Sooyeon's progrss memo

Because the 17-acre U.N. compound, built in the early 1950s, is technically international territory, it was exempt from state and federal regulations on worker and environmental safety, and even with respect to smoking, until last year the inspection by the NYFD.
They racked up 866 violations. It estimates that fewer than 20 percent of those violations have been addressed so far, according to the mayor's office.
Also required improvements included certifying a number of U.N. security personnel as fire directors, filing updated plans to address the remaining fire-code violations and establishing a link with the city in case of fire.
I also found out that U.N. have struggled for years to persuade the United States and the other 191 member nations to finance a multibillion-dollar renovation project for the headquarters. The project, known as the Capital Master Plan, has finally received funding but is not scheduled for completion until the end of 2014.

I interviewed a couple of random UN employees working at the UN headquarter building. But they didn’t want to put their name on my articles. ( I guess UN has pretty strict rule to talk to newspaper..) They generally talked me how much they feel unsafe about the building and some said the UN had ignored and didn’t have any budget when NYFD inspected the building. They had to take some money from the other budget. Some were happy to see the renovation plan finally approved, but said “it can’t take care of the problems right now’’

Today, I finally got the contact of Gary Fowlie, Chief of the Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit, fowlie@un.org, through Prof. Barbara Bors.
So hopefully, he will be able to answer the main questions (If there has been any changes since 9/11, or what has been updated or fixed since the inspection last year. )
Most of all, I’m planning to ask him to introduce me someone working for the UN building. (I heard there is a guy, the only one who can control the old building system.)
Also I will contact NYFD if they have done more updates about the violations at UN since last November.