antagonistic would be an understatement." ... The EPA had approved the LMDC's deconstruction plan in the fall of 2005, but now the two sides traded accusations. The "LMDC is now planning a deconstruction which apparently has significant differences since our review and acceptance of LMDC's abatement plan last September," the EPA wrote to the agency in March 2006. If anything, the Galt and Bovis team was more incensed than the EPA. In their view, the regulators weren't being clear about what they wanted. The contractors viewed the regulators as white-gloved butlers, ignorant of construction realities, scrutinizing every corner for stray dust specks and treating a demolition site as if it were a clean room in a microchip-manufacturing facility. The contractors were charged with cleaning all the World Trade Center dust from the building. But how do you define "clean"? The regulators insisted that the structure be completely free of dust. The contractors countered that there is no such thing as no dust when you are demolishing a 30-year-old building. Finally, the sides compromised on a so-called dime standard: A floor would be deemed acceptable as long as no spot of dust larger than a dime remained. But even that definition didn't solve the conflict, and time after time workers would be sent back to clean some more and win the regulators' blessing - sometimes despite the fact that air-testing revealed no dangerous levels of contaminants. Each time, as many as 50 workers on a floor, all of them in double-layer Tyvek suits with respirators, were deployed with toothbrushes and pipe cleaners to scrape away at every exposed inch of bolt, pipe, or conduit. While the regulators and the LMDC battled largely behind the scenes, unnerving accidents were occurring. At least twice, panes of glass fell from the tower, and in March 2006 a worker was injured after falling 40 feet. In April 2006 came new trauma: The entire project had to be halted when pieces of human bones were discovered on the roof. A handful of fragments had been found before. But a comprehensive search had never occurred. Now a team descended on the site in full Hazmat gear to comb through the dust for remains of 9/11 victims. By the fall, 784 bone fragments had been removed from the building. Start and stop - In September 2006 the country marked the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy. But the deconstruction of the Deutsche Bank building still hadn't begun. That month regulators approved a "revised implementation plan," and the full-fledged decontamination work finally got underway. But no sooner was the good news announced than yet another problem cropped up. Because of the stringent decontamination procedures (or perhaps because Galt had submitted an artificially low bid to win the job), Galt had to deploy many more workers than it had anticipated. That meant Galt's original fee - $60 million - wouldn't come close to covering the necessary man-hours. The company would go bankrupt, its president warned, unless the fee was increased. As the fall of 2006 progressed, the dispute intensified into a crisis. Officials from the LMDC, Bovis, Galt, the city, and the state shuttled into and out of meetings for weeks. To no avail: In December some 180 of the 200 Galt workers simply walked off the job. The warnings about Galt had long been forgotten, according to three people involved in the negotiations. Galt was viewed as doing a good job, they say, and officials were loath to let the company bow out. Once again, high-ranking officials were brought in: In January 2007, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the state's then-new (and now former) governor, Eliot Spitzer, convened a meeting to hammer out an accord with the contractors. The resulting deal essentially deferred the argument till later: The LMDC agreed to raise Galt's compensation by $10 million, with the proviso that it could negotiate or sue at the end of the project to "recapture" any portion that it challenged. Galt returned to the job early in 2007 and the speed of work picked up. On March 19, 2007, the quest to bring the building down reached a milestone: Workers began disassembling the 40th floor. During the next four months, Galt removed 13 more. But accidents continued to occur. One of the most menacing came on May 17, when a 15-foot length of pipe fell from the 35th floor, plunged through the roof of the adjacent firehouse, and mildly injured two firefighters. The accident triggered a new round of bad press. That mishap and others caused the issuance of dozens of violations against the contractors. Of course, with multiple regulators combing the site every day, it wasn't entirely surprising that problems would be detected. New York's Department of Buildings, just to cite one example, had one or more inspectors on the premises every single day. The stream of violations - particularly for the fallen pipe - seemed like warnings. But the LMDC didn't appear to be troubled. Avi Schick, who was named chairman of the LMDC in April 2007, was pleased enough with the progress that he gave a tour of the building to a reporter from the New York Times in mid-August. The article was published one day before the blaze that killed two firefighters. Schick floated a trial balloon: Perhaps it would be worth testing the level of contaminants to determine whether a less demanding cleanup method might work? Depending on your point of view, that meant either a more rational, streamlined process (if you're the LMDC or a contractor), or an attempt to loosen the rules and raise the chances of a toxic emission (if you're a regulator or resident). The EPA's response was an unequivocal and absolute "no." The LMDC's proposal to "implement a new sampling plan to gather new data... and to revisit abatement procedures" is "unacceptable to EPA," the agency's top local official wrote on Aug. 29. Eventually realizing that the EPA wasn't going to back down, Schick began working with a total of 13 different regulators and government agencies through the fall and emerged with an approved new plan in early February. The result won plaudits even from some of the activists. It includes all sorts of fire protections and a change long pushed by local residents: Decontamination and deconstruction will no longer occur at the same time. A new subcontractor has been hired, and this time it's a well-regarded company: LVI Services, which worked on the cleanup of the Pentagon after 9/11. The Deutsche Bank building is now scheduled to be demolished by the end of 2008, a date that should be viewed with skepticism given the failure to meet virtually every other major deadline in the effort to retire it. ... Investigators are examining countless aspects, including who was responsible for the severed standpipe. "But even broader," says a source familiar with the investigation, "is how we got ourselves into this situation in the first place. What was John Galt doing on the job? Who is John Galt? How did they get the contract? Are there any irregularities in that?" Meanwhile, families of the dead firefighters have already filed suits, Galt has sued Bovis for payment of its full contract, and the chances of litigation between the LMDC and Bovis seem high. ... (CNN/Fortune, By Nicholas Varchaver, March 19, 2008)
• Health studies of Sept. 11 dogs ongoing ... To date, 35 deployed dogs and 15 control dogs enrolled in the study have died. The proportion of deceased deployed dogs to deceased control dogs is not significantly different than the control group, nor is the rate of cancer. ... (JAVMA News, March 15, 2008)
• Another Ghost of 9/11 Is Cleared for Demolition ... Fiterman Hall — a semi-ruin since 9/11 that still stands, like the former Deutsche Bank building, as a ghost on the edge of ground zero — is expected to be razed within a year, now that federal regulators have approved a decontamination plan. “This will enable this important project to move forward,” Matthew Goldstein, the chancellor of the City University of New York, said on Wednesday. Fiterman Hall, which stands 15 stories, is part of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a unit of CUNY. About 30 decontamination workers are already in the building, said Marc Violette, a spokesman for the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, which is overseeing demolition and construction for CUNY. It will take four to six months, he said, immediately followed by deconstruction, which will also last four to six months. The project cost is $16.3 million. The contractor is PAL Environmental Safety Corporation of Long Island City, Queens. ... (NYTimes, by David W. Dunlap, March 14, 2008)
• Federal Spending on WTC Responders' Treatment: $261 Million Plus ... A March 11 report from the Government Accountability Office to a congressional joint economic committee says NIOSH now has a good handle on estimated costs to treat thousands of firefighters, police officers, and others who responded to the World Trade Center site during and after Sept. 11, 2001. The report says federal funds spent from October 2001 to November 2007 totaled $261.1 million, which is money awarded and overseen by NIOSH. ... (Occupational Health & Safety, March 13, 2008)
• Fiterman Hall Sees Light at the End of the Demolition ... the smaller-scale demolition nightmare on the outskirts of ground zero — is a step closer to coming down, the chancellor of the City University of New York said, now that federal regulators have approved a decontamination plan. ... Fiterman Hall is a 15-story building at 30 West Broadway, north of 7 World Trade Center, which was converted to classroom and office space for the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a unit of CUNY. It was damaged on Sept. 11, 2001, and has been standing in its ravaged state ever since while battles were waged over insurance coverage, financing sources and the adequacy of protection from contaminants while the structure is being razed. Eventually, it is to be replaced by a new Fiterman Hall. ... Last Friday, the federal Environmental Protection Agency formally accepted a decontamination plan put forth by the dormitory authority. The plan focuses on “containment measures to control potential releases of contaminants, proper procedures for monitoring the work and waste disposal,” the agency said. The federal agency said adherence to the safeguards proposed in the plan “will help prevent the occurrence of a situation that may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and the environment.” ... Bovis Lend Lease, the general contractor for the demolition project at 130 Liberty Street, and its former subcontractor, the John Galt Corporation, were accused last month by federal safety regulators of indifference or intentional disregard for dangerous conditions that led to a fatal fire there last August. Decontamination work was suspended. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which owns 130 Liberty Street, received approval last month to start decontamination work again. On March 3, workers from Bovis and its new subcontractor, LVI Services, arrived on the job. A spokesman for the development corporation said there was a crew of 76 workers during the day shift on Wednesday, followed by 46 for the night shift. (NYTimes, by David W. Dunlap, March 13, 2006)
• CUNY's Toxic Hall to Fall at Ground Zero ... After more than two years of delays, federal officials have finally approved plans to decontaminate and demolish City University's toxin-filled Fitterman Hall at Ground Zero, which has served as a grim reminder of the 9/11 terror attacks. The US Environmental Protection Agency approved the complex plan to clear the building of asbestos, mercury, dioxin and other toxins, setting the stage for decontamination crews to begin work inside Fitterman Hall yesterday. "We cleared the last regulatory hurdle," said Mark Violette, a spokesman for the New York State Dormitory Authority, which is in charge of the demolition and replacement of the former academic building at 30 West Broadway. The letter from the EPA arrived Friday, and Violette said the authority had its contractor, PAL Environmental, begin work as soon as possible. The cost of getting rid of the terror-scarred building is $16.3 million. Violette said a crew of 30 was inside Fitterman Hall yesterday, installing decontamination units at all the building's entrances, showers for workers and plastic sheathing over windows to keep toxins inside. The decontamination work will take four to six months. "As soon as the decontamination work is done, we'll roll out the deconstruction phase. which will take another four to six months," Violette said. The most recent delay in the project came after a fire at the Deutsche Bank building over the summer killed two firefighters. That building, south of the World Trade Center, was also undergoing a complex decontamination and deconstruction. ... (NYPost, by Tom Topousis, March 13, 2008)
• GAO: 9/11-Health Cost Estimates “Improved” Since Last Year .... GAO: NIOSH’s 9/11-Health Cost Estimates “Improved” Since Last Year -NIOSH Says that 9/11 Health Progs. Will Cost $218.5 Million in FY 2008, But Admin. Provides Only $25 Million in Budget- ... Washington, D.C. – Today, Senators Charles Schumer, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez and Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney, Jerrold Nadler, and Vito Fossella released a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concluding that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) had improved the cost estimation process for World Trade Center health programs over the last year.  NIOSH estimates that the total cost for 9/11-related health care and medical monitoring programs in FY 2008 will be $218.5 million, compared with the agency’s cost estimate for FY 2007 of $230 to $283 million.  The GAO report (click here for a full copy) says that NIOSH’s cost estimates for this fiscal year are improved because they are based in large part on the average actual costs of screening and monitoring exams conducted in FY 2007. ... (Room Eight New York Politics, March 12, 2008)
• Closure eludes EMT's kin ... The family of a paramedic who worked for months in the Ground Zero morgue to give closure to the families of 9/11 victims is still looking for their own closure two years after her death. Emergency Medical Technician Deborah Reeve worked for several months sorting body parts at the morgue following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In addition to exposing herself to death on a massive scale, she breathed asbestos fibers that her doctors say killed her. On Tuesday, Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, dozens of her colleagues, her husband and fellow paramedic, David, and her two children, Elizabeth, 12, and Mark, 8, met at Jacobi Medical Center's EMT Station 20 to dedicate a plaque in her honor. ... The turnout impressed David Reeve, but the sentiments were not enough for the man who buried his wife of 14 years at age 41. Reeve fought for medical coverage during her last year of life as she battled mesothelioma, an aggressive form of lung cancer, and she was the first EMT worker to receive a $30,000-a-year disability compensation. Her funeral was paid for by the Fire Department - her death was classified as one in the administrative line of duty. But her husband and children were left $90,000 in debt from medical bills after she died. ... (Daily News, by Dorian Block, March 12, 2008)
• Dedication of plaque in memory of 9/11 paramedic who died in '06 ...A paramedic who worked at a morgue in the toxic dust of ground zero is being honored two years after she died of lung cancer. A plaque is expected to be unveiled in memory of New York Fire Department paramedic Deborah Reeve at a ceremony Tuesday at Station 20 in the Morris Park section of the Bronx. Reeve died on March 16, 2006, of mesothelioma, a lung cancer associated with exposure to asbestos. The 41-year-old developed a cough in late 2003 and retired about a year later, too ill to work. Her death has not been officially linked to exposure from the 9/11 attacks, though her family and doctors say her cancer was caused by her work at the World Trade Center. (Newsday, March 11, 2008)
• The bell tolls for another hero of 9/11 ... Thompson was a first responder from the Sixth Precinct, just up West Street from the attack site. He worked the bucket brigades in the days following the building collapses, sifting the debris in hopes of finding survivors. He'd develop a hacking cough later on. Something unusual for a nonsmoker, the doctors said. Then, in December, he was finally diagnosed. Cancer. ... (Staten Island Advance, March 10, 2008)
• Environmental Illnesses Haunt Some Who Covered 9/11 .... Between 2002 and 2004, The World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program surveyed 9,442 workers, including 81 who worked for news agencies. The survey found that this group was five times as likely as the general population to suffer from reduced breathing capacity. The NYPPA has been encouraging 9/11 journalists to fill out an anonymous online survey. By early February, the survey had logged 161 responses. Respondents reported a variety of breathing problems like asthma and persistent coughing, and symptoms of depression and PTSD. Thirty-six of them said post-9/11 health problems have affected their careers. When the Twin Towers collapsed, they kicked up a cloud of pulverized cement, glass, lead, asbestos, PCBs, pesticides and other chemicals. Some of the journalists now suffering from health problems feel angry that the government did little to warn people about these dangers. They now scoff at the early assurances that the air was safe ... (Media Channel, March 6, 2008)
  
