This is the work blog for the Investigations in Depth class at NYU during the spring 2008 semester. It contains the exploratory notes, memos, budget lines, pitches, rough drafts and revised drafts with cited sources. The final work is posted at http://skyscraperproject.blogspot.com/
This is the story that 15 graduate school student journalists found in their investigations:
Skyscraper Safety in NYC Post-9/11
For weeks, a group of student-reporters at New York University set out to understand and describe skyscraper safety in New York in the post-September 11, 2001 era. The product became the stories you see posted here. Members of Prof. Jan Barry’s Investigations in Depth class looked into everything from the width of stairwells in commercial buildings to evacuation procedures, from problems in high-rise residential buildings to recent construction-related deaths in the city. New Yorkers, visitors to the city and workers want to be safe not just inside buildings, but also while walking by buildings and working on the buildings. The 15-part report was produced by a diverse group of student-reporters (see bios after each story) over the course of a semester. We hope these stories will add substance to the discussion about skyscraper safety in New York City.
Jan Barry
Adjunct professor of journalism
New York University
Staff writer, The Record (Bergen Co., NJ)
janbarry61@hotmail.com
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Public Place: High Rise or High Risk?
Gowanus development promises affordable housing, but at what cost to public health?
By David Giambusso
May 2, 2008
BROOKLYN--On the morning Delta shuttle from LaGuardia to Dulles, Buddy Scotto was suddenly in a cold sweat. “My father was right--I never should have gotten involved in this stuff,” he thought. Sitting next to him was the new pastor at St. Mary’s on Court Street. He had literally put the fear of God in Scotto.
“Scotto, if you’ve got me on a wild goose chase, the whole neighborhood’s gonna hear about it,” said the young priest. Scotto was convinced now that it was all a hoax: the call from the Vice President, the meeting at the White House, the money for the sewage plant, everything.
“Between the gate of the White House and getting inside the Oval Office, I honestly don’t remember a thing,” said Scotto. By the time he was on the shuttle back to New York he had a $458 million guarantee to build the Red Hook Sewage Treatment Plant. “All I had to do was go to a place called Kansas City, Missouri and vote for Gerald Ford,” said Scotto.
For the first time in 200 years, the Gowanus Canal was going to start getting cleaned up. Since then, Scotto has spent the better part of his life making deals and cajoling politicians to dredge the Gowanus and make it livable. As he approaches his 80th birthday, his dream seems to be on the verge of fruition. Now his greatest obstacle lies 120 feet below ground.
The Politics of Pollution
Scotto was a lifelong Democrat. He helped found the Independent Neighborhood Democrats in Carroll Gardens. He got involved to help the neighborhood, but soon found himself getting too embroiled in the world of politics. His friends were pushing him to run for Congress. He thought he could put a stop to it by registering as a Republican. When he told the boys at IND they were indignant. “You’re staying in this club even if you are a goddamn Republican!” Scotto recalls them saying.
While Scotto dodged the bullet of a Congressional run, soon enough the local Republicans started coming around and asking him to be a delegate at the Republican National Convention in 1976. They convinced him to run on the promise that his alternate could go if he was elected. Sure enough, he was voted in by a healthy margin. As planned, he told his alternate to head to the convention and washed his hands of the whole affair.
The phone rang one day and an operator on the other end said, “Salvatore Scotto, This is the White House. I have the Vice President for you.” Scotto was taken aback but tried to compose himself. Nelson Rockefeller was asking why Scotto wasn’t giving his full-throated support to President Ford. The whole New York delegation was rumored to be supporting Ronald Reagan and even though Rockefeller wasn’t running, it was an embarrassment for the former New York governor.
Scotto was close to admitting that he wasn’t really a Republican when he recognized his chance. He began reciting a laundry list of problems facing his neighborhood. Chief among them were the putrid conditions at the Gowanus Canal.
For over a century the Gowanus Canal has acted as an industrial and residential sewer, suffering the runoff of gas plants, tanneries, machine shops, and factories as well as 14 sewage outlets. The waterway, which connects Upper New York Bay to the neighborhoods of Red Hook, South Brooklyn, and Park Slope, runs along a flood basin of toxicity. Several days after his meeting at the White House, Scotto would return with funding to start the Red Hook Sewage Treatment plant.
A year later, Scotto secured several million more to re-activate the flushing tunnel in the Gowanus after it had been shut down by area manufacturers who found it inconvenient for barge transportation. As part of that deal, he had won over a half a million in seed money for the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC), a group of local interests dedicated to cleaning up the canal, developing affordable housing, and ridding the basin of the toxic polluters responsible for decades of pollution.
With plans for affordable housing, commercial units, and green spaces currently backed by the city and with remediation underway at sites all along the canal, it would seem Scotto’s lifelong dream is finally coming true. Yet to some in the neighborhoods and in the scientific community here, there is a dark underbelly to this so-called progress. While it has been thirty years since cleanup began on the Gowanus, many feel it has been largely insufficient and in order to make the area safe again, it will take a much bigger commitment on the part of the City and Sate. In the meantime, some say the consequences of building over this deeply embedded toxicity may have dire consequences to current and future residents.
Trouble Below
“The level of contamination at Public Place Site seems very extensive,” said Patricia Culligan, professor of Civil Engineering at Columbia University and co-author of “Eco-Gowanus: Urban Remediation by Design.” The book, a project of professors and graduate students at Columbia University was put together with the help of community members such as Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus (FROGG) and Brooklyn Community Board Six.
Public Place, an 11 acre, state owned parcel, was formerly the site of a manufactured gas plant (MGP). It was seized by the state after being condemned for toxicity and is now part of the Brownfield Cleanup Program, a state initiative enacted in 2003 to make contaminated areas more viable for redevelopment.
The program offers tax breaks to development companies that are willing to take on the cost of remediation and build new housing on lands once thought to be uninhabitable. State taxpayers essentially foot the bill for development discounts in exchange for the promise of safe remediation.
The state has turned Public Place over to the Hudson Companies in partnership with Scotto’s GCCDC who recently won the bid to develop 774 units of mixed-income housing, commercial space, and community group space on the site.
Unlike other brownfields, the cost of cleanup is being incurred largely by National Grid, a private international energy company that recently purchased Keyspan. Keyspan is the inheritor of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, who owned the original MGP and is responsible for much of the site’s toxicity. According to a Volunteer Agreement signed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Keyspan, once Keyspan has met certain cleanup obligations on the site it is free from any liability for future incidents that may arise due to contamination.
According to Marlene Donnelly, a representative of FROGG, Hudson Companies will still receive nearly 25 percent of its development costs back in tax rebates, despite not spending any money on remediation. Hudson Companies representative Alan Bell was recently quoted in the Brooklyn Paper saying, “We tend to shy away from sites that have been contaminated in some severe way” adding that “Public Place has a long history and the city is really committed to getting this cleaned up.”
Community members and scientists close to the project are questioning the level of that commitment. Ludger Balan heads the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy, a group that provides conservation support, environmental stewardship and public environmental education programs on the Gowanus Canal.
According to him, the extent of cleanup currently proposed falls far short of what is necessary for public health. “Any development plan that does not consider a clean-up of the Gowanus Canal first is a ploy and marketing scheme driven by a city highly dependent on real estate sales,” says Balan. He and other scientists maintain that the Gowanus needs to be completely dredged and the surrounding wetlands restored before anyone can conceive if living along the canal.
The city and state have said the site will be livable in 4 to 6 years, but remediation experts don’t see how that is possible. According to data provided by the Urban Divers, there are more than 12 points where raw, untreated sewage is discharged into the Canal after every rainfall, translating into millions of gallons of combined sewage overflow (CSO). This contributes to high levels of pathogens, or disease-causing bacteria, in the Gowanus Canal. Says Balan, “The entire uplands of the Gowanus Canal is severely contaminated. Dilapidated bulkheads throughout the Gowanus Canal continuously contribute to the migration of dioxins to and from land and water and vice versa.”
These assertions are consistent with the findings of Culligan and her team, who have studied the toxicity of MGP sites. They argue that chemical deposits extend roughly 120 feet beneath the surface and could seep out into the canal as well as escape in plumes of noxious vapors. The nature of these deposits varies as toxins from other sites have seeped into the groundwater as well.
Some of the more dangerous elements at Public Place site, according to the Columbia researchers, are Benzene, Xylene (BTEX), and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH’s) some of which are known to cause lung, stomach, and skin cancer as well as leukemia. A 1989 survey found these elements present in the groundwater at Public Place at levels thousands of times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency has set out for drinking water.
While none of the groundwater at Gowanus will be used for drinking, there are other ways in which these toxins can cause harm. “There has to be a pathway that allows you to come into contact with the contamination, and you can inhale airborne vapors so that’s one pathway.” Another pathway is skin contact should the elements appear in the park spaces, basement floods, or the canal itself. According to the Columbia study, “Any dose of Benzene can lead to illness.”
As Balan points out, exposure to these elements is not what most people likely bargain for in buying or renting a new home. “Would you want barges and trucks carting stinky and heavily contaminated sediment passing beneath your million dollar condo's window and front door?” asks Balan, saying also, “As a consequence, average citizens rich and poor [are] heavily and consistently lured to pay highest value to live on contaminated land, contaminated water and bad air quality, on a high risk flood zone waterfront. A small minority of developers get rich and thousands of families are left to hold a dirty bag, with a high mortgage and immense debts.”
Cleanup or ‘remediation’ of the site would involve decades of constant soil and water cleansing according to “Eco Gowanus”, the type of that is not often politically or financially feasible, especially in a faltering economy. “Historically the remediation of these brownfield sights has not been as thorough as the remediation that we’re proposing here,” Culligan says.
The State’s Response
Yet plans to cleanup Public Place and build residential and commercial housing proceed unabated. Gardiner Cross, an engineer with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation told Community Board 6 in January that, “It would be impossible to dig out the contaminants in their entirety,” but that “The cleanup will be sufficient to support virtually any development.”
Amen Omorugbe is a project manager for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), and is currently overseeing cleanup at the Public Place site. While National Grid (formerly Keyspan), is saddled with all of the cleanup responsibilities, the work is carried out by private contractors such as GEI Consultants, who are contracted by National Grid and overseen by DEC.
According to studies conducted by the DEC, the contamination at Public Place is consistent with that of other MGP sites in that there are high levels of BTEX and PAH’s as mentioned in “Eco-Gowanus”.
Omorugbe concedes that these contaminants are well below grade (or surface level), some as deep as 125 ft. “We recognize that you can’t treat that,” says Omorugbe. Instead, current plans call for removing roughly ten feet of topsoil, shipping it out on trucks to sites out of state where it will be treated. New soil will be carted in and laid over a barrier that is designed to prevent contaminants from seeping up into the new dirt. A 70 ft barrier will also be vertically introduced around the site barriers in an attempt to stop surrounding contaminants from seeping through.
Omorugbe was uncertain where the soil will be shipped, but believes it will be sent to processing plants in New Jersey or Pennsylvania. He was also unable to provide details of the exact decontamination process for the soil or the trucks that will be transporting it, raising questions of the public health risks to the communities where the toxic fill will be dumped.
