Building Safety Liability- Progress Memo Voien

An investigation of post 9/11 lawsuits has brought to light the complicated nature of building safety and liability. Contractors, airlines, the city of New York, and the FAA have all been litigants in claims brought by victims, their families, and workers in the 95 complaints which were filed after 9/11. Only families of victims who opted out of the compensation fund offered by the government and responding workers (who were excluded from the fund) are able to bring suits because the terms of the pay-out from the government gave airlines and the government immunity.

The question of whom to sue when a building falls on you or poisons you with asbestos and particulate matter as it crumbles is profound, as are questions about why the victims have chosen the defendants they have. No one has sued the FBI, because it is known to be very difficult to do so, however, the FBI would technically be as culpable as the FAA as Attorney Mark Conlin has pointed out. Recently, even the World Trade Center developer, Larry Silverstein, brought a suit against the airlines for “loss of use,” of the buildings after 9/11.

The city has been sued by thousands of responding workers in various capacities. The contractors the city employed to assist fire fighters by assessing the buildings’ structural integrity were sued for negligence because under a New York law there is “an obligation on all contractors, including engineers, who direct workers to perform jobs in and around contamination to provide those workers with personal protective equipment.” However, is the city just the deepest pocket that could be liable in a web of liability surrounding the kind of unprecedented event that people are not prepared for legally? Or, does the logic of the law help us carve out where the oversights, assumptions, laziness and disorganization that conspired to allow such a tragedy to happen were located, and thus, help us prevent the next one?

…I talked with an attorney who worked on the city workers’ suit against the city. It and many lawsuits are still pending, but he was able to tell me that it does seem reasonable that the city and the engineering contractors were liable to account for the safety of the workers, even under circumstances they could not have predicted. I still hope to interview
- Kenneth Becker, the city lawyer in charge of all WTC-related litigation.
- Paul DiNapoli, a senior partner at Napoli Bern Ripka LLP, which is representing the workers suing the engineers.
- Steven Gale, a leading counter-terrorism expert at the University of Pennsylvania
- And, of course, Larry Silverstein, the developer who is suing the airlines.

The likelihood of talking to Silverstein or any of his lawyers is very low according to the one attorney I spoke with, who said no one would discuss the details of their upcoming high-profile case. However, he will probably sue with the same sort of tactics that the other airline suits used so I can talk to those attorneys and probably get some good quotes…