• Environmental Illnesses Haunt Some Who Covered 9/11-- Rescuers and construction workers aren't the only ones sickened by exposure to World Trade Center dust and smoke. Journalists, including photographers, are also reporting health problems. ... New York Times staff photographer Keith Meyers loved to tackle rigorous assignments, like flying in military jets and scuba diving with astronauts in training. "He was almost hyper in terms of his energy level," says friend and fellow Times photographer Fred Conrad. "He could run circles around people." On September 11, 2001, Meyers cut short a vacation and raced to New York to help with coverage at Ground Zero. Four days later, Meyers climbed aboard a Coast Guard helicopter to shoot a series of historic pictures, the first aerial news photos of the still-burning World Trade Center site. As he leaned out of the helicopter, Meyers could feel the rising smoke. "It was like breathing fire, and I could feel my skin tingling and burning," he says. A doctor later told him he probably had been exposed to chemicals as caustic as Drano. Over the next two years, Meyers's health deteriorated. While covering the New York City blackout in 2003, he suffered several asthma attacks. His energy level diminished, and twice he nodded off behind the wheel while waiting at tollbooths. Now 59, Meyers suffers from serious breathing problems. Treatment keeps many of his symptoms in check, but he can no longer do his job. He went on indefinite medical leave from The Times last year. His diagnoses are like a catalogue of the illnesses that afflict 9/11 workers: asthma, rhinitis, sinusitis, gastroesophageal reflux disorder, paradoxical voice box disorder. On top of all that is a feeling of lost identity now that he has given up photojournalism. ... Meyers is not alone. Five other journalists have told PDN they suffer persistent health effects after working at the World Trade Center site, and a sixth has died of cancer. Two of them were unwilling to be named in this article, one for privacy reasons and another because of an ongoing lawsuit. David Handschuh, a photographer for the New York Daily News, has been working with The New York Press Photographers Association (NYPPA) to make sure these journalists aren't forgotten. Handschuh, 48, broke his leg covering the World Trade Center attack and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. "It's not a New York problem. It's a nationwide problem," Handschuh says when discussing 9/11 health concerns, emphasizing that many out-of-town journalists were part of the coverage. First responders and construction workers who toiled in the toxic aftermath of 9/11 have been the subject of news reports, political speeches and prize-winning newspaper editorials. But little has been said about the journalists who were exposed to the same conditions. Handschuh and the NYPPA are advocating for legislation in New York State to extend the deadline for journalists to file 9/11-related workers compensation claims. Last year state lawmakers extended the filing deadline for rescue and recovery workers to August 14, but there is no similar extension for journalists. For environmental illnesses like asthma and cancer, proving a direct link between cause and effect is difficult. Certain cancers might not appear for decades. But right now, some journalists are convinced their health problems are the result of their work at Ground Zero. Keith Silverman, 49, a freelance camera operator who arrived at the World Trade Center the morning of September 11 and spent the next two weeks there for ABC, says he can no longer work in TV. He suffers from chronic sinus issues and is in remission from Hodgkin's lymphoma, problems he believes come from exposure to dust and smoke at Ground Zero. "They don't know what we breathed in because there were so many carcinogens in the air," he says. Philippe Gassot, 52, a Washington, D.C.-based correspondent for French TV and radio; Jim Purcell, 42, publisher of a weekly newspaper in Middletown, New Jersey; and another photo- journalist all say they suffer from worsening breathing problems after covering Ground Zero. A producer for a Canadian TV network spent a week at Ground Zero after 9/11. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in June 2002 and died of lung failure in 2004. His wife (who requested that his name not be published) says she believes the World Trade Center dust acted as a trigger for this rare form of cancer. It is likely that there are more. Between 2002 and 2004, The World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program surveyed 9,442 workers, including 81 who worked for news agencies. The survey found that this group was five times as likely as the general population to suffer from reduced breathing capacity. .... (Photo Distric News, By Daryl Lang, March 03, 2008)
  