This is similar to a “cap and pave” strategy used just a few feet down the canal where a new Lowe’s mega-store was built. Culligan and others feel this method of remediation limits the use of the land.
“The cap and pave strategy is basically turning brownfields into car parking lots. It was locking the contamination in,” says Culligan. The method also calls for constant monitoring of the site or evidence of leaking toxins. Culligan worried that this was not occurring, “We were somewhat concerned when we spoke to the stake holders that they weren’t aware of what monitoring was going on at that sight.”
The concern of scientists and engineers not on the state payroll is that the underground toxins are far too volatile to be simply covered up with a layer of concrete. Cleansing 10 feet of soil does little to address the deep pools of BTEX, Coal Tar and sludge, that have seeped into the pools of ground water over a hundred feet below.
What The Future Holds
As illustrated in “Eco-Gowanus,” these toxins form plumes or pools that are well below the surface of the site as well as the bottom of the canal. If unaddressed they will continually threaten to escape into the water itself, the surrounding soil or into the air in the form of noxious clouds.
Moreover, even if Public Place were remediated to the level suggested by Culligan, it would still not address the surrounding sites that are equally volatile. “I think what the community deserves is a full understanding of the contamination that exists not just at this site but at neighboring sites,” said Culligan, “Just cleaning up site by site makes no sense--from an engineering perspective or an economic perspective--because the contamination doesn’t care about site boundaries.”
Community Board meetings are marked with discord. Many stakeholders as well as area politicians find themselves conflicted over the benefits of Gowanus development. While community members like Buddy Scotto and others from the GCCDC who have been fighting for a renewed interest in Gowanus for decades, see this as a golden opportunity, others such as Community Board 6 members, FROGG, and The Urban Divers are deeply reticent. While the current cleanup of Public Place is the responsibility of National Grid, once the minimal requirements of the DEC are met, National Grid has no further liability. Future lawsuits will be paid out by New York State taxpayers.
Balan, in particular, foresees ominous consequences and said, “Until solutions for remediation of these issues take a serious lead in the dialogue of developing the Gowanus Canal, I fear the drive of the real estate interest will lead us to see another Love Canal. It appears that this is currently in the making.”
SOURCES
People:
Patricia Culligan, Professor of Civil Engineering, Columbia University
Buddy Scotto, Vice President, Founder, Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation
Amen Omorugbe, Public Place Project Manager, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Marlene Donnely, Water Quality Specialist, FROGG
Ludger Balan, Director, Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy
Craig Hammerman, District Manager, Community Board 6
Mark Lulka, US Army Corps of Engineers
Mike Mclaughlin, Reporter, Brooklyn Paper
Sarah Ryley, Reporter, Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Tony Avella, NYC Councilman, Queens
Robert Suskind, Blogger, The Gowanus Lounge
Joel Kupferman, esq. Executive Director New York Environmentsl Law and Justice Project
Documents:
Eco-Gowanus-Urban Remediation by Design, ed. Patricia Culligan, Richard Plunz
Public Place Request For Proposals, August 16, 2007
Voulunteer Cleanup Agreement Between NYS DEC and Keyspan, d/b/a National Grid, August 21, 2002
Fianal Sediment and Sampling Report, Gowanus Canal and Bay Ecosystem Restoration Project, US Amy Corps of Engineeers, August 2006
New York Feasibility Study, Gowanus Bay and Canal, US Army Corps of Engineers, Feb. 8 2005
Hudson Raritan Estuary-Gowanus Canal Ecosystem Retoration Study, NYS DEP, June 2007
Gowanus Canal Comprehensive Community Plan, GCCDC, January 12, 2007
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, various articles, Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Paper, various articles, Mike Mclaughlin
Websites:
www.gowanuslounge.blogpot.com
www.dec.ny.gov
www.usace.army.mil
www.nyc.gov
www.brooklyncb6.org
www.gowanus.org
http://curbed.com/archives/2008/02/26/big_gowanus_public_place_development_finalists_revealed.php
By David Giambusso
May 2, 2008
BROOKLYN--On the morning Delta shuttle from LaGuardia to Dulles, Buddy Scotto was suddenly in a cold sweat. “My father was right--I never should have gotten involved in this stuff,” he thought. Sitting next to him was the new pastor at St. Mary’s on Court Street. He had literally put the fear of God in Scotto.
“Scotto, if you’ve got me on a wild goose chase, the whole neighborhood’s gonna hear about it,” said the young priest. Scotto was convinced now that it was all a hoax: the call from the Vice President, the meeting at the White House, the money for the sewage plant, everything.
“Between the gate of the White House and getting inside the Oval Office, I honestly don’t remember a thing,” said Scotto. By the time he was on the shuttle back to New York he had a $458 million guarantee to build the Red Hook Sewage Treatment Plant. “All I had to do was go to a place called Kansas City, Missouri and vote for Gerald Ford,” said Scotto.
For the first time in 200 years, the Gowanus Canal was going to start getting cleaned up. Since then, Scotto has spent the better part of his life making deals and cajoling politicians to dredge the Gowanus and make it livable. As he approaches his 80th birthday, his dream seems to be on the verge of fruition. Now his greatest obstacle lies 120 feet below ground.
The Politics of Pollution
Scotto was a lifelong Democrat. He helped found the Independent Neighborhood Democrats in Carroll Gardens. He got involved to help the neighborhood, but soon found himself getting too embroiled in the world of politics. His friends were pushing him to run for Congress. He thought he could put a stop to it by registering as a Republican. When he told the boys at IND they were indignant. “You’re staying in this club even if you are a goddamn Republican!” Scotto recalls them saying.
While Scotto dodged the bullet of a Congressional run, soon enough the local Republicans started coming around and asking him to be a delegate at the Republican National Convention in 1976. They convinced him to run on the promise that his alternate could go if he was elected. Sure enough, he was voted in by a healthy margin. As planned, he told his alternate to head to the convention and washed his hands of the whole affair.
The phone rang one day and an operator on the other end said, “Salvatore Scotto, This is the White House. I have the Vice President for you.” Scotto was taken aback but tried to compose himself. Nelson Rockefeller was asking why Scotto wasn’t giving his full-throated support to President Ford. The whole New York delegation was rumored to be supporting Ronald Reagan and even though Rockefeller wasn’t running, it was an embarrassment for the former New York governor.
Scotto was close to admitting that he wasn’t really a Republican when he recognized his chance. He began reciting a laundry list of problems facing his neighborhood. Chief among them were the putrid conditions at the Gowanus Canal.
For over a century the Gowanus Canal has acted as an industrial and residential sewer, suffering the runoff of gas plants, tanneries, machine shops, and factories as well as 14 sewage outlets. The waterway, which connects Upper New York Bay to the neighborhoods of Red Hook, South Brooklyn, and Park Slope, runs along a flood basin of toxicity. Several days after his meeting at the White House, Scotto would return with funding to start the Red Hook Sewage Treatment plant.
A year later, Scotto secured several million more to re-activate the flushing tunnel in the Gowanus after it had been shut down by area manufacturers who found it inconvenient for barge transportation. As part of that deal, he had won over a half a million in seed money for the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC), a group of local interests dedicated to cleaning up the canal, developing affordable housing, and ridding the basin of the toxic polluters responsible for decades of pollution.
With plans for affordable housing, commercial units, and green spaces currently backed by the city and with remediation underway at sites all along the canal, it would seem Scotto’s lifelong dream is finally coming true. Yet to some in the neighborhoods and in the scientific community here, there is a dark underbelly to this so-called progress. While it has been thirty years since cleanup began on the Gowanus, many feel it has been largely insufficient and in order to make the area safe again, it will take a much bigger commitment on the part of the City and Sate. In the meantime, some say the consequences of building over this deeply embedded toxicity may have dire consequences to current and future residents.
Trouble Below
“The level of contamination at Public Place Site seems very extensive,” said Patricia Culligan, professor of Civil Engineering at Columbia University and co-author of “Eco-Gowanus: Urban Remediation by Design.” The book, a project of professors and graduate students at Columbia University was put together with the help of community members such as Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus (FROGG) and Brooklyn Community Board Six.
Public Place, an 11 acre, state owned parcel, was formerly the site of a manufactured gas plant (MGP). It was seized by the state after being condemned for toxicity and is now part of the Brownfield Cleanup Program, a state initiative enacted in 2003 to make contaminated areas more viable for redevelopment.
The program offers tax breaks to development companies that are willing to take on the cost of remediation and build new housing on lands once thought to be uninhabitable. State taxpayers essentially foot the bill for development discounts in exchange for the promise of safe remediation.
The state has turned Public Place over to the Hudson Companies in partnership with Scotto’s GCCDC who recently won the bid to develop 774 units of mixed-income housing, commercial space, and community group space on the site.
Unlike other brownfields, the cost of cleanup is being incurred largely by National Grid, a private international energy company that recently purchased Keyspan. Keyspan is the inheritor of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, who owned the original MGP and is responsible for much of the site’s toxicity. According to a Volunteer Agreement signed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Keyspan, once Keyspan has met certain cleanup obligations on the site it is free from any liability for future incidents that may arise due to contamination.
According to Marlene Donnelly, a representative of FROGG, Hudson Companies will still receive nearly 25 percent of its development costs back in tax rebates, despite not spending any money on remediation. Hudson Companies representative Alan Bell was recently quoted in the Brooklyn Paper saying, “We tend to shy away from sites that have been contaminated in some severe way” adding that “Public Place has a long history and the city is really committed to getting this cleaned up.”
Community members and scientists close to the project are questioning the level of that commitment. Ludger Balan heads the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy, a group that provides conservation support, environmental stewardship and public environmental education programs on the Gowanus Canal.
According to him, the extent of cleanup currently proposed falls far short of what is necessary for public health. “Any development plan that does not consider a clean-up of the Gowanus Canal first is a ploy and marketing scheme driven by a city highly dependent on real estate sales,” says Balan. He and other scientists maintain that the Gowanus needs to be completely dredged and the surrounding wetlands restored before anyone can conceive if living along the canal.
The city and state have said the site will be livable in 4 to 6 years, but remediation experts don’t see how that is possible. According to data provided by the Urban Divers, there are more than 12 points where raw, untreated sewage is discharged into the Canal after every rainfall, translating into millions of gallons of combined sewage overflow (CSO). This contributes to high levels of pathogens, or disease-causing bacteria, in the Gowanus Canal. Says Balan, “The entire uplands of the Gowanus Canal is severely contaminated. Dilapidated bulkheads throughout the Gowanus Canal continuously contribute to the migration of dioxins to and from land and water and vice versa.”
These assertions are consistent with the findings of Culligan and her team, who have studied the toxicity of MGP sites. They argue that chemical deposits extend roughly 120 feet beneath the surface and could seep out into the canal as well as escape in plumes of noxious vapors. The nature of these deposits varies as toxins from other sites have seeped into the groundwater as well.
Some of the more dangerous elements at Public Place site, according to the Columbia researchers, are Benzene, Xylene (BTEX), and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH’s) some of which are known to cause lung, stomach, and skin cancer as well as leukemia. A 1989 survey found these elements present in the groundwater at Public Place at levels thousands of times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency has set out for drinking water.
