By Julie Shapiro
Clear
answers were hard to find in the week
after a worker at the Deutsche Bank
building accidentally severed the
building’s standpipe.
After
several versions, all the parties
finally agreed on these facts a week
after the accident: The alarm on the
standpipe, which supplies the upper
floors with water during a fire, went
off at 8:30 a.m. Thurs., Feb. 5 when a
worker removed a 10-foot section of the
pipe. Interior demolition work continued
in the building for seven hours after
the alarm warned that the standpipe was
not functioning.
In the
earliest version of the events, the
Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which
owns the building, said all work stopped
immediately after the worker cut the
pipe Thursday morning. But F.D.N.Y.
spokesperson Jim Long said Friday that
work continued until the end of the
shift around 3:30 p.m. The L.M.D.C. also
said workers in the building were
evacuated in the afternoon, but Long
said the word “evacuation” was not
precisely correct.
“It wasn’t
an evacuation so much as a change in
shifts,” Long said, with the night shift
barred from the building after the day
shift finished.
When told of Long’s account, Mike Murphy, L.M.D.C. spokesperson, acknowledged that work continued after the alarm went off.
Murphy and Long were on the same
page by Friday afternoon, and it looked like the confusion was
over. But at a Community Board 1 meeting several days later, Cas
Holloway, chief of staff to Dep. Mayor Ed Skyler, promulgated an
entirely different account.
“It wasn’t until later in the
afternoon that the cut happened,” Holloway told C.B. 1’s W.T.C.
Redevelopment Committee Monday night with absolute certainty.
“After the pipe was cut, the building was evacuated
immediately.”
The committee was surprised to
hear a version of the events that differed so widely from what
the F.D.N.Y. and the L.M.D.C. had said in news reports, but
Holloway insisted that his account was the correct one. Then,
Murphy, the L.M.D.C. spokesperson, addressed the community board
and corroborated Holloway’s account, adding to the committee’s
surprise.
As it turned out, Holloway’s
account, which Murphy echoed, was wrong, Tony Sclafani,
Buildings Dept. spokesperson, said Wednesday. The correct
account was the widely disseminated version from last Friday —
reported at DowntownExpress.com that day — which means the
standpipe was cut in the morning.
“It came from us,” Sclafani said
of the confusion. “We should have updated our information but we
did not.”
Holloway told the community board
the standpipe alarm initially went off because of a frozen valve
Thursday morning, then went off a second time later in the
afternoon when the standpipe was cut. The Buildings Dept.
initially thought that was what happened, but an investigation
revealed that was not the case, Sclafani said.
The community is growing
frustrated by the continued back-and-forth about the accident.
“Roughly seven days after the
incident, the community is still getting conflicting
information,” said Catherine McVay Hughes, chairperson of the
W.T.C. Committee, on Wednesday. “The community is still trying
to get to the bottom of what happened.”
Last Thursday was the first time
the standpipe alarm sounded since it was installed in the wake
of the 2007 blaze in the building that killed two firefighters.
A broken standpipe left the firefighters trapped in the building
without water during that fire. The three construction managers
who are accused of removing a section of the standpipe prior to
the fire to speed the cleaning of the building, now face
manslaughter and other charges from the district attorney.
The worker who accidentally cut
the pipe Thursday was on the second floor of the 26-story
building removing sheetrock from the ceiling, part of the
exhaustive cleaning protocol to rid the building of asbestos
contamination. The worker found the standpipe, which usually
runs vertically up the building, running horizontally behind the
sheetrock. Not realizing its importance, he cut off 10 feet of
it.
The worker who cut the pipe, with
subcontractor LVI Environmental Services, did not realize it was
a standpipe because it was not painted red, as the standpipe is
supposed to be, though it “did have red markings on it,” said
Long, from the F.D.N.Y.
“How could he not recognize the
standpipe?” asked an incredulous Hughes, from the community
board.
Hughes said workers should have
been evacuated as soon as the alarm went off, not seven hours
later when their shift ended.
“If the standpipe isn’t working
and there’s a fire, how would you put the fire out?” Hughes
said. “Obviously, on this job, we know how important standpipes
are.”
The F.D.N.Y. did not want to
evacuate the building until they figured out what the problem
was, but they immediately told local firehouses the standpipe
wasn’t working, Long said. It took the F.D.N.Y. until 3 p.m. to
discover the gap in the pipe on the second floor, because they
were busy checking each of the pipe’s valves, assuming the
breach was small and easy to fix, Long said. The gauge on the
system, which measures air pressure in the pipe, showed that it
still had some pressure, which led the F.D.N.Y. to assume a
small leak, not a gaping hole.
“Generally, you’re not thinking
someone cut anything,” Long said.
Plumbers repaired the standpipe by
10 p.m. Thursday, and the Buildings Dept. lifted its brief
stop-work order shortly afterward, the L.M.D.C.’s Murphy said.
The L.M.D.C. pumped water through the repaired standpipe earlier
this week, and the standpipe passed the test.
The L.M.D.C. will not jump right
back into the decontamination work that had been going round the
clock until the standpipe breach. While fine-cleaning work on
the fourth and fifth floors is continuing, any heavy work on the
first three floors will wait until the L.M.D.C. repaints and
retags the entire standpipe and meets with all the construction
supervisors, Murphy said. The L.M.D.C. also plans to enlarge the
maps on each floor that show where the standpipe is. The safety
improvements will likely be complete by the end of the week.
Government regulators are
currently reviewing a demolition plan for the building, which
was heavily damaged on 9/11. The L.M.D.C. will post the
demolition plan online by the end of the week and will hold a
public meeting about it on March 5 at 5:30 p.m.
The physical removal of the top of
the building has been on hold since the fatal fire, but
contractors began removing the facade at the end of last year.
The L.M.D.C. hopes the deconstruction will resume by the end of
April and finish by mid-October.
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
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