• Downtown: At the Site of Disaster, Dust and Dismay ... RETURNING in the evening to his loft on Murray Street in Lower Manhattan, Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, inspecting the paws of his Australian shepherd, often finds them coated in black dirt and dust. Dr. Hupert, a public health researcher and physician, is one of many local residents who worry about substances that may be emanating from the World Trade Center construction site, particularly along Church Street, where trucks leave at the intersection with Vesey Street, near St. Paul’s Chapel. “It’s been getting worse as the construction’s gotten more intense, and there are just a lot of unknowns about it,” Dr. Hupert said. When out with his 2-year-old daughter, he avoids Church Street altogether; other times, he holds his breath. Nor is he alone in his worries: According to Catherine McVay Hughes, chairwoman of the World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee of Community Board 1, possible health hazards from ground zero are the No. 1 complaint among Downtown residents. In response, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in two weeks will start using a new street sweeper to eliminate dust that might have migrated off the site and onto adjoining streets. According to Steve Coleman, an agency spokesman, the Port Authority will also install grates at entrances and exits of the site that will knock dust off truck wheels. “This will do a much better job in cleaning any of the dust that may have left the site,” Mr. Coleman said. ... While residents view the dust as a health hazard, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the city-and-state agency that monitors air quality at the construction site, sees success. Michael Murphy, a spokesman for the corporation, said that thousands of tests had been conducted, and their results showed that any contamination was below the levels that the federal Environmental Protection Agency considered potentially dangerous. Not all local merchants would agree. Shimon Zlotnikov, whose family owns Shimmie’s New York Outlet, a discount shop on Warren Street that sells everything from clothing to kitchen supplies, said that merchandise he placed on the sidewalk outside his store in the morning was caked with dust by the time he brought it back inside at closing time. “I’m having a big problem with the fact that they’re not doing everything they can possibly do about the dust,” he told community board members at a meeting Tuesday, his casual gray T-shirt standing out in a crowded room of dark suits. ... (NYTimes, by Gregory Beyer, March 2, 2008)
  

FEBRUARY

• Fine Contractors At Fatal Fire Building -- Assess $464G Penalty ... The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration Feb. 19 issued 44 citations to two contractors that worked on the demolition of the Deutsche Bank Building, where a fire killed two Firefighters last August. OSHA slapped Bovis Lend Lease, the primary contractor, and the John Galt Corporation with $464,500 in fines. Bovis said it would appeal the decision. Amazed by 'Breakdown' "It's incomprehensible to us that such violations would exist in one of the most highly-monitored work sites in the country," said Joel Shufro, the executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health. "There's a breakdown in the overall administration of the site." The building's demolition is being overseen by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. The Fire Department determined that smoking by workers caused the fire. A broken standpipe in the building left firefighters without access to water and they encountered barriers to escape routes, a violation of the Fire Code. n response to both OSHA's findings about the Deutsche Bank fire and the recent death of a worker at the Trump Soho work site, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer announced the institution of the Borough Construction Watch. "Just as some communities have a Neighborhood Watch program that works with the Police Department and helps residents reduce crime in their neighborhoods, we need a neighborhood construction watch to work with the Buildings Department to help monitor safety issues at the many building sites on Manhattan streets," Mr. Stringer said in a statement. UFA Supports Effort Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy praised the Borough President's plan. "His creation of the task force can and should be a model for other boroughs to follow," he said in a statement. "As we have said all along, Firefighters' schedules are already overburdened and our proposal to create a dedicated FDNY building inspection task force have been rejected by the Fire Department for supposed budgetary reasons." Community Board 1 Vice Chair Catherine McVay Hughes will lead the group, and committees within it would oversee projects in conjunction with the Buildings Department, unions and other advocacy groups and meet regularly with contractors, Mr. Stringer's office said. ... .(The Chief, By Ari Paul, Feb. 29, 2008)
• Lawyer fired for talking to reporter wants $50G in Deutsche fire suit ... A lawyer is suing the widow and children of a firefighter killed last year in the toxic tower next to Ground Zero. Firefighter Joseph Graffagnino's widow, her two kids and their lawyer are being sued by Marc Fernrich, a Manhattan lawyer who was dropped from the family's case against the city and is now demanding a $50,000 payday. ... (NYDaily News, by Thomas Zambito & Jose Martinez, Feb. 28, 2008)
• DEUTSCHE LAWYERS IN FIERY FEUD ... A lawyer for a firefighter killed in the Deutsche Bank blaze has accused an attorney who worked with him on the case of trying to shake down the dead man's family. In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, John Meringolo said fellow lawyer Marc Fernich was "motivated by unbridled avarice" when he tried "to professionally extort . . . money from the widow and two infant children of fallen . . . Firefighter Joseph P. Graffagnino," who died in the Aug. 18 fire. Fernich did six months of work as Meringolo's co-counsel before Meringolo fired him for speaking to a Post reporter about the case. Last week, Fernich filed suit against Meringolo and the Graffagninos, looking to collect on the $50,000 he says they owe him. But he insisted his beef is with Meringolo only. "It's ironic that he stole my services and is accusing me of a crime" and "it's unfortunate that he's dragging his clients into this," Fernich said. (NYPost, by Dareh Gregoriani, Feb. 28, 2008)
  