While none of the groundwater at Gowanus will be used for drinking, there are other ways in which these toxins can cause harm. “There has to be a pathway that allows you to come into contact with the contamination, and you can inhale airborne vapors so that’s one pathway.” Another pathway is skin contact should the elements appear in the park spaces, basement floods, or the canal itself. According to the Columbia study, “Any dose of Benzene can lead to illness.”
As Balan points out, exposure to these elements is not what most people likely bargain for in buying or renting a new home. “Would you want barges and trucks carting stinky and heavily contaminated sediment passing beneath your million dollar condo's window and front door?” asks Balan, saying also, “As a consequence, average citizens rich and poor [are] heavily and consistently lured to pay highest value to live on contaminated land, contaminated water and bad air quality, on a high risk flood zone waterfront. A small minority of developers get rich and thousands of families are left to hold a dirty bag, with a high mortgage and immense debts.”
Cleanup or ‘remediation’ of the site would involve decades of constant soil and water cleansing according to “Eco Gowanus”, the type of that is not often politically or financially feasible, especially in a faltering economy. “Historically the remediation of these brownfield sights has not been as thorough as the remediation that we’re proposing here,” Culligan says.
The State’s Response
Yet plans to cleanup Public Place and build residential and commercial housing proceed unabated. Gardiner Cross, an engineer with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation told Community Board 6 in January that, “It would be impossible to dig out the contaminants in their entirety,” but that “The cleanup will be sufficient to support virtually any development.”
Amen Omorugbe is a project manager for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), and is currently overseeing cleanup at the Public Place site. While National Grid (formerly Keyspan), is saddled with all of the cleanup responsibilities, the work is carried out by private contractors such as GEI Consultants, who are contracted by National Grid and overseen by DEC.
According to studies conducted by the DEC, the contamination at Public Place is consistent with that of other MGP sites in that there are high levels of BTEX and PAH’s as mentioned in “Eco-Gowanus”.
Omorugbe concedes that these contaminants are well below grade (or surface level), some as deep as 125 ft. “We recognize that you can’t treat that,” says Omorugbe. Instead, current plans call for removing roughly ten feet of topsoil, shipping it out on trucks to sites out of state where it will be treated. New soil will be carted in and laid over a barrier that is designed to prevent contaminants from seeping up into the new dirt. A 70 ft barrier will also be vertically introduced around the site barriers in an attempt to stop surrounding contaminants from seeping through.
Omorugbe was uncertain where the soil will be shipped, but believes it will be sent to processing plants in New Jersey or Pennsylvania. He was also unable to provide details of the exact decontamination process for the soil or the trucks that will be transporting it, raising questions of the public health risks to the communities where the toxic fill will be dumped.
This is similar to a “cap and pave” strategy used just a few feet down the canal where a new Lowe’s mega-store was built. Culligan and others feel this method of remediation limits the use of the land.
“The cap and pave strategy is basically turning brownfields into car parking lots. It was locking the contamination in,” says Culligan. The method also calls for constant monitoring of the site or evidence of leaking toxins. Culligan worried that this was not occurring, “We were somewhat concerned when we spoke to the stake holders that they weren’t aware of what monitoring was going on at that sight.”
The concern of scientists and engineers not on the state payroll is that the underground toxins are far too volatile to be simply covered up with a layer of concrete. Cleansing 10 feet of soil does little to address the deep pools of BTEX, Coal Tar and sludge, that have seeped into the pools of ground water over a hundred feet below.
What The Future Holds
As illustrated in “Eco-Gowanus,” these toxins form plumes or pools that are well below the surface of the site as well as the bottom of the canal. If unaddressed they will continually threaten to escape into the water itself, the surrounding soil or into the air in the form of noxious clouds.
Moreover, even if Public Place were remediated to the level suggested by Culligan, it would still not address the surrounding sites that are equally volatile. “I think what the community deserves is a full understanding of the contamination that exists not just at this site but at neighboring sites,” said Culligan, “Just cleaning up site by site makes no sense--from an engineering perspective or an economic perspective--because the contamination doesn’t care about site boundaries.”
Community Board meetings are marked with discord. Many stakeholders as well as area politicians find themselves conflicted over the benefits of Gowanus development. While community members like Buddy Scotto and others from the GCCDC who have been fighting for a renewed interest in Gowanus for decades, see this as a golden opportunity, others such as Community Board 6 members, FROGG, and The Urban Divers are deeply reticent. While the current cleanup of Public Place is the responsibility of National Grid, once the minimal requirements of the DEC are met, National Grid has no further liability. Future lawsuits will be paid out by New York State taxpayers.
Balan, in particular, foresees ominous consequences and said, “Until solutions for remediation of these issues take a serious lead in the dialogue of developing the Gowanus Canal, I fear the drive of the real estate interest will lead us to see another Love Canal. It appears that this is currently in the making.”
SOURCES
People:
Patricia Culligan, Professor of Civil Engineering, Columbia University
Buddy Scotto, Vice President, Founder, Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation
Amen Omorugbe, Public Place Project Manager, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Marlene Donnely, Water Quality Specialist, FROGG
Ludger Balan, Director, Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy
Craig Hammerman, District Manager, Community Board 6
Mark Lulka, US Army Corps of Engineers
Mike Mclaughlin, Reporter, Brooklyn Paper
Sarah Ryley, Reporter, Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Tony Avella, NYC Councilman, Queens
Robert Suskind, Blogger, The Gowanus Lounge
Joel Kupferman, esq. Executive Director New York Environmentsl Law and Justice Project
Documents:
Eco-Gowanus-Urban Remediation by Design, ed. Patricia Culligan, Richard Plunz
Public Place Request For Proposals, August 16, 2007
Voulunteer Cleanup Agreement Between NYS DEC and Keyspan, d/b/a National Grid, August 21, 2002
Fianal Sediment and Sampling Report, Gowanus Canal and Bay Ecosystem Restoration Project, US Amy Corps of Engineeers, August 2006
New York Feasibility Study, Gowanus Bay and Canal, US Army Corps of Engineers, Feb. 8 2005
Hudson Raritan Estuary-Gowanus Canal Ecosystem Retoration Study, NYS DEP, June 2007
Gowanus Canal Comprehensive Community Plan, GCCDC, January 12, 2007
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, various articles, Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Paper, various articles, Mike Mclaughlin
Websites:
www.gowanuslounge.blogpot.com
www.dec.ny.gov
www.usace.army.mil
www.nyc.gov
www.brooklyncb6.org
www.gowanus.org
http://curbed.com/archives/2008/02/26/big_gowanus_public_place_development_finalists_revealed.php
Falling Through The Enforcement Gap
By Andrew Garib
New York, May 2 -- Ramiro Jara, 25, of Bushwick, who six years before came to America from Ecuador in search of opportunity, fell 15 stories to his death at the Union Square construction site where he worked. According to reports, Jara unclipped his harness from his safety line and attempted to cross between two scaffolds, 25 feet apart, suspended from the roof of the building he was working on above busy morning traffic on November 2, 2006. He never made it. Instead, he slipped and fell to his death while walking along the building’s ledge. He landed on a platform one story above the ground steps away from Fifth Avenue.
The New York City Department of Buildings called Jara’s death an accident, but in the same breath announced an array of safety regulations that Jara’s employer, Town Restoration Services, had violated at the site. The builder did not have a licence for the rigging the scaffolding hung from, a licenced rigger or a designated foreman on site, nor paperwork showing that workers had been trained for the rigs.
Jara’s death was not unique to New York or the rest of the country. Just this January, Brooklynite Yurly Vanchytsky, 53, was decapitated after falling 42 stories from the top of the nearly complete Trump Soho tower on Spring St., where he was pouring concrete, and only two weeks later, Queens resident Jose Palacios, fell 12 stories to his death after his scaffolding collapsed in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. And on April 15th, Kevin Kelly, 25, of Queens, died after falling nine floors when his safety strap failed while installing windows on a high rise condominium on the East Side. All three job sites were riddled with safety violations. “Safety is not a priority for the Buildings Department,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York’s 14th district, which includes the site of Kelly’s death.
Public outcry continued, and the city has reacted haphazardly. In March, a city inspector was jailed for his negligent role in a crane collapse that killed seven people amidst reports of corruption from the city’s press. But Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer called for the creation of a new city agency to take over construction site safty, saying the DOB still “doesn’t get it.” The City sustained enough pressure to force out Buildings Commissioner Patricia J. Lancaster, a former engineer who herself called for more regulation. During her term, construction deaths steadily rose from 19 in 2003 to 38 – 24 involving falls – in 2006. Already thirteen died this year as of Kelly’s death.
In New York City’s still booming construction market, falls account for more than half of all construction site fatalities. But a non-scientific investigation of falling deaths in construction in major cities across the country with building booms and the regulations and enforcement which apply there show that while New York has a third more construction fatalities than the national average, it is not alone. And while city officials have received enormous pressure to improve safety laws, a detailed comparison between New York City and a jurisdiction which boasts the best construction safety record on the continent shows that the difference may not be in the law, but how the law is enforced.
A National Problem
Michael Donovan is more concerned than most about construction safety in the city. “Walking down the street, I cringe when I see scaffoldings at the tops of 40-story buildings,” the Manhattan-based Certified Industrial Hygienist said. “If I see grappling hooks over parapet walls, I wonder, how much did they check? Did they have a professional engineer sign off on it? Bricks break looks, or cinder blocks, and there you go.” Donovan has 20 years of experiences in worker safety issues, including those involving the cleanup at the World Trade Center after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Construction is the most dangerous industry for workers in America, and falls account for more than a third of all construction deaths. But at the national level, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, established in 1970, oversees stringent and respected safety standards for fall protection, which have been in place since 1979 and saw several significant revisions since then, requiring worker training and providing detailed guidelines among other additions.
“OSHA’s New York regional office has a strong inspection schedule to reduce injuries and fatalities in the local construction industry, as well as an ongoing aggressive campaign to educate employers and employees about the vital importance of promoting prevention through training,” George Chartier, OSHA spokesperson, said in an e-mail.
OSHA fall protection regulations kick in anytime fall distances 6 feet or higher are involved. They require one or a combination of three systems to protect workers: Guardrails to prevent falls, safety nets to prevent serious injury or death due to falls, and personal fall arrest or fall restriction devices, straps, cables and anchoring attached to the worker’s mandatory harness which either restrict the distance a worker would fall or break the fall, absorbing the energy of a fall to prevent, both systems designed to leave the worker dangling in mid-air but otherwise safe. The regulations are incredibly detailed, comprising over 60 pages of requirements such as the required height of guardrails (39-45”) and their proper installation, the maximum width of safety net webbing (6”) and minimum tensile strength of the border rope (5000 lbs), and the “maximum acceleration distance” for the shock absorber of a fall arrest system (42”) and even the materials they can be made from (steel cable or nylon). The administration also has strict and detailed regulations regarding the erection, use and dismantling of scaffolding, as well as its design and the fall protection systems that are required on scaffolding (guardrails) and other aerial moving platforms, such as cherry pickers (which require fall restriction or arrest systems).
