...Thick
black smoke was pouring out of the shell of what used to be the
Deutsche Bank building. The structure had been badly damaged in
the terrorist attack when portions of the collapsing south tower
dug a 15-story gash and propelled toxic dust into it. Six years
later the bank building was finally being taken down.
The fire quickly spread to 13 floors. The 100 firefighters inside
the building couldn’t douse the flames because, as would become
clear later, the basement standpipe that should have supplied
water to the floors above had been disconnected. The scene was
chaotic. Firefighters couldn’t see through the dense smoke and
found their retreat blocked by a mazelike series of plywood walls
and polyethylene sheeting that made it nearly impossible to locate
exits. Panic was audible in the voices on the firefighters’
radios.
Eventually some 275 firemen used ropes to hoist hoses up the
scaffolding on the building and tamed the seven-alarm
conflagration around 10:30 that night, seven hours after the blaze
began. But the struggle to extinguish the flames had cost two
lives. Firefighters Robert Beddia, 53, and Joseph Graffagnino, 33,
were found lying on the 14th floor near a hose line and pronounced
dead at a local hospital. The cause: smoke inhalation...