• Council Bill Would Cover Health Care Costs For Ground Zero Workers ... The city would foot the cost of health care for city workers suffering illnesses related to toxin exposure at ground zero until they can receive disability payments, if a bill by a City Council member, Michael McMahon of Staten Island, passes. "I was shocked when I learned that our heroes of 9/11 were not receiving the health care they needed after becoming ill as a result of their work at ground zero," Mr. McMahon said yesterday in a statement. "The city has an obligation to these men and women to ensure that they receive the best health care possible in their time of need. These are the people who served the city in our time of need without regard to their own health and safety." Mr. McMahon will announce the introduction of the bill today at City Hall along with the head of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, and representatives from the firefighters and emergency workers unions. (The NY Sun, Feb. 27, 2008)
• Sick 9/11 workers rally in rainy D.C. for more help ... Chanting "$25 million isn't enough!" dozens of sick 9/11 first responders stood in the rain on Capitol Hill Tuesday and urged President Bush to restore funding to help pay their medical bills. Joseph Zadroga, whose son James died of lung disease after working 100 hours at the site for the NYPD, said the government needs to help those who helped the city get back on its feet after the towers fell. ... (NYDaily News, by Stephanie Gaskell, Feb. 27, 2008)
  
• 9/11 responders demand health care funding ... WASHINGTON - Gregory Quibell already suffered from pulmonary fibrosis last October when he was diagnosed with leukemia. He said yesterday he at first didn't think that the cancer was related to his cleanup work at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. But his doctor said it was, and now Quibell, 53, of North Babylon, wants the federal government to help him. ... (Newsday, by Carl Macgowan, Feb. 27, 2008)
• Council Bill Would Cover Health Care Costs For Ground Zero Workers ... The city would foot the cost of health care for city workers suffering illnesses related to toxin exposure at ground zero until they can receive disability payments, if a bill by a City Council member, Michael McMahon of Staten Island, passes. ... (NYSun, Feb. 27, 2008)
  
• LMDC and New Contractor Resume Work at 130 Liberty -- Time and Cost Expected to Double -- COMPANY THAT BLEW UP SANDS AND STARDUST CASINOS WILL NOW TAKE APART DEUTSCHE BANK TOWER NEW CONTRACTOR’S “CULTURE OF SAFETY” TOUTED? ... One of the principal changes implemented since August has been the hiring of a new subcontractor, LVI Environmental Services Inc., to complete the project. Known for its expertise in imploding large buildings, including several Las Vegas casinos, LVI had been one of the finalists for the original contract in 2005, but it withdrew its bid after another company on the short list received anonymous threats warning it not take on 130 Liberty. This paved the way for the hiring of the John Galt Corporation, which was removed from the project by the LMDC after the August fire, and which has subse-quently been alleged to have ties to a company believed by some investigators to be linked to organized crime. LVI prides itself on its “culture of safety,” having logged nearly 200,000 hours of abatement work at the Pentagon since September, 2001 without incident. Last month, however, one worker was killed and several injured, during LVI’s decontamination and demolition of a power plant in San Francisco. The strategy for taking 130 Liberty apart has also changed. Instead of simultaneously decontaminating and demolishing the remaining 26 stories the procedure until the August fire, LVI will (pending approval of this process from regulators) remove all the toxins from the building before resuming deconstruction. The negative air pressure system used to keep contaminants like asbestos inside while work proceeds not only made the building difficult for firefighters to navigate, but it may well have fed fresh air to the August 18 blaze. Bovis Senior Vice President Frank Voci explained that a replacement system is linked to a master switch that will allow negative pressure to be shut down immediately across the entire worksite. The standpipe system, which failed to function during the fire, has been repaired and extended, according to Bovis, with a total of five connections from which water can be drawn in case of fire. Additionally, Mr. Voci explained, “we have a detector so that if there is a drop in air pressure, or the [standpipe] system is compromised in any way, an alarm will go off.” (Battery Park Broadsheet, by Evan Simko-Bednarski, Feb. 2008)
  
• Officials hope Deutsche demo can resume late this year .. . In politics they say the cover-up is always worse than the crime and in toxic demolitions, apparently the cleanup takes longer than the deconstruction. So said David Emil, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is hoping to begin dismantling the former Deutsche Bank building later this year. Emil — who did not use the political metaphor — told Downtown Express last week that the abatement work ridding the building of toxic chemicals is only in its preliminary stages and once it begins fully, it will take much longer to do than the physical removal of the building structure at 130 Liberty St. “The abatement definitely should take more than the actual deconstruction,” he said Thursday after the L.M.D.C.’s board meeting. ... Emil said he was confident the abatement work would not take the rest of the year, but the original work plan he laid out suggested that it would be longer. Emil, through a spokesperson, amended his remarks this week and laid out a work plan that could begin in mid-March and be completed in about eight months under a best case scenario. If so, the physical removal of the building severely damaged by the collapsing Twin Towers would resume toward the end of November and could be done in about 75 days. ... Galt was issued three “willful” and 22 serious violations and was fined $271,500. Bovis got two willful violations and 17 serious ones for a total of $193,000. ... Frank Voci, Bovis’ senior vice president, who was transferred to 130 Liberty after the fire, told Community Board 1 members and residents last month that Bovis wanted “to regain your trust and confidence.” Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is investigating the contractors and government officials who worked on the Deutsche project. Emil told Downtown Express last week that work decontaminating the area near slabs that have to be removed is currently underway on the building’s top floor, 19. Once the slabs are removed, a decontamination chamber will be built allowing the full abatement of the top floors to begin. Officials hope this decontamination begins in mid- or late-March. LVI Environmental Services, Inc., the new subcontractor, can decontaminate floors in blocks of two or three, but has chosen to do two, Emil said. Each two-floor block will take about 60 days to decontaminate. Through his spokesperson this week, Emil said a new block could be started every two or three weeks, which suggests the decontamination work could be done in just under eight months. Emil originally said only three blocks would be worked on at the same time — and two of them would be only for the final or first few days of the decontamination work. He also said there would be a few days of preparation before the 60-day process could begin on each block. Under this work plan, which Emil subsequently amended, the dismantling of the building would not have resumed until the summer or fall of 2009. Community and environmental groups successfully pressed the L.M.D.C. to complete the decontamination work before demolition resumes for safety reasons. Emil said another advantage to this new procedure is that without having to worry about contaminated materials on lower floors the deconstruction can be done more quickly without sacrificing safety.... (Downtown Express, by Josh Rogers, Feb. 22-28, 2008)
  
• Letters to the editor: Deutsche Mistakes II ... Downtown residents, office workers and many community, labor, and environmental organizations have repeatedly pressed the L.M.D.C./Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center for careful, transparent planning on the demolition. In 2004, we warned that the project was uncoordinated and that responsibility and accountability were diffuse. We called for the hiring of competent contractors, pre-planning for a range of disasters, a robust community notification plan, and an L.M.D.C. responsive to the regulators. We met with stonewalling at every turn. Red flags raised repeatedly were ignored. By 2006, the incompetence and integrity problems of the contractors made headlines. The deaths of firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino were all the more tragic because the institutional failures that contributed to their deaths were foreseeable. ... As your editorial (Feb. 15 – 21, “What Downtown needs from the L.M.D.C.”) advises, L.M.D.C. should enter into a genuine working relationship with the community, especially since a number of gaps remain, not least the underdeveloped emergency community notification plan. ... And, we must have a transparent public process going forward. L.M.D.C. must regularly hold two types of meetings: working meetings with adequate time for detailed discussion of the plans, and public meetings in the evening that allow the community and independent experts to voice their concerns at an open mic. Implementing this public process would be the surest sign that L.M.D.C. has begun to learn from the mistakes of the past. ... (Downtown Express, by Josh Rogers, Feb. 22-28, 2008)
  