The administration can levy fines of up to $2000 for non-serious violations, $7000 for hazards that pose or caused a threat to worker safety, and up to $70,000 for the worst offenses, called “willful” violations, where the builder knows about but recklessly disregards hazards to worker health and safety. “If you have a willful citation issue in connection with a fatality or a hazard directly related, Labor Department attorneys would discuss matter with a US attorney’s office,” Ted Fitzgerald, the department’s Region 2 press officer, said. “OSHA can’t bring up litigation ourselves.” Fitzgerald said criminal prosecutions and jail time are very rare, and was unable to provide statistics by the time of publication.
“There are very good fall regulations, especially on scaffolding,” Donovan said. The problem, he said, wasn’t in the regulations, but in their enforcement. “OSHA is so thin in terms of manpower, they react instead of act. They react well, but I don’t know if they can really enforce” the regulations.
Occupational safety and health specialist Tony Straka agrees that while federal and some city regulations are good, enforcement is lacking. Straka works for the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor-based non-profit coalition advocating for workplace safety, and has testified on their behalf before state and city hearings regarding construction safety. Straka said the number of OSHA inspectors nation-wide was alarmingly low, down to 818 in 2007 from 1082 in 2003 and 1271 in 1990, as is the number of Department of Buildings inspectors, which rose from approximately 50 in 2006 to about 75 last year. “The staffing of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration continues to be well below what it should be to ensure safe and healthy conditions in the workplace,” Straka said before an emergency meeting of the New York City Council Committee on Housing and Buildings on February 4. “Despite OSHA’s emphasis on construction hazards, and its best efforts to perform its mission to the best of its ability, it is clear its ability to enforce its regulations is limited by its limited staff.” The same, he said, goes for Buildings.
With OSHA’s low inspector count, the problem of construction safety becomes a national problem. Taking a look across the country in four major cities with building booms between 2003 and 2006, for when the most recent data is available, it is clear that New York’s problem of falling hardhats is not unique to the five boroughs.
Dallas/Ft. Worth, which is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the nation according to the Census Bureau and was in the midst of a building boom at the same time as New York’s, recorded an average of under 7 falling deaths per year between 2003 and 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. New York City had an average twice that, on par with Chicagoland’s 14.25. Miami had one of the hottest high-rise markets in the country, and recorded an average of 12 – but in a metropolitan area less than half the size of Chicago’s or New York City. The average number of fatal construction falls in New York per capita was 63% above Dallas/Ft. Worth’s, and a third higher than the national average. Metro Miami’s was more than twice the national average. In Dallas/Ft. Worth, the safest metro area for construction falls in this unscientific study, OSHA is the only law protecting against falls in construction, whereas in New York, a labyrinth of regulations hasn’t slowed the death rate.
New York’s Regulations Tangle
Lawyer Nicholas Wise knows New York’s construction safety laws as well as anyone. He has worked at the personal injury firm Weitz & Luxenberg for more than a decade, and has won millions of dollars for his clients. A recent case involved a construction worker working at “a fancy new hotel” in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan. The construction company sent the worker to the roof of a building which was being stripped and incorporated into the new hotel, where he was to pick away at the roof made of old asbestos. He was provided a “simple safety line” - a fall restriction system that insufficient for the work and the risk involved. “Lo and behold, he’s chopping through the roof on which he’s standing, goes through the roof, down to the next floor, and lands with legs on either side, his crotch on an i-beam,” Wise said. The worker fractured part of his spine. The safety line was at fault, Wise said, and the client won the case. “If they given him a proper line he would have fallen two or three feet, and he would have been fine. You have to give people the right equipment.”
To win the case, Wise used a little-known provision of New York City law called Section 240(1) of the Labor Law, which requires construction companies to provide their workers with proper safety equipment when working at a height. “It is a very helpful law, and as a result of it, owners and general contractors go to much greater lengths to make sure they do have those protections,” Wise said. Another part of the law, Section 241(6), refers to yet another set of city construction safety laws, the New York Industrial code. “You can base a cause of action on that, but you have to show a violation of the industrial code,” Wise said. “The ironic part of that is, no one really looks to the industrial code. They look to OSHA, because they haven’t amended it or changed [the code] since the mid-70s. But you can’t predicate a liability case just on OSHA.”
Thus a key part of New York’s web of construction safety laws allows injured workers or the families of killed workers to sue in civil courts, but Wise said that the Labor Laws like Section 240(1) have been weakened by the judicial system. “What has been happening in the past five to eight years, is the courts have eviscerating the protection, they’ve been narrowing when it applies,” he said. “It used to give [workers] full protection.” New York is the only jurisdiction in America with such laws on the books.
It is no surprise the Department of Buildings also has its safety regulations in the city’s building’s code, which is unique to New York among the cities studied for this story. The department has been under constant siege from construction and public safety advocates as well as local and national politicians calling for greater regulations. The most recent additions to the building code’s safety laws were prompted by deaths in the industry, particularly scaffolding accidents. When Ramiro Jara died in November 2006, the city created an emergency task force, which consulted with city officials, representatives of labor and building companies, and members of the occupational safety policy community, including Tony Straka. The Scaffolding Workers Safety Task Force provided the city with thirteen recommendations, all of which were implemented in some form into city law. The so-called Scaffolding Laws now require companies to have a license in order to use a suspended scaffold, as well as notifying the city when scaffolds will be erected, used and dismantled. This is on top of earlier scaffolding regulations in the building code from 2005, which provided similar but more stringent regulations than OSHA’s rules.
During the latest spate of construction falls, particularly the death of Yurly Vanchytsky in January, prompted calls for new regulations on concrete work. Vanchytsky died when the wooden molds holding the concrete he was pouring collapsed, sending him plunging to his death.
The alarm at City Hall was palpable. “The construction industry in general, and concrete operations in particular, need more regulation,” former Commissioner Lancaster said in her prepared remarks at the February 4 emergency meeting.. Lancaster recommended legislation requiring general and concrete contractors to be licensed through the city and safety managers to oversee concrete operations during high-rise construction. “The impetus here is the absence of an accountability scheme amongst the contractors on a job site,” department spokesperson Carly Sullivan said.
Still, other politicians said the recommendations were not enough. In an e-mail, 2nd District Councilwoman Rosie Mendez called the new regulations a good start, but “the proposals are too narrowly focused, and they need to be expanded to include preventative measures for the wide range of construction accidents we’ve seen across the city,” she said.
The city had its most vocal criticism from Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer, who called for an overhaul of the department. Stringer said that Buildings had “lost the confidence” of his constituents, and needed to spread its investigatory powers across other city agencies, including an Office of Special Enforcement which he wanted created under the Office of Management and Budget, the mayor’s own oversight agency.
But while politicians and lawyers disagree on the causes of New York’s high rise construction safety crisis, construction safety experts insist that the problem, at least in part, is one of regulation. “I think the point is that they’re the stretched so thin,” Donovan said of Buildings.
Closing his speech before the February 4 meeting, Straka said that stronger enforcement with stiffer penalties would make the industry much safer. “If an employer knew there was a substantial likelihood of being criminally prosecuted – and going to jail – for taking shortcuts with other people’s lives, it would be certain to get his attention and would be certain to greatly reduce the number of construction accidents and fatalities in New York City,” he said.
Comparison with Toronto
Carlos Figueira has worked in the Ontario construction industry since he was 17. He’s now with the Construction Safety Association of Ontario, a respected industry-based non-profit promoting worker safety, and after thirty-three years of construction labor and consulting, he is running special projects for the association that claims Ontario has “the best construction safety record in North America, possibly the best in the world.”
Ontario’s capital, Toronto, has had as big a boom in the construction industry as any on continent, yet has had fewer construction deaths than any of the cities profiled in this story between 2003 and 2006. Toronto’s construction safety regulations are governed by the province (a more powerful equivalent of a state government). “Ontario has been known to have probably the most stringent regulations compared to other jurisdictions within Canada,” Figueira said, which “often look to Ontario.”
The Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1978 covers regulations that are broadly equivalent to those in OSHA, with few exceptions. Ontario’s regulations are thorough and detailed, if not as long and meticulous. (American regulations are a total of 66 pages, including guidelines and suggestions for construction safety planning and guardrail and scaffold construction, whereas Ontario’s legislation fits on eight pages including briefer suggestions.) Fall protection legislation comes into effect at 3 m (10’), or at 1.2 m (4’) if there is a risk of falling into a hazard below, such as a hazardous substance, a wheelbarrow path, operating machinery and or water. Unlike the US regulations, guardrails between 0.9 m and 1.1 m high (~2.5’ to ~3’) are required first and foremost, but if they cannot be provided for practical or safety reasons, the worker must have a restraint, fall arrest, or safety net system in place. These systems must meet exacting standards provided by the Canadian Standards Association, an independent industry standards association, as well as those explicitly listed in the legislation itself. If the worker has access to the edge of an unprotected height, under certain circumstances, such as work over a bridge or on scaffolding, there must be a guardrail at a height above 2.4 m (8’). In 2001, the Ontario government added a requirement to adequately train workers in fall protection systems.
On top of the regulations, the Ministry of Labour requires all contractors to register with the Workplace Safety Insurance Board, a public insurer and occupational safety training and education agency under the aegis of the ministry.
Penalties for non-compliance are harsh. Corporations can be responsible for fines of up to C$500,000, and individuals can incur fines up to C$50,000 and twelve months of jail time. The Ontario Ministry of Labour publishes all recent fines above C$5000 for individuals and $50,000 for corporations, and has 90 listed on its website for 2007 and 26 so far this year as of May 1. In April, Stelco, Inc received C$400,000 in fines, and one builder, Ion Cenuser, was sentenced to seven days in jail and fined $3000 under OHSA for pushing a ministry inspector. A March Law Times News article said “the ministry is pressing hard for jail time in such regulatory matters.” Bruce Skeaff, spokesperson from the ministry, said jailings remain “extremely rare,” Cenuser’s case being the only one he can recall in his years with the MOL. “Supervisors have been given jail time because of clear negligence,” Figueira said. “They definitely neglected their responsibilities.”
Importantly, unlike OSHA, Ontario’s regulations have a built-in mechanism for allowing civil cases for negligence under the occupational safety law, a measure that fills the gap left by a narrowing Section 240(1) in New York’s jurisprudence. Also, at the federal level, Bill C-45, called the Westway Law after the 1992 Westway mining disaster in the province of Nova Scotia that killed 26 workers, allows criminal prosecution of builders found extremely negligent in the injury or death of their workers. The law came into effect in 2004, and found its first conviction in the province of Quebec in December 2007, where a worker was crushed to death in 2005 and his employer was charged under the law.
The Enforcement Gap
Figueira said that key to Ontario’s worker safety success is a responsive legislature and proper enforcement and inspection. “If we continue to have accidents in a certain area because of a certain task they’re doing, they’ll implement legislation,” he said of the provincial government. “For example, fall protection [regulations were] not as stringent as it was six years ago, back in 2002. They made amendments to the act requiring certain things, including mandatory training.” Figueira said that Ontario added 200 additional inspectors in 2005, a fact the ministry confirmed.