• WTC First Responders To Rally In Washington D.C. ... World Trade Center first responders and their families are heading to D.C. to continue fighting for health care. Nearly 200 first responders are heading to Capitol Hill to hold a rally Tuesday protesting major cuts to their health care. They say the government slashed the budget for 9/11 health care from $108 million to $25 million for the next fiscal year. The workers say they deserve better care after exposing themselves to toxic air. "We're not going to stand for being cut out of the budget by 77 percent,” said John Feal, founder of the Fealgood Foundation. “It's not adequate and it’s an insult.” “If I got hurt in Afghanistan, my family and I would be covered, but since I got hurt in Manhattan we're not,” said WTC construction worker Thomas Magee. Many first responders are also pushing congress to pass the James Zadroga bill which would ensure that everyone exposed to toxins at Ground Zero has proper medical care. (NY1, Feb. 25, 2008)
• For Engineer, a Cloud of Litigation After 9/11 ... To hear Ramon Gilsanz speak — voice calm and measured, even on a day when travel plans are tied in a knot by a snowstorm — you would never guess that he is being sued by thousands of people. And that does not count the man who is suing him on behalf of everyone in the United States. What did he do to deserve this? Mr. Gilsanz, a structural engineer with a small firm in Manhattan, was one of the legions of people who just showed up downtown after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack to help. Some made sandwiches. Others dug. Mr. Gilsanz engineered. The two colossal towers had been turned into three and half billion pounds of rubble, piles that reached 12 stories high and 8 stories deep. Buildings had partially collapsed. Any search for survivors would require heavy cranes set on treacherous ground. Someone had to figure out how and where to put them. Fragile walls had to be shored up. Led by Mr. Gilsanz, a group of structural engineers talked their way past the barricades. They became indispensable in a world that suddenly had no recognizable geometry. Nine months later, the debris was cleared. Despite the fast pace and cruel terrain, no workers died because of structural failures or accidents during the recovery. Now, however, thousands of people have filed lawsuits claiming that they became ill by breathing the air at the World Trade Center site while working on the recovery. Still others have sued not because they worked there, but because they had jobs in places where the debris was stored. They say the exposure made them sick. Finally, one man has sued on behalf of the United States, claiming that Mr. Gilsanz is part of a vast conspiracy to cover up the truth about 9/11, including the “so-called building failures.” The lawsuit maintains that exotic weaponry actually destroyed the buildings, and that the airplanes were mass psychological trickery.... Mr. Gilsanz is one of about 130 structural engineers from 30 firms who have been named as defendants in an enormous cloud of litigation that drifts, year by year, through the federal court. The engineers turned up at the trade center site as volunteers, but after a few days, the city established formal arrangements, and they were signed up as subcontractors. “We did not want to get paid for this work, but we were told we had to be paid in order to participate,” said Joseph Tortorella, a former president of the Structural Engineers Association, who is also being sued. “Many of us ended up giving the money to charity.” Both Mr. Tortorella and Mr. Gilsanz say they had nothing to do with monitoring the air. “Air quality is out of our realm as structural engineers,” Mr. Gilsanz said. “We were in the same atmosphere, exposed to the same substances. I took the training with all the workers. Everyone was told to wear the respirator. It was hard.” ... (NYTimes, by Jim Dwyer, Feb. 23, 2008)
  
• Over 'Deutsche' Death Fireman's Family Sues LMDC ... Michael Barasch, one of the attorneys for the Beddia family, inspected the Deutsche Bank Building in November with a group of other lawyers and insurance investigators. He recalled seeing the broken standpipe, which left firefighters no access to water during the fire, and the letters "R-I-P" written in red paint on the 15th floor. ... The suit alleged that the contractors at the Deutsche Bank Building allowed workers to smoke at the site and they created illegal impediments to escaping from a fire in the building. ... 'DEBRIS EVERYWHERE': Attorney Michael Barasch inspects the ruins of the Deutsche Bank Building, where two Firefighters were killed in the line of duty Aug. 18. Mr. Barasch represents the family of the late Robert Beddia, and filed a lawsuit against the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and private contractors. ... While the lawsuit does not name the Bloomberg administration, Mr. Barasch said that it was still possible his firm would add it to the list of defendants. The main purpose of the lawsuit, he said, was to force the agencies and businesses who oversaw the building's demolition to disclose evidence. (The Chief-Leader, by Ari Paul, Feb. 22, 2008)
  
• For Ill WTC Workers Council Urges Feds To Okay 9/11 Aid ... The City Council unanimously passed a resolution Feb. 13 urging Congress to approve the James Zadroga Act, which would secure permanent Federal funding for medical monitoring and treatment for workers and residents suffering from 9/11-related illnesses and injuries. .... Workers and residents were exposed to toxins such as benzene and asbestos in addition to pulverized concrete and particles of human remains. In addition, 12.4 percent of 9/11 responders have post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and 9/11 workers are more likely to develop asthma. ... (The Chief-Leader, by Ari Paul, Feb. 22, 2008)
• Manhattan Borough President Vows To Crack Down On Site Safety ... Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer announced the creation of the Borough Watch Construction Working Group Wednesday to oversee site safety at city construction sites. Stringer says the number of safety violations at high-rise locations more than doubled last year. The group will help monitor construction areas to make sure contractors are following regulations. The borough president is asking everyone to get involved. "We're now going to mobilize our neighbors and families to go out and see what's actually going on,” said Stringer. “So if you see a crane hanging off a building and you see something that shouldn't be happening, the working group is going to get on the case." The watch group formation comes one day after the federal government fined two contractors at the former Deutsche Bank building for safety and health violations following the fire that killed two firefighters in August.... (NY1, Feb. 21, 2008)
  
• As Fire Inquiry at Ground Zero Grows, So Do the Legal Bills ... The Bloomberg administration and the state-run Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, both under scrutiny in the criminal investigation into the fatal Deutsche Bank fire, have incurred more than $2.2 million in fees for outside lawyers to defend their roles in the events that led up to the blaze, officials said this week. The outside lawyers have done a range of work, from advising the agencies and representing witnesses and potential targets of the inquiry to shepherding many of the two million documents subpoenaed in the investigation, according to city and development corporation officials, and other people with knowledge of the matter. The investigation, by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, began in the days after the Aug. 18 fire and initially focused on the deaths of two firefighters at the former bank tower, which sits on the edge of ground zero and is being torn down to clear the way for a new office tower. But it has swiftly and steadily broadened into a vast inquiry. Today, according to officials involved in the undertaking, more than a dozen prosecutors, investigators and forensic accountants are examining not only the fire, but also the conduct of the contractors hired to demolish the building; the performance of city, state and federal regulators who oversaw the demolition and asbestos removal; and the awarding of the $60 million contract. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the state authority that is overseeing the rebuilding effort at ground zero, owns the former Deutsche Bank building and is overseeing the deconstruction project. It awarded the contract to Bovis Lend Lease, one of the world’s largest construction management companies. ... The prosecutors in Mr. Morgenthau’s office have focused on the conduct of a range of government officials, from the city as well as the development corporation, and contractors who were responsible for inspecting the site and ensuring the safety of workers and others there, said the officials familiar with the inquiry. One central question is how the city’s Buildings Department inspectors — four of whom were assigned to the project, along with a supervisor — failed to notice or report that a 42-foot section of the standpipe was missing from the basement, officials said. The standpipe caries water from street to the building’s upper floors, and officials have said the missing section caused critical delays in getting water to the firefighters battling the blaze. Also under scrutiny is why the Fire Department never inspected the building, or the standpipe, as it was required to do. ... Tensions between the city and the district attorney’s office, which reached a high point when city lawyers sought to question firefighters before they were interviewed by prosecutors, have largely eased, in part as a result of the involvement of knowledgeable criminal defense lawyers, one official said. The city, which hired the criminal defense firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel about a month after the August fire, paid more than $693,000 for the roughly six-week period ending in October, according to Kate O’Brien Ahlers, a spokeswoman for the office of the city’s corporation counsel, Michael A. Cardozo. Mr. Cardozo’s office of the corporation counsel has been billed nearly $679,000 for the months of November and December, bringing the total to $1,372,040. That amounts to more than $90,000 a week, though Ms. Ahlers said city officials expect that rate to decrease. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which also hired a prominent criminal defense firm, Dechert LLP, has spent about $900,000, according to a spokesman for that agency. Both firms agreed to discount their normal fees by about 20 percent, city and development corporation officials said. The lawyers who are heading up each legal team — Gary P. Naftalis, a partner at Kramer Levin, and Edward A. McDonald, a partner at Dechert — are both highly regarded criminal defense attorneys. Both declined to comment yesterday. For the development corporation, the legal fees, which are expected to continue to climb, will add to the already staggering price tag for the demolition project. The original cost of cleaning and deconstructing the former bank tower was estimated at $75 million in the summer of 2005. By January 2007, the cost had risen to $90 million. Officials now estimate that the final cost could exceed $170 million. ... Michael Murphy, a spokesman for the development agency, said it would seek to recover the costs of the outside legal counsel through insurance policies on the project, and through claims stemming from its contract with Bovis. But other potential costs — and more work for the outside lawyers — loom. ... (NYTimes, by William K. Rashbaum & Charles V. Bagli, Feb. 21, 2008)
• Bank Tower Contractors Accused of 44 Violations ... Federal safety regulators have accused the contractors who were taking down the former Deutsche Bank tower in the summer of indifference or intentional disregard for dangerous conditions that led to a fatal fire there, and of a host of other serious safety violations, officials said on Tuesday. The regulators cited the project’s general contractor, Bovis Lend Lease, an international construction management company, and its former subcontractor, the John Galt Corporation, for 44 safety violations, and proposed fining them nearly half a million dollars. Most of the violations, cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a result of an inspection it began after the Aug. 18 fire, were classified as serious, and five were listed as willful, the agency’s most severe category. ... OSHA also cited the companies for hazards like blocked and unmarked exits, a lack of fire extinguishers, and allowing smoking — which fire investigators have said was the likely cause of the blaze. The contractors exposed workers “to death or serious injury from falls, falling objects, electrocution and the inability to exit the tower swiftly and safely” in the event of a fire, the agency said. “Employers must adhere to safety and health standards, and prepare completely and effectively for workplace emergencies,” said Richard Mendelson, OSHA’s area director in Manhattan, who oversaw the investigation. “Failure to do so can — and, in this case, did — cost lives,” he said. Bovis fired the Galt company in the days after the fire. Both Bovis and Galt have filed papers with the agency contesting the citations and, in statements, said that they would vigorously fight the accusations. The breadth and scope of the accusations provide the most detail to date of the systemic failure of oversight at what is arguably the most regulated demolition and asbestos abatement site in the country. They also raise questions about the role of an alphabet soup of local, state and federal agencies, from the city’s Buildings and Fire Departments and the federal Environmental Protection Agency to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the state authority overseeing the rebuilding effort at ground zero. Several agencies had inspectors assigned to the site all day, every day — there were four Buildings Department inspectors and a supervisor whose only responsibility was the bank tower — while city officials have said that the Fire Department failed to inspect the building at all, as it was required to do. “How is it possible that these violations occurred?” said Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit coalition of unions and health professionals that has long been critical of the project’s contractors and the demolition project. “Clearly, there was a systematic failure of oversight.” Although OSHA’s findings suggest that the myriad violations occurred under the noses of all those inspectors and other private contractors, including a construction company, URS, hired by the development corporation to oversee the job, the safety agency regulates only private contractors. ... The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, however, is conducting a broad criminal investigation into the deaths and the entire project, which was mired in delays, multimillion-dollar cost overruns and regulatory red tape long before the fire halted the deconstruction of the tower. The criminal inquiry is focused in part on failures by the city, including the Fire and the Buildings Departments, and prosecutors in Mr. Morgenthau’s office have begun presenting evidence to a grand jury. They are also examining how the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and Bovis selected Galt, a company that had never before performed such work. City investigators had cautioned development officials against hiring Galt; the company was an arranged marriage of sorts between a scaffolding company with no demolition experience and executives from a company called Safeway Environmental, which city officials suspected of having ties to organized crime. ... OSHA cited the two contractors for a total of $464,500 in proposed fines. It listed 3 willful and 22 serious violations by Galt, carrying fines of $271,500, and 2 willful and 17 serious violations by Bovis, with $193,000 in fines. The contractors, which were formally served with the citations on Friday, have 15 days from then to request an informal conference or fight the allegations before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. According to the OSHA citations, which covered the four-day period before the fire, Bovis willfully failed to inspect the building’s standpipe and to maintain it in operating condition and willfully failed to ensure there was an adequate water supply for firefighters to operate their equipment. OSHA said the other willful violations included Galt’s failure to enforce no-smoking regulations, and the blockage of access to the building’s stairwells by both Galt and Bovis. The agency defines a willful violation as one committed “with plain indifference to or intentional disregard for employee safety and health.” A serious citation, according to the agency, is one in which “death or serious physical harm is likely to result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known.” ... Galt, in a statement, rejected the accusations and vowed to defend itself. The company contended that the government agencies overseeing the site often issued conflicting directives that resulted in “massive slowdowns and cost overruns.” “Every detail of the work was scrutinized, criticized and finally approved before it could be done," the statement said. "It is inconceivable that these agencies, including OSHA, whose trained inspectors were present at the site on a daily basis, could not detect, or were oblivious to the alleged ‘serious and willful’ violations that supposedly existed prior to the fire." The statement said that if government regulators, including OSHA, failed to discover the alleged violations before the fire, they should be the ones charged with failing to do their duty. ... (NYTimes, by William K. Rashbaum & Charles V. Bagli, Feb. 20, 2008)
• Health Department Begins New Study of Residents and Area Workers ... In collaboration with physicians at Bellevue Hospital Center, the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recently began a new, in-depth respiratory health study to learn more about the different kinds of World Trade Center (WTC)-related exposures that may have affected the health of people who lived or worked in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and the months that followed. Included as part of Mayor Bloomberg's $100 million initiative to expand New York City's response to 9/11-related illnesses, the study's participants are being recruited from the more than 71,000 individuals enrolled in the federally funded WTC Health Registry. Although this critical research effort is not designed to treat individuals with respiratory problems, treatment is available at the WTC Environmental Health Center. ... (NYCDOH, Feb. 20, 2008)
• Contractors fined for Deutsche fire ... Contractors accused of turning the Deutsche Bank building into a deathtrap where two firefighters were killed were fined $464,500 Tuesday for 44 federal safety violations. Two companies were cited for hazards such as a missing section of standpipe to bring water to firefighters, failure to mark exits and letting workers smoke inside the Ground Zero tower. ... (Daily News, by Brian Kates, Feb. 20, 2008)
• Contractors Fined In Connection With Deutsche Bank Fire ... The Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Bovis Lend Lease and John Galt Corporation for 44 safety and health violations Tuesday. The violations include: a broken standpipe, not enough water pressure or water to fight fires inside the tower, and smoking in work areas. The contractors were hired for asbestos removal and demolition of the building. It was damaged in the September 11th attacks. Investigators say workers smoking in the building caused the fire. The August 18th fire killed two firefighters. Bovis Lend Lease responded to the citations saying, it "has worked with city, state, and federal agencies in planning for the resumption of work. In the past month, working with these agencies, Bovis has successfully developed a revised health and safety plan for the rest of the abatement and demolition project." ... (NY1, Feb. 20, 2008)
  