While the number of Ontario construction deaths and fall fatalities have held steady during the building boom in Toronto and other major cities, American numbers have grown slightly, and New York’s have grown drastically. And while the US Department of Labor has not been able to produce the number of its occupational safety inspectors in New York, the national numbers alone are telling: OSHA had a total of 818 inspectors in 2007 nation-wide for an industry with over 7 million workers according to the Census Bureau, whereas Ontario – with a population of less than 13 million and 405,000 construction workers – has more than half that number, 430. The Department of Buildings has an additional 75 inspectors approximately, but they are responsible for enforcing the entire building code, of which only a small part is concerned with safety.
Michael Donovan said he’s “not surprised” at the disparity of inspectors: the results speak for themselves. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration did not provide a comment in time for the publication of this article.
When asked if his province’s regulations were enough to protect workers, Carlos Figueira hesitated. “I’m not sure how to answer the question.” Figueira, said. He then added, “For the current time, yeah. But as things were changing, practices were changing, and you have different people coming in. But legislation comes upon actions. If we continue to have accidents in a certain area because of a certain task they’re doing, they’ll implement legislation.”
Yet despite his confidence in his government, Figueira said one thing was for sure. “We constantly, continuously have fatalities because of falls.”
-30-
>> NYCOSH safety expert Tony Straka, and prepared remarks at a February 4, 2008 emergency meeting of the city council committee on housing and construction.
>> Dept. of Labor region 2 press head Ted Fitzgerald
New York, May 2 -- Ramiro Jara, 25, of Bushwick, who six years before came to America from Ecuador in search of opportunity, fell 15 stories to his death at the Union Square construction site where he worked. According to reports, Jara unclipped his harness from his safety line and attempted to cross between two scaffolds, 25 feet apart, suspended from the roof of the building he was working on above busy morning traffic on November 2, 2006. He never made it. Instead, he slipped and fell to his death while walking along the building’s ledge. He landed on a platform one story above the ground steps away from Fifth Avenue.
The New York City Department of Buildings called Jara’s death an accident, but in the same breath announced an array of safety regulations that Jara’s employer, Town Restoration Services, had violated at the site. The builder did not have a licence for the rigging the scaffolding hung from, a licenced rigger or a designated foreman on site, nor paperwork showing that workers had been trained for the rigs.
Jara’s death was not unique to New York or the rest of the country. Just this January, Brooklynite Yurly Vanchytsky, 53, was decapitated after falling 42 stories from the top of the nearly complete Trump Soho tower on Spring St., where he was pouring concrete, and only two weeks later, Queens resident Jose Palacios, fell 12 stories to his death after his scaffolding collapsed in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. And on April 15th, Kevin Kelly, 25, of Queens, died after falling nine floors when his safety strap failed while installing windows on a high rise condominium on the East Side. All three job sites were riddled with safety violations. “Safety is not a priority for the Buildings Department,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York’s 14th district, which includes the site of Kelly’s death.
Public outcry continued, and the city has reacted haphazardly. In March, a city inspector was jailed for his negligent role in a crane collapse that killed seven people amidst reports of corruption from the city’s press. But Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer called for the creation of a new city agency to take over construction site safty, saying the DOB still “doesn’t get it.” The City sustained enough pressure to force out Buildings Commissioner Patricia J. Lancaster, a former engineer who herself called for more regulation. During her term, construction deaths steadily rose from 19 in 2003 to 38 – 24 involving falls – in 2006. Already thirteen died this year as of Kelly’s death.
In New York City’s still booming construction market, falls account for more than half of all construction site fatalities. But a non-scientific investigation of falling deaths in construction in major cities across the country with building booms and the regulations and enforcement which apply there show that while New York has a third more construction fatalities than the national average, it is not alone. And while city officials have received enormous pressure to improve safety laws, a detailed comparison between New York City and a jurisdiction which boasts the best construction safety record on the continent shows that the difference may not be in the law, but how the law is enforced.
A National Problem
Michael Donovan is more concerned than most about construction safety in the city. “Walking down the street, I cringe when I see scaffoldings at the tops of 40-story buildings,” the Manhattan-based Certified Industrial Hygienist said. “If I see grappling hooks over parapet walls, I wonder, how much did they check? Did they have a professional engineer sign off on it? Bricks break looks, or cinder blocks, and there you go.” Donovan has 20 years of experiences in worker safety issues, including those involving the cleanup at the World Trade Center after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Construction is the most dangerous industry for workers in America, and falls account for more than a third of all construction deaths. But at the national level, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, established in 1970, oversees stringent and respected safety standards for fall protection, which have been in place since 1979 and saw several significant revisions since then, requiring worker training and providing detailed guidelines among other additions.
“OSHA’s New York regional office has a strong inspection schedule to reduce injuries and fatalities in the local construction industry, as well as an ongoing aggressive campaign to educate employers and employees about the vital importance of promoting prevention through training,” George Chartier, OSHA spokesperson, said in an e-mail.
OSHA fall protection regulations kick in anytime fall distances 6 feet or higher are involved. They require one or a combination of three systems to protect workers: Guardrails to prevent falls, safety nets to prevent serious injury or death due to falls, and personal fall arrest or fall restriction devices, straps, cables and anchoring attached to the worker’s mandatory harness which either restrict the distance a worker would fall or break the fall, absorbing the energy of a fall to prevent, both systems designed to leave the worker dangling in mid-air but otherwise safe. The regulations are incredibly detailed, comprising over 60 pages of requirements such as the required height of guardrails (39-45”) and their proper installation, the maximum width of safety net webbing (6”) and minimum tensile strength of the border rope (5000 lbs), and the “maximum acceleration distance” for the shock absorber of a fall arrest system (42”) and even the materials they can be made from (steel cable or nylon). The administration also has strict and detailed regulations regarding the erection, use and dismantling of scaffolding, as well as its design and the fall protection systems that are required on scaffolding (guardrails) and other aerial moving platforms, such as cherry pickers (which require fall restriction or arrest systems).
The administration can levy fines of up to $2000 for non-serious violations, $7000 for hazards that pose or caused a threat to worker safety, and up to $70,000 for the worst offenses, called “willful” violations, where the builder knows about but recklessly disregards hazards to worker health and safety. “If you have a willful citation issue in connection with a fatality or a hazard directly related, Labor Department attorneys would discuss matter with a US attorney’s office,” Ted Fitzgerald, the department’s Region 2 press officer, said. “OSHA can’t bring up litigation ourselves.” Fitzgerald said criminal prosecutions and jail time are very rare, and was unable to provide statistics by the time of publication.
“There are very good fall regulations, especially on scaffolding,” Donovan said. The problem, he said, wasn’t in the regulations, but in their enforcement. “OSHA is so thin in terms of manpower, they react instead of act. They react well, but I don’t know if they can really enforce” the regulations.
Occupational safety and health specialist Tony Straka agrees that while federal and some city regulations are good, enforcement is lacking. Straka works for the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor-based non-profit coalition advocating for workplace safety, and has testified on their behalf before state and city hearings regarding construction safety. Straka said the number of OSHA inspectors nation-wide was alarmingly low, down to 818 in 2007 from 1082 in 2003 and 1271 in 1990, as is the number of Department of Buildings inspectors, which rose from approximately 50 in 2006 to about 75 last year. “The staffing of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration continues to be well below what it should be to ensure safe and healthy conditions in the workplace,” Straka said before an emergency meeting of the New York City Council Committee on Housing and Buildings on February 4. “Despite OSHA’s emphasis on construction hazards, and its best efforts to perform its mission to the best of its ability, it is clear its ability to enforce its regulations is limited by its limited staff.” The same, he said, goes for Buildings.
With OSHA’s low inspector count, the problem of construction safety becomes a national problem. Taking a look across the country in four major cities with building booms between 2003 and 2006, for when the most recent data is available, it is clear that New York’s problem of falling hardhats is not unique to the five boroughs.
Dallas/Ft. Worth, which is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the nation according to the Census Bureau and was in the midst of a building boom at the same time as New York’s, recorded an average of under 7 falling deaths per year between 2003 and 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. New York City had an average twice that, on par with Chicagoland’s 14.25. Miami had one of the hottest high-rise markets in the country, and recorded an average of 12 – but in a metropolitan area less than half the size of Chicago’s or New York City. The average number of fatal construction falls in New York per capita was 63% above Dallas/Ft. Worth’s, and a third higher than the national average. Metro Miami’s was more than twice the national average. In Dallas/Ft. Worth, the safest metro area for construction falls in this unscientific study, OSHA is the only law protecting against falls in construction, whereas in New York, a labyrinth of regulations hasn’t slowed the death rate.
New York’s Regulations Tangle
Lawyer Nicholas Wise knows New York’s construction safety laws as well as anyone. He has worked at the personal injury firm Weitz & Luxenberg for more than a decade, and has won millions of dollars for his clients. A recent case involved a construction worker working at “a fancy new hotel” in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan. The construction company sent the worker to the roof of a building which was being stripped and incorporated into the new hotel, where he was to pick away at the roof made of old asbestos. He was provided a “simple safety line” - a fall restriction system that insufficient for the work and the risk involved. “Lo and behold, he’s chopping through the roof on which he’s standing, goes through the roof, down to the next floor, and lands with legs on either side, his crotch on an i-beam,” Wise said. The worker fractured part of his spine. The safety line was at fault, Wise said, and the client won the case. “If they given him a proper line he would have fallen two or three feet, and he would have been fine. You have to give people the right equipment.”
To win the case, Wise used a little-known provision of New York City law called Section 240(1) of the Labor Law, which requires construction companies to provide their workers with proper safety equipment when working at a height. “It is a very helpful law, and as a result of it, owners and general contractors go to much greater lengths to make sure they do have those protections,” Wise said. Another part of the law, Section 241(6), refers to yet another set of city construction safety laws, the New York Industrial code. “You can base a cause of action on that, but you have to show a violation of the industrial code,” Wise said. “The ironic part of that is, no one really looks to the industrial code. They look to OSHA, because they haven’t amended it or changed [the code] since the mid-70s. But you can’t predicate a liability case just on OSHA.”
Thus a key part of New York’s web of construction safety laws allows injured workers or the families of killed workers to sue in civil courts, but Wise said that the Labor Laws like Section 240(1) have been weakened by the judicial system. “What has been happening in the past five to eight years, is the courts have eviscerating the protection, they’ve been narrowing when it applies,” he said. “It used to give [workers] full protection.” New York is the only jurisdiction in America with such laws on the books.
It is no surprise the Department of Buildings also has its safety regulations in the city’s building’s code, which is unique to New York among the cities studied for this story. The department has been under constant siege from construction and public safety advocates as well as local and national politicians calling for greater regulations. The most recent additions to the building code’s safety laws were prompted by deaths in the industry, particularly scaffolding accidents. When Ramiro Jara died in November 2006, the city created an emergency task force, which consulted with city officials, representatives of labor and building companies, and members of the occupational safety policy community, including Tony Straka. The Scaffolding Workers Safety Task Force provided the city with thirteen recommendations, all of which were implemented in some form into city law. The so-called Scaffolding Laws now require companies to have a license in order to use a suspended scaffold, as well as notifying the city when scaffolds will be erected, used and dismantled. This is on top of earlier scaffolding regulations in the building code from 2005, which provided similar but more stringent regulations than OSHA’s rules.