• Deutsche Bank Building Decontamination to Happen First .... Even as work on the building begins again, however, the aftermath of the fire continues to have consequences for the LMDC. Last month Barbara Beddia Crocco, the sister of Robert Beddia, one of the two firefighters to die in the fire, filed suit against the LMDC and some of its contractors, charging that they knew of the dangerous conditions at the building but did nothing. A lawyer representing the family of the other fallen firefighter, Joseph Graffagnino, said they plan to sue the agency as well. LMDC officials made no mention of the suits when their board of directors met Feb. 14, but they did vote to extend the agency’s contract with it’s lawyers, Dechert LLP, by $2,500,000 to $3,500,000 overall. The LMDC is also increasing its budget for legal document management by a quarter of a million dollars to $350,000. The board also approved a motion to pay the Battery Park City Authority for a full year’s work by it’s employee Kevin Finnegan as Acting Senior Project Manager at the Deutsche Bank building. Finnegan’s post at the LMDC was initially expected to end last year with the completion of the deconstruction. Finnegan’s salary could add up to $170,000. (Tribeca Trib, by Nick Pino, Feb. 19, 2008)
  
• LMDC and New Contractor Resume Work at 130 Liberty ... (BPC Broadsheet, Feb. 7-21, 2008)
• Contractors Fined in Deutsche Bank Demolition ... Federal regulators said today that they have cited the general contractor taking down the former Deutsche Bank tower and its former subcontractor for dozens of safety violations at the building where two firefighters died, proposing nearly half a million dollars in fines against them. The citations, by the United States Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, against Bovis Lend Lease and the John Galt Corporation focused on fire-related hazards, including a missing section of standpipe that left firefighters without water to battle the Aug. 18 blaze, and insufficient water supply and water pressure. The agency also cited Bovis and the Galt company for numerous other safety hazards, from blocked and unmarked exits to a lack of fire extinguishers and allowing smoking, which fire investigators said was the cause of the fatal blaze. The hazards, OSHA said in a news release, exposed workers “to death or serious injury from falls, falling objects, electrocution and the inability to exit the tower swiftly and safely” in the event of a fire. Bovis fired the Galt company in August. “Employers must adhere to safety and health standards, and prepare completely and effectively for workplace emergencies,” said Richard Mendelson, OSHA’s area director in Manhattan who oversaw the investigation that resulted in the citations. “Failure to do so can — and, in this case, did — cost lives,” he said. Bovis said it strongly disagreed with the citations and would vigorously fight them. A spokesman for the Galt company, which is no longer operating, could not be reached for comment, but one construction executive who worked with the company on the project said that Galt was cited, in some instances, for actions they had taken at the behest of safety regulators. The citations stem from OSHA’s inspection following the fire, which left Firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino dead. The contractors, which were formally served with the citation on Friday, have 15 days from then to either request an informal conference or fight the allegations before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, is conducting a broad criminal investigation into the deaths and the entire project, which had been mired in delays and regulatory red tape long before the fire shut down the deconstruction of the black tower. That inquiry is focused on how the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and Bovis selected the Galt company, as well as failures on the part of the city, including the Fire Department and the Buildings Department, which were responsible for inspecting the site. ... Among the issues cited by OSHA were: — Failing to inspect and maintain firefighting equipment to ensure that the standpipe system was operational, and that sufficient water supply and water pressure were available for firefighting. — Obstructed emergency exit access (including sealed emergency stairwells, emergency stairwells blocked by construction and unlighted stairwells). — Inadequate emergency escape procedures.— Unmarked exits. — Lack of fire extinguishers, emergency alarm procedures and fire cutoffs. — Failing to develop and follow a fire protection program. — Smoking permitted in work areas. — Temporary structures inside the building made of combustible materials. — Scaffolds erected too close to power lines. — Unprotected sides and edges of work areas, unprotected floor openings, missing or broken guardrails and missing stair rails. — Exposed live electrical parts, electric panel boards in wet locations and other electrical hazards. ... (NYTimes, by William K. Rashbaum & Charles V. Bagli, Feb. 19, 2008)
  
• Leavitt's broken record ... Providing health care to World Trade Center rescue and recovery workers has never been high on President Bush's priorities list. So it shamefully remains in the last budget proposal of his White House tenure. He and Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt have refused to take the lead in allocating money for treatment. Worse, Leavitt has obstructed efforts by his own agency to do right by the 9/11 responders. Bush included in his $3.1 trillion spending plan all of $25 million for the Ground Zero brigade. That's less than one-sixth of the projected $165 million cost of maintaining services at specialized New York health centers and establishing a national clinical network. Once again, it will fall to Sen. Hillary Clinton, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Rep. Vito Fossella and the rest of the New York congressional delegation to fight for additional monies to keep programs at Mount Sinai Medical Center, the Fire Department and elsewhere in business. They will also have to keep pressuring Leavitt, who appears bent on working against the responders. In December, he killed a plan by his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hire a company to coordinate care for 8,000 9/11 workers across the country. After Leavitt stonewalled demands for an explanation, CDC Director Julie Gerberding sent a letter to Maloney on Feb. 5, stating, "We are committed to maintaining continuity in services to responders" and "will report back soon with our determination about how best to proceed." Gerberding cannot be taken seriously. Leavitt has made the same commitment over and over and over - and each time he has broken his word. (NYDaily News, Feb. 18, 2008)
  
• Editorial: What Downtown needs from the L.M.D.C. ... This is one of the few times in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s six-year history that we have heard no rumors of its imminent demise. Gov. Eliot Spitzer appears to be solidly behind the corporation created by his predecessor. Since it’s going to stick around and since it’s one of the key players in Downtown’s ongoing rebuilding efforts, it is essential that its performance improves. The L.M.D.C. was given nearly $3 billion of federal money after 9/11 to help Manhattan south of Houston St., thus tying much of Lower Manhattan’s successful recovery to the success of the agency. ... Perhaps the biggest L.M.D.C. failure under Pataki was at the former Deutsche Bank building — a damaged structure which took the lives of two brave firefighters last year and which continues to plague the Downtown community. Spitzer, Avi Schick, the corporation’s chairperson, and their team have not learned the right lessons from their mistakes and those of their predecessors. L.M.D.C. officials pooh-poohed the warnings of community and environmental activists, hired inexperienced contractors with alleged mob ties, and did not do enough after glass fell from the building. By the time Spitzer’s team took over last year, the project somehow appeared to be righting itself. But when a large pipe fell from the building and injured two firefighters, when the head of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center admitted the rush to take the building down led to the pipe crash, when safety and fire violations continued, those were the points that things should have been rethought — a decision that might have saved two men’s lives. The lesson should have been that public input is vital. Questions about what is being planned should be answered, not ignored. Giving the public and independent experts chances to review draft plans while there is still a realistic chance to change them is smart. The Deutsche deconstruction plan is still not ready five months after the fire and like the recent decontamination plan, we expect it will also be sprung onto the public at the last minute. We continue to hear from dedicated community people and others who are frightened to say anything the L.M.D.C. won’t like. These people should be fully included because they often have good solutions to problem ... A smart local agency that listens to the community can develop more and better solutions. That’s what Downtown needs the L.M.D.C. to be. (Downtown Express, Feb. 15-21, 2008)
  
• Deutsche cleanup approved, demo plan still not ready ... Local activists are cautiously optimistic about a newly approved plan for the decontamination of the former Deutsche Bank building. In the plan, announced Feb. 7, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation committed to clean up the entire building before continuing to demolish it, a course community members have been advocating for months. ... In terms of notification, Hughes, of C.B. 1, was surprised not to find out about the new abatement plan directly from the L.M.D.C. “One of the things we’ve been asking for is a clear and transparent process,” she said. “Deutsche Bank is clearly a building that demands an open process. We need to have an open meeting on this so people can find out what’s going on.” The L.M.D.C. declined an invitation to attend the W.T.C. Committee Monday evening. Dave Newman, industrial hygienist with New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, said the L.M.D.C. was disingenuous in not releasing details of the plan earlier, since it has clearly been under discussion for months. “They’ve kept all of this a secret from the community,” Newman said. “There’s no transparency, no give and take, and that continues to be unacceptable.” Newman was most concerned about the plan’s details, which he said show sloppy planning. For example, some parts of the plan prohibit workers from using elevators, while other parts say elevators will be used to remove material from the building, Newman said. ... Corbett praised the L.M.D.C.’s decision to decouple the remaining work, though he said he couldn’t understand why the corporation ever tried to do both steps at once in the first place. Abatement requires large amounts of combustible materials, like plywood, which are used to contain the contamination. Meanwhile, demolition involves torches and molten metal. With the two processes going on in close proximity, Corbett said, “you end up in a situation where a fire can occur.” Corbett added, though, that decoupling provides no guarantees, referring to reports from fire investigators that the blaze was started by a worker’s cigarette. ... (Downtown Exprss, by Julio Shapiro, Feb. 15-21, 2008)
  
• CUNY hopes Fiterman demo will begin this year ... Fiterman Hall, which was contaminated and damaged on 9/11 during the fire that destroyed 7 W.T.C., is a classroom building for the City University of New York. Located on the block bounded by Barclay St., Greenwich St., Park Place and W. Broadway, Fiterman Hall is part of the Borough of Manhattan Community College and several blocks south of the school’s main building. Work on Fiterman Hall has been delayed in the past while CUNY waited for funding, partly from insurance money, but the project will soon be moving steadily forward, said Benn Lewis, vice president of Airtek Environmental Corp., the owner representative on the site. On Jan. 9, Airtek submitted its final decontamination plan to the Environmental Protection Agency and other government regulators. “We’re really close, we hope, knock on wood, to getting approval,” Lewis told C.B. 1. “We thought we were days away when Deutsche Bank happened,” he added, referring to the fire last August at that contaminated building, which killed two firefighters and made officials more cautious about other demolition projects Downtown. As a result of the fire, decontamination projects undergo intense scrutiny. Lewis needs to get approval from a large group of agencies and attends biweekly meetings with them at the Office of Emergency Management.... (Downtown Exprss, by Julio Shapiro, Feb. 15-21, 2008)
  
• Ground Zero gets a safety chief ... With several construction projects simultaneously taking shape at the World Trade Center site over the next few months, the owners of the site have created a new post for someone to oversee all safety issues and prevent accidents. Joseph Schwed of Honeywell International started as safety director of the World Trade Center site last week. Previously, the Port Authority of New Jersey and New York had separate safety managers for each construction project. Schwed, 40, will oversee all of the safety contractors and coordinate all activities on the 16-acre site. Work at the site began in 2005 and construction is underway for the Sept. 11 memorial, a transit hub, the Freedom Tower and towers 2, 3 and 4. The entire project is scheduled for completion in 2012, Port Authority officials said."It's of the utmost concern that the safety of the employees and the general public are all taken into account and that this unprecedented project is being done in a safe manner," Schwed said. Schwed, who worked for the Port Authority from 1993 to 1997, said he will also maintain a close relationship with Silverstein Properties and their contractors and insurance representatives. Port Authority officials said there have been no fatalities at the World Trade Center site. In recent years, high-rise construction accidents have more than doubled at other city sites, prompting a new set of safety rules. Officials said the position was necessary to prevent accidents at the site for workers and the general public. .... (Newsday, by Brondon Bain, Feb. 15, 2008)
  
• Council to Pass Motion on 9/11 Treatment Aid; Compels U.S. Funding; EMS Officers Want FDNY Alternative ...  FREEDOM OF CHOICE: EMS retiree advocate Marianne Pizzitola (center), urged that the Zadroga Act be changed to allow firefighters and EMS workers to seek medical monitoring and treatment outside the FDNY program. Joining her is former EMT Stephen Hess, left, and Tom Eppinger, president of EMS Officers Local 3621 of District Council 37. ... (The Chief-Leader, by Ari Paul, February 15, 2008)
  
• Agency Sued Over Death of Firefighter at Tower ... The sister of one of the two firefighters killed in August fighting a fire at the former Deutsche Bank building sued the government agency that owns the building and several contractors on Wednesday, charging they knowingly created dangerous conditions that led to her brother’s death. The sister, Barbara Beddia Crocco, contends in the suit that her brother, Robert Beddia, 53, died because of conditions caused during the dismantling of the building, including piles of combustible debris, dismantled fire connections, compromised stairwell walls and barricaded exits. The lawsuit says the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which owned the building, and several private companies knew of the potentially fatal conditions before the fire. But in a striking omission, Ms. Crocco did not sue New York City or the city’s Fire Department, even though city officials relieved three senior fire officers of their posts about 10 days after the Aug. 18 fire. Aryeh Portnoy, a lawyer for Ms. Crocco, said his client had not ruled out suing the Fire Department, “at the right time.” “Tragically,” according to the papers filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, “the conditions created by the defendants were too much for Beddia to withstand, and he was killed by toxic smoke, unable to escape because of the stairwell barricades erected by the defendants.” Mr. Portnoy said that the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the contractors at the site “knowingly created those conditions.” He added, “They had a responsibility to let the firefighters know, and they failed to do that.” ... The suit seeks unspecified punitive and compensatory damages. Mr. Beddia and a second firefighter, Joseph Graffagnino, 33, died when a broken standpipe in the basement could not deliver water to the fire, which fire marshals said was probably started by a cigarette. At a news conference in August, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said three senior fire officials had been stripped of their command during an investigation into the fatal fire. The mayor said the local firehouse had failed to conduct any required inspections of the building, which was on the edge of ground zero, since 2006. John C. Meringolo, a lawyer representing the family of Mr. Graffagnino, said on Wednesday that he intends to file suit as well. (The New York Times, by Anemona Hartocollis, Feb. 14, 2008)
  
• Firefighter's family files wrongful-death suit ... "They did things that violated rules and laws and regulations, and they put people in danger and people died," said Aryeh Portnoy, of Manhattan, an attorney for the Beddia family. There are a dozen defendants in the lawsuit, including city-state entities such as the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and private firms such as contractor Bovis Lend Lease. .... (Newsday, by Zachary R. Dowdy, Feb. 14, 2008)
  
• Deutsche firefighter's sister sues over 'death trap' building ... The sister of a firefighter killed in the fire at the Deutsche Bank building overlooking Ground Zero sued the site's contractors Wednesday - accusing them of turning the partially demolished tower into a "veritable death trap." Barbara Beddia Crocco's suit spreads the blame for Firefighter Robert Beddia's death, targeting a host of companies that worked at the site, along with the state agency in charge of rebuilding the area after the 9/11 attacks. "They owed these firefighters a safe place to work," said Michael Barasch, a lawyer for Crocco. "And they gave them a place that was a mess, an absolute debris mine field." ... A criminal investigation into their deaths is ongoing. The 91-page suit in Manhattan Supreme Court alleges that the contractors, despite being paid "tens of millions of dollars," took "deadly risks" by hiring inexperienced workers and failing to tell the FDNY about hazards at the tower. ... (Daily News, by Jose Martinez, Feb. 14, 2008)
  
• Firefighter's kin sue gov't, contractors over ground zero fire ... Galt, the main subcontractor