During the latest spate of construction falls, particularly the death of Yurly Vanchytsky in January, prompted calls for new regulations on concrete work. Vanchytsky died when the wooden molds holding the concrete he was pouring collapsed, sending him plunging to his death.
The alarm at City Hall was palpable. “The construction industry in general, and concrete operations in particular, need more regulation,” former Commissioner Lancaster said in her prepared remarks at the February 4 emergency meeting.. Lancaster recommended legislation requiring general and concrete contractors to be licensed through the city and safety managers to oversee concrete operations during high-rise construction. “The impetus here is the absence of an accountability scheme amongst the contractors on a job site,” department spokesperson Carly Sullivan said.
Still, other politicians said the recommendations were not enough. In an e-mail, 2nd District Councilwoman Rosie Mendez called the new regulations a good start, but “the proposals are too narrowly focused, and they need to be expanded to include preventative measures for the wide range of construction accidents we’ve seen across the city,” she said.
The city had its most vocal criticism from Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer, who called for an overhaul of the department. Stringer said that Buildings had “lost the confidence” of his constituents, and needed to spread its investigatory powers across other city agencies, including an Office of Special Enforcement which he wanted created under the Office of Management and Budget, the mayor’s own oversight agency.
But while politicians and lawyers disagree on the causes of New York’s high rise construction safety crisis, construction safety experts insist that the problem, at least in part, is one of regulation. “I think the point is that they’re the stretched so thin,” Donovan said of Buildings.
Closing his speech before the February 4 meeting, Straka said that stronger enforcement with stiffer penalties would make the industry much safer. “If an employer knew there was a substantial likelihood of being criminally prosecuted – and going to jail – for taking shortcuts with other people’s lives, it would be certain to get his attention and would be certain to greatly reduce the number of construction accidents and fatalities in New York City,” he said.
Comparison with Toronto
Carlos Figueira has worked in the Ontario construction industry since he was 17. He’s now with the Construction Safety Association of Ontario, a respected industry-based non-profit promoting worker safety, and after thirty-three years of construction labor and consulting, he is running special projects for the association that claims Ontario has “the best construction safety record in North America, possibly the best in the world.”
Ontario’s capital, Toronto, has had as big a boom in the construction industry as any on continent, yet has had fewer construction deaths than any of the cities profiled in this story between 2003 and 2006. Toronto’s construction safety regulations are governed by the province (a more powerful equivalent of a state government). “Ontario has been known to have probably the most stringent regulations compared to other jurisdictions within Canada,” Figueira said, which “often look to Ontario.”
The Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1978 covers regulations that are broadly equivalent to those in OSHA, with few exceptions. Ontario’s regulations are thorough and detailed, if not as long and meticulous. (American regulations are a total of 66 pages, including guidelines and suggestions for construction safety planning and guardrail and scaffold construction, whereas Ontario’s legislation fits on eight pages including briefer suggestions.) Fall protection legislation comes into effect at 3 m (10’), or at 1.2 m (4’) if there is a risk of falling into a hazard below, such as a hazardous substance, a wheelbarrow path, operating machinery and or water. Unlike the US regulations, guardrails between 0.9 m and 1.1 m high (~2.5’ to ~3’) are required first and foremost, but if they cannot be provided for practical or safety reasons, the worker must have a restraint, fall arrest, or safety net system in place. These systems must meet exacting standards provided by the Canadian Standards Association, an independent industry standards association, as well as those explicitly listed in the legislation itself. If the worker has access to the edge of an unprotected height, under certain circumstances, such as work over a bridge or on scaffolding, there must be a guardrail at a height above 2.4 m (8’). In 2001, the Ontario government added a requirement to adequately train workers in fall protection systems.
On top of the regulations, the Ministry of Labour requires all contractors to register with the Workplace Safety Insurance Board, a public insurer and occupational safety training and education agency under the aegis of the ministry.
Penalties for non-compliance are harsh. Corporations can be responsible for fines of up to C$500,000, and individuals can incur fines up to C$50,000 and twelve months of jail time. The Ontario Ministry of Labour publishes all recent fines above C$5000 for individuals and $50,000 for corporations, and has 90 listed on its website for 2007 and 26 so far this year as of May 1. In April, Stelco, Inc received C$400,000 in fines, and one builder, Ion Cenuser, was sentenced to seven days in jail and fined $3000 under OHSA for pushing a ministry inspector. A March Law Times News article said “the ministry is pressing hard for jail time in such regulatory matters.” Bruce Skeaff, spokesperson from the ministry, said jailings remain “extremely rare,” Cenuser’s case being the only one he can recall in his years with the MOL. “Supervisors have been given jail time because of clear negligence,” Figueira said. “They definitely neglected their responsibilities.”
Importantly, unlike OSHA, Ontario’s regulations have a built-in mechanism for allowing civil cases for negligence under the occupational safety law, a measure that fills the gap left by a narrowing Section 240(1) in New York’s jurisprudence. Also, at the federal level, Bill C-45, called the Westway Law after the 1992 Westway mining disaster in the province of Nova Scotia that killed 26 workers, allows criminal prosecution of builders found extremely negligent in the injury or death of their workers. The law came into effect in 2004, and found its first conviction in the province of Quebec in December 2007, where a worker was crushed to death in 2005 and his employer was charged under the law.
The Enforcement Gap
Figueira said that key to Ontario’s worker safety success is a responsive legislature and proper enforcement and inspection. “If we continue to have accidents in a certain area because of a certain task they’re doing, they’ll implement legislation,” he said of the provincial government. “For example, fall protection [regulations were] not as stringent as it was six years ago, back in 2002. They made amendments to the act requiring certain things, including mandatory training.” Figueira said that Ontario added 200 additional inspectors in 2005, a fact the ministry confirmed.
While the number of Ontario construction deaths and fall fatalities have held steady during the building boom in Toronto and other major cities, American numbers have grown slightly, and New York’s have grown drastically. And while the US Department of Labor has not been able to produce the number of its occupational safety inspectors in New York, the national numbers alone are telling: OSHA had a total of 818 inspectors in 2007 nation-wide for an industry with over 7 million workers according to the Census Bureau, whereas Ontario – with a population of less than 13 million and 405,000 construction workers – has more than half that number, 430. The Department of Buildings has an additional 75 inspectors approximately, but they are responsible for enforcing the entire building code, of which only a small part is concerned with safety.
Michael Donovan said he’s “not surprised” at the disparity of inspectors: the results speak for themselves. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration did not provide a comment in time for the publication of this article.
When asked if his province’s regulations were enough to protect workers, Carlos Figueira hesitated. “I’m not sure how to answer the question.” Figueira, said. He then added, “For the current time, yeah. But as things were changing, practices were changing, and you have different people coming in. But legislation comes upon actions. If we continue to have accidents in a certain area because of a certain task they’re doing, they’ll implement legislation.”
Yet despite his confidence in his government, Figueira said one thing was for sure. “We constantly, continuously have fatalities because of falls.”
-30-
>> NYCOSH safety expert Tony Straka, and prepared remarks at a February 4, 2008 emergency meeting of the city council committee on housing and construction.
>> Dept. of Labor region 2 press head Ted Fitzgerald
>> George Chartier, national spokesperson for OSHA
>> Construction Safety Associaiton of Ontario Carlos Figuiera
>> Ontario Ministry of Labour Bruce Skeaff
>> Personal Injury lawyer Mike Wise
>> NY-based Certified Industrial Hygeinist Michael Donovan
>> Fred Kotler, NYS head of the AFL-CIO
>> NYC Councilor Rosie Mendez
>> Department of Buildings spokesperson Carly Sullivan (before Lancaster quit)
>> former DoB Commissioner Patricia J. Lancaster’s prepared remarks at the emergency meeting on February 4
>> “Prosecutors treating regulatory matters more harshly.” The Law Times, March 31, 2008 http://www.lawtimesnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3960
>> Ontario OHSA regulations
>> US OHSA regulations
>> DOB regulations & building code
>> Building codes for Chicago, Miami/Dade (Florida), Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Toronto
>> personal injury lawyer Nicholas Wise, of Weitz & Luxenburg
Liability or the Deepest Pocket- Will Post 9/11 Suits Help Anyone but the Plaintiffs?
By Guelda Voien
Lawsuits are the American way. Even as we vilify them, we can thank lawsuits for seatbelts, fires escapes, even mandatory heating in our apartments.
The tragedy of 9/11 brought more than death, destruction and sadness. It brought up a number of questions. Questions ranged from whether or not the government knew about the attacks, to whether or not they grossly mishandled the clean up. When there are questions, there are lawsuits.
While one can dispute the matter of guilt, disparage the idea of gaining money or recognition from tragedy, and admit that no lawsuit will change what happened that day, lawsuits remain a very effective means of changing how entities behave. This is what the litigants in some post 9/11 lawsuits claim to want, but, as always with an event for which there is no precedent, the legal space is difficult to parse.
“The system is full of holes to this day,” Stephen Gale, a counterterrorism expert at the University of Pennsylvania, has said of the United States’ airport security. If we really want to have airtight safety when we fly “we'd have to start by looking at the best model out there, El-Al of Israel,” Gale has said in interviews, “and I don't think airlines would want to put up with that. We can't have airlines going around profiling people."
If a safer way of flying was available, but not implemented, should airlines be held accountable for deaths from hijackings that may have been preventable?
Contractors, airlines, the city of New York, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Port Authority, the Federal Aviation Administration and the government of Saudi Arabia have all been litigants in claims brought by victims, their families, and workers in the 95 complaints that were filed after 9/11. Of the original 95 lawsuits on behalf of 96 victims, 53 cases were settled right away. Others, including the large class-action suits by first responders, against the city, Port Authority and EPA, remain unresolved.
For some victims and some attorneys involved in 9/11 cases, the court that matters most now is that of public opinion. Others feel that their exclusion from the compensation fund was unfair and are seeking a legal route to recompense.
For Joel Kupferman, of the Environmental Law and Justice Project, the goal of the suits is noble, not predatory. “I don’t want the head of the EPA lying to us. I don’t want bad people promoted for leaving a disaster like this. I want medical monitoring and proper clean up for people [who are at risk for dust inhalation,]” he says.
On March 27th, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld an earlier decision by Federal District Court in Manhattan. This will allow one major case against the city, which has more than 4,000 plaintiffs, to go forward. This means that the city is not totally immune from suits by individuals just because 9/11 was an extraordinary circumstance.
Kupferman says toxic tort cases are vitally important to improving safety, but sadly often carry a gag order. This prevents others whom the toxins might affect from learning about the situation and about the legal and environmental remedies available to them. Both the amount of the payout and the exact details of the case are often kept secret as a condition of the settlement.
The city has admitted that the World Trade Center’s destruction sent aloft dust that has made people sick. Mayor Bloomberg has asked that the compensation fund be re-opened to allow first responders, though not your average resident, to be compensated for their suffering.
However, some litigants claim not to be interested in compensation, but rather in responsibility. They are interested in the city and various federal agencies’ responsibility for the children who were allowed to go back to school two months after 9/11, when the dust had barely settled, for the city inspectors who visited sites all over lower Manhattan without face masks because the city was afraid of alarming people, for the fact that although the circumstances that 9/11 produced were totally unforeseeable, the city of New York had some due diligence to perform in the interests of its loyal citizens. Many people feel that the city failed its people in the wake of 9/11, and seven years later, we hear very little from this minority of New Yorkers.
“It’s not as though [they] got black lung,” says Adam McClelland, who lived in Soho during the attacks, and went to the World Trade Center site immediately after to hand out coffee to firefighters for days. “It’s just New York, it was an extraordinary circumstance, and it’s gotten a lot of attention,” he says. McClelland does not recall having any respiratory problems after the attack, but admits that “everyone is different, it depends on who you are, and we still don’t know what will happen in 15 years.”
The city has been sued by thousands of responding workers in various capacities. Many of these are first responders, but the litigants also include residents of lower Manhattan who claim the city should have advised them not to return to their homes while toxic dust still billowed in the air. The structural engineers who volunteered for the city, to assist fire fighters in assessing 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,” according to attorney Paul DiNapoli. The engineers should have told people to wear masks. Because of their expertise, they ought to know better, is the logic. McClelland disagrees. “I don’t think that’s fair,” he says.
The EPA is also a litigant in a suit by the Environmental Law and Justice Project. Lower Manhattan should not have been called inhabitable for some time, according to Kupferman. The city, Port Authority and EPA are now liable for failing to give residents, workers, and students at Stuyvesant High School the appropriate information to make adequately informed decisions about their health, according to the suit.
Kupferman felt federal jurisdiction was the easiest to go after, and so his suit focuses on the EPA, but, as he says, “there are 3 or 4 different layers of government here” that one could construe as responsible for your safety in an event such as 9/11. “You would think that would help you be safer,” says Kupferman, “but it was the opposite.”
However, are government entities just the deepest pocket in a web of liability surrounding an unprecedented tragedy? Some attorneys in the cases firmly assert that litigation is the only real way to navigate safety jurisdiction. Kupferman believes that laziness, incompetence and greed were the real issues. He claims that internal correspondence at city government shows that economic interests pushed the re-opening of lower Manhattan, and that warnings from the EPA were ignored by the city. He also alleges that hired experts, such as doctors and engineers, were told to not to find the area dangerous, by city officials, who hoped to mitigate the disaster’s impact on the city’s economy.
Questions remain as to the good faith of post 9/11 litigants, however. DiNapoli, a lawyer assisting in the first-responders’ case, has recently come under scrutiny because of alleged abuse of settlement funds dispersed after he won his first big class-action suit- the “fen-fen” diet pill case. Although the actual numbers are protected by gag order, many believe the “fen-fen” suit resulted in a payout of over $1 billion. DiNapoli has said publicly that he wants settlements for his clients in the 9/11 case. Napoli, Bern, and Ripka LLP, his firm, says they need to settle in order to break even because they have already spent millions on expensive medical research for their 9/11 case.
Michael Eatroff worked on a first responders’ case against the city and the Port Authority. He says his firm “represented different workers from different agencies,” in a class action against the city “for all emergency workers who worked at the site after it fell and within the first two years.” During three and four hour depositions Eatroff saw workers thoroughly questioned about physical symptoms, mental and emotional problems, and respiratory problems. “City attorneys wanted to show that there were other causes of our clients’ respiratory problems. Emotional problems were discussed also; spouses were asked how their relationships had changed,” said Eatroff.
They claim to suffer from chronic respiratory problems, and claim that these were caused by asbestos, not the mere dust that the city said was, in Rudy Giuliani’s words, “just the World Trade Center cough.” The city did not issue protective gear, and the vast majority of the people involved in the suit were city employees. Kupferman says that in the aftermath of the attacks, the city’s official reason for not issuing masks was because “the city did not want to alarm people.”
Research physicians, such as Robin Herbert, of Mount Sinai Medical Center, have said publicly that asbestos, dust and fiberglass could still have been an issue for as long as two years in lower Manhattan. Some first responders “continue to have persistent upper and lower respiratory symptomatology — coughs and sinus problems,” Herbert said in an NBC interview in 2003.
Even if all the safety regulations during clean up had been strictly followed, the levels of asbestos and other toxins might still have been too high to be safe or legal, especially for children. However, the private contractors hired to dispose of 9/11 debris did not always follow the regulations, as the contractors themselves have admitted. Representatives of the company would later state at a public meeting that they would have needed to have “workers' mothers on site to admonish them to [effectively] comply,” with the safety regulations the city stipulated.
Students at Stuyvesant High School were allowed to return to school in October, although studies have shown lower Manhattan may have been a toxic site for up to two years after 9/11 in particular places, especially the elementary school that the trucks stopped in front of when carrying debris from the site. Independent testing has shown that the material the trucks carried contained levels of asbestos and fiberglass that were unlawful to transport through public streets, according to Kupferman. Responsibility for the procedure is shared by Port Authority, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the City and the EPA.
“The real problem with port authority is that they are being lax right now during reconstruction,” says Kupferman. The Port Authority and LMDC are unique entities: hybrids of the public and private, staffed and funded by both government and private enterprise. This causes unique jurisdictional conflicts and as well as a murky landscape of motives. It is not unreasonable to assume that business interests would be part of the decision-making for the LMDC. Activist Sally Regenhard, of the Skyscraper Safety Coalition, says was “a massive failure at the federal, city, state and definitely the Port-Authority level.”
All that was decided in the most recent legal episode was that in fact the city’s immunity would have to be decided on a case by case basis. How other entities will fare is left to be seen. On Wednesday April 30th, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was found liable for damages incurred in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, according to the New York Times.
Detective James Zadroga died in 2006 from respiratory failure linked to his work at the World Trade Center site. Mention of him still incites immediate controversy. Many people say it cannot be proven that he died from 9/11 dust, and even if he did, that certain equipment would have helped. But are people skeptical because they think his family is in search of the deepest pocket? Or because they are afraid to acknowledge how massive a public safety failure post-9/11 clean-up may have been?
Kupferman says the firemen he represents only wanted one thing. “They wanted someone to tell them ‘Don’t wash your clothes with your kids’ clothes,” he says. “What cuts across the left and the right is that people want the government to give the correct information.” And that seems reasonable. People want to be able to make decisions for themselves and their families independently, with all the available information, especially in a disaster.
Sources-
Michael Eatroff, Attorney- Patton Boggs LLP
Joel Kupferman, Attorney- New York Environmental Law and Justice Project
Stephen Gale, Associate Professor University of Pennsylvania- Department of Political Science, as quoted by salon.com
Paul DiNapoli, Attorney- Napoli, Bern, Ripka, LLP, as quoted in the New York Times
Sally Regenhard, CEO- Skyscraper Safety Campaign
Adam McClelland, filmmaker- Small Rebel Army Productions
Robin Herbert, Physician- Mount Sinai Medical Center, as quoted by NBC
Lawsuits are the American way. Even as we vilify them, we can thank lawsuits for seatbelts, fires escapes, even mandatory heating in our apartments.
The tragedy of 9/11 brought more than death, destruction and sadness. It brought up a number of questions. Questions ranged from whether or not the government knew about the attacks, to whether or not they grossly mishandled the clean up. When there are questions, there are lawsuits.
While one can dispute the matter of guilt, disparage the idea of gaining money or recognition from tragedy, and admit that no lawsuit will change what happened that day, lawsuits remain a very effective means of changing how entities behave. This is what the litigants in some post 9/11 lawsuits claim to want, but, as always with an event for which there is no precedent, the legal space is difficult to parse.
“The system is full of holes to this day,” Stephen Gale, a counterterrorism expert at the University of Pennsylvania, has said of the United States’ airport security. If we really want to have airtight safety when we fly “we'd have to start by looking at the best model out there, El-Al of Israel,” Gale has said in interviews, “and I don't think airlines would want to put up with that. We can't have airlines going around profiling people."
If a safer way of flying was available, but not implemented, should airlines be held accountable for deaths from hijackings that may have been preventable?
Contractors, airlines, the city of New York, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Port Authority, the Federal Aviation Administration and the government of Saudi Arabia have all been litigants in claims brought by victims, their families, and workers in the 95 complaints that were filed after 9/11. Of the original 95 lawsuits on behalf of 96 victims, 53 cases were settled right away. Others, including the large class-action suits by first responders, against the city, Port Authority and EPA, remain unresolved.
For some victims and some attorneys involved in 9/11 cases, the court that matters most now is that of public opinion. Others feel that their exclusion from the compensation fund was unfair and are seeking a legal route to recompense.
For Joel Kupferman, of the Environmental Law and Justice Project, the goal of the suits is noble, not predatory. “I don’t want the head of the EPA lying to us. I don’t want bad people promoted for leaving a disaster like this. I want medical monitoring and proper clean up for people [who are at risk for dust inhalation,]” he says.
On March 27th, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld an earlier decision by Federal District Court in Manhattan. This will allow one major case against the city, which has more than 4,000 plaintiffs, to go forward. This means that the city is not totally immune from suits by individuals just because 9/11 was an extraordinary circumstance.
Kupferman says toxic tort cases are vitally important to improving safety, but sadly often carry a gag order. This prevents others whom the toxins might affect from learning about the situation and about the legal and environmental remedies available to them. Both the amount of the payout and the exact details of the case are often kept secret as a condition of the settlement.
The city has admitted that the World Trade Center’s destruction sent aloft dust that has made people sick. Mayor Bloomberg has asked that the compensation fund be re-opened to allow first responders, though not your average resident, to be compensated for their suffering.
However, some litigants claim not to be interested in compensation, but rather in responsibility. They are interested in the city and various federal agencies’ responsibility for the children who were allowed to go back to school two months after 9/11, when the dust had barely settled, for the city inspectors who visited sites all over lower Manhattan without face masks because the city was afraid of alarming people, for the fact that although the circumstances that 9/11 produced were totally unforeseeable, the city of New York had some due diligence to perform in the interests of its loyal citizens. Many people feel that the city failed its people in the wake of 9/11, and seven years later, we hear very little from this minority of New Yorkers.
“It’s not as though [they] got black lung,” says Adam McClelland, who lived in Soho during the attacks, and went to the World Trade Center site immediately after to hand out coffee to firefighters for days. “It’s just New York, it was an extraordinary circumstance, and it’s gotten a lot of attention,” he says. McClelland does not recall having any respiratory problems after the attack, but admits that “everyone is different, it depends on who you are, and we still don’t know what will happen in 15 years.”
The city has been sued by thousands of responding workers in various capacities. Many of these are first responders, but the litigants also include residents of lower Manhattan who claim the city should have advised them not to return to their homes while toxic dust still billowed in the air. The structural engineers who volunteered for the city, to assist fire fighters in assessing 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,” according to attorney Paul DiNapoli. The engineers should have told people to wear masks. Because of their expertise, they ought to know better, is the logic. McClelland disagrees. “I don’t think that’s fair,” he says.
The EPA is also a litigant in a suit by the Environmental Law and Justice Project. Lower Manhattan should not have been called inhabitable for some time, according to Kupferman. The city, Port Authority and EPA are now liable for failing to give residents, workers, and students at Stuyvesant High School the appropriate information to make adequately informed decisions about their health, according to the suit.
Kupferman felt federal jurisdiction was the easiest to go after, and so his suit focuses on the EPA, but, as he says, “there are 3 or 4 different layers of government here” that one could construe as responsible for your safety in an event such as 9/11. “You would think that would help you be safer,” says Kupferman, “but it was the opposite.”
However, are government entities just the deepest pocket in a web of liability surrounding an unprecedented tragedy? Some attorneys in the cases firmly assert that litigation is the only real way to navigate safety jurisdiction. Kupferman believes that laziness, incompetence and greed were the real issues. He claims that internal correspondence at city government shows that economic interests pushed the re-opening of lower Manhattan, and that warnings from the EPA were ignored by the city. He also alleges that hired experts, such as doctors and engineers, were told to not to find the area dangerous, by city officials, who hoped to mitigate the disaster’s impact on the city’s economy.
Questions remain as to the good faith of post 9/11 litigants, however. DiNapoli, a lawyer assisting in the first-responders’ case, has recently come under scrutiny because of alleged abuse of settlement funds dispersed after he won his first big class-action suit- the “fen-fen” diet pill case. Although the actual numbers are protected by gag order, many believe the “fen-fen” suit resulted in a payout of over $1 billion. DiNapoli has said publicly that he wants settlements for his clients in the 9/11 case. Napoli, Bern, and Ripka LLP, his firm, says they need to settle in order to break even because they have already spent millions on expensive medical research for their 9/11 case.
Michael Eatroff worked on a first responders’ case against the city and the Port Authority. He says his firm “represented different workers from different agencies,” in a class action against the city “for all emergency workers who worked at the site after it fell and within the first two years.” During three and four hour depositions Eatroff saw workers thoroughly questioned about physical symptoms, mental and emotional problems, and respiratory problems. “City attorneys wanted to show that there were other causes of our clients’ respiratory problems. Emotional problems were discussed also; spouses were asked how their relationships had changed,” said Eatroff.
They claim to suffer from chronic respiratory problems, and claim that these were caused by asbestos, not the mere dust that the city said was, in Rudy Giuliani’s words, “just the World Trade Center cough.” The city did not issue protective gear, and the vast majority of the people involved in the suit were city employees. Kupferman says that in the aftermath of the attacks, the city’s official reason for not issuing masks was because “the city did not want to alarm people.”
Research physicians, such as Robin Herbert, of Mount Sinai Medical Center, have said publicly that asbestos, dust and fiberglass could still have been an issue for as long as two years in lower Manhattan. Some first responders “continue to have persistent upper and lower respiratory symptomatology — coughs and sinus problems,” Herbert said in an NBC interview in 2003.
Even if all the safety regulations during clean up had been strictly followed, the levels of asbestos and other toxins might still have been too high to be safe or legal, especially for children. However, the private contractors hired to dispose of 9/11 debris did not always follow the regulations, as the contractors themselves have admitted. Representatives of the company would later state at a public meeting that they would have needed to have “workers' mothers on site to admonish them to [effectively] comply,” with the safety regulations the city stipulated.
Students at Stuyvesant High School were allowed to return to school in October, although studies have shown lower Manhattan may have been a toxic site for up to two years after 9/11 in particular places, especially the elementary school that the trucks stopped in front of when carrying debris from the site. Independent testing has shown that the material the trucks carried contained levels of asbestos and fiberglass that were unlawful to transport through public streets, according to Kupferman. Responsibility for the procedure is shared by Port Authority, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the City and the EPA.
“The real problem with port authority is that they are being lax right now during reconstruction,” says Kupferman. The Port Authority and LMDC are unique entities: hybrids of the public and private, staffed and funded by both government and private enterprise. This causes unique jurisdictional conflicts and as well as a murky landscape of motives. It is not unreasonable to assume that business interests would be part of the decision-making for the LMDC. Activist Sally Regenhard, of the Skyscraper Safety Coalition, says was “a massive failure at the federal, city, state and definitely the Port-Authority level.”
All that was decided in the most recent legal episode was that in fact the city’s immunity would have to be decided on a case by case basis. How other entities will fare is left to be seen. On Wednesday April 30th, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was found liable for damages incurred in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, according to the New York Times.
Detective James Zadroga died in 2006 from respiratory failure linked to his work at the World Trade Center site. Mention of him still incites immediate controversy. Many people say it cannot be proven that he died from 9/11 dust, and even if he did, that certain equipment would have helped. But are people skeptical because they think his family is in search of the deepest pocket? Or because they are afraid to acknowledge how massive a public safety failure post-9/11 clean-up may have been?
Kupferman says the firemen he represents only wanted one thing. “They wanted someone to tell them ‘Don’t wash your clothes with your kids’ clothes,” he says. “What cuts across the left and the right is that people want the government to give the correct information.” And that seems reasonable. People want to be able to make decisions for themselves and their families independently, with all the available information, especially in a disaster.
Sources-
Michael Eatroff, Attorney- Patton Boggs LLP
Joel Kupferman, Attorney- New York Environmental Law and Justice Project
Stephen Gale, Associate Professor University of Pennsylvania- Department of Political Science, as quoted by salon.com
Paul DiNapoli, Attorney- Napoli, Bern, Ripka, LLP, as quoted in the New York Times
Sally Regenhard, CEO- Skyscraper Safety Campaign
Adam McClelland, filmmaker- Small Rebel Army Productions
Robin Herbert, Physician- Mount Sinai Medical Center, as quoted by NBC
Tall Buildings, Skinny Stairs
by Andrea Galyean
New York, May 2, 2008 -
How wide are you?
I just the measured the widest part of me (my shoulders) and I’m 16 inches across. Add a couple inches on each side for normal movement, and I need at least 20 inches of width to walk down an office hallway or stairwell. But I’m a good bit smaller than the average
So if this suit-wearing average guy and I wanted to walk down a stairwell at the same time – if there was a fire in a high-rise, for instance, and we were trying to get out – we’d need 47 stairwell inches. Two people closer to his size would need 54 inches. But what if, instead of people filing downstairs side-by-side, there were also firefighters coming up? Firefighters wear big suits and carry a lot of gear, so they take up more room. How wide would that stairwell need to be?
That question is at the heart of a dispute about
The
The largest building evacuation in
John Labriola, a WTC survivor who used the stairs to escape from the 71st floor of the north tower, contributed his recollections of that day to the
Labriola also took photographs during the evacuation. One of the most famous, taken within the stairwell, shows civilians flattened against the wall as firefighters pass. The stairwells in the north tower were 44 inches wide.
Glenn Corbett, a fire sciences professor at
National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) analyzed the WTC collapse and made 30 recommendations about how high-rise buildings might be stronger, safer, and easier to get out of. NIST investigators cited Labriola’s photographs and testimony from other survivors in advising that high-rise buildings use wider stairwells. They found that WTC evacuees moved twice as slowly as had been estimated and concluded that if the towers, which were less than half full on September 11, had been fully occupied, 14,000 people would have died. “To achieve a significantly faster total evacuation at full capacity would have required increases in egress capacity – the number and width of exits and stairways,” said lead NIST investigator Dr. S. Shyam Sunder in 2005.
That was not the first such proposal. Jake Pauls, a fire safety specialist from
Based on his studies, Pauls proposed a new standard minimum of 56 inches. As Corbett explained, "56 inches gives you the ability for counterflow, the ability for people to pass. It's an obvious solution. Any four-year-old can figure that out."
The New York Buildings Department agreed – for a while. As late as May 2007, proposed code revisions included wider stairwells, but the version due to go into effect this year returned to the old standard. What happened? This is where the numbers change from inches and people to square footage and cash.
In
When the Buildings Department was drafting the new building code, it “requested NIST’s input and expertise in five specific areas,” including stair widths, according to a 2005 press release. But the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), whose members own 80 percent of North American office space, “blocked every attempt” to implement NIST’s suggestion, according to Corbett. An advocacy memo from BOMA to its members asked them to work “at the state and local level to ensure that the NIST recommendations are not used as justification for introducing unnecessary new requirements in state and local building codes.”
Representatives of BOMA and the Real Estate Board of New York volunteered on the city committee to decide egress requirements for the new building code, where they successfully fought to keep the old width rather than give up floor space for stairs.
Woody Pascal, chief of staff to Councilman Erik Martin Dilan, who chairs the City Council’s Housing and Buildings Committee, recalls the debate. “There was an issue with the stairs, yes. Basically, if the stairs were wider, the rooms would be smaller.”
The Buildings Department notes that the codes specify a minimum only and says developers can always build wider stairs, as the Durst Organization is doing with the new Bank of America building in Midtown. But few are willing to forgo potential profits in the current market, where luxury offices on Wall Street can rent for several hundred thousand dollars per square foot per year.
Frederic Schwarz, a Manhattan-based architect, has worked on a number of high-rise projects in recent years. He said developers “want to do the right things, but only to a point." He was a leader in the early efforts to redesign the WTC site and thinks a lot about building safety. But he doesn’t even try to design wider stairs for commercial clients. “Forget it,” he said, “That’s not even a conversation. You’re fighting for every inch.”
And so, the 2008 New York City Building Codes will go into effect on July 1. The required minimum width for exit stairwells in high-rises will be: 44 inches.
Sources named:
- Glenn Corbett: c: 201-993-2814; gcorbett1@ix.network.com
- Jake Pauls: w: 301-933-5275; bldguse@aol.com
- Frederic Schwarz: 212-741-3021; fschwartz@schwartzarch.com
- Woody Pascal @ Councilman Erik Martin Dilan’s legislative office: 718-642-8664
Additional sources:
- Steve Scotford, Bluerock Real Estate, c:917-340-1187
- Rick Arbelo @ Councilman Erik Martin Dilan’s district office: 212-788-7284
Documents cited:
- New York Times, “9/11 Has Spurred Only Modest Changes in New York City and National Building Codes,” by Sewell Chan, September 6, 2006
- “Minimum Stair Width for Evacuation, Overtaking Movement and Counterflow Technical Bases and Suggestions for the Past, Present and Future,” by Jake L. Pauls, John J. Fruin, and Jeffrey M. Zupan, June 2005
- 2008
- Gotham Gazette, “Reconstructing New York’s Building Code Overhaul,” by Mark Berkey-Guard, May 14, 2007
- “Statement from John Labriola, World Trade Center, September 11, 2001,” by John Labriola, courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, September 2002
- Statement by NYC Building Commissioner Patricia J. Lancaster, regarding NIST’s Recommendations, June 23, 2005
- The Study of Occupant Behavior During the [1993]
- NIST NCSTAR 1:
- NIST NCSTAR 1-7: Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communication, September 2005
Web sites consulted:
- http://www.boma.org - Building Owners and Managers Association
- http://www.bomany.org - Building Owners and Managers Association of New York
- http://www.nist.gov - National Institute of Standards and Technology
- http://www.nfpa.org - National Fire Protection Association
- http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection - Smithsonian
- http://www.iccsafe.org - International Code Council
- http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob -
Thursday, May 1, 2008
The Problem with High-Rise Residences
Residents of high-rise apartment buildings in New York should be prepared to save themselves in case of an emergency – because high-rise residential buildings are not required to provide residents with a comprehensive evacuation procedure.
The news may come as a bit of a surprise for penthouse-apartment dwellers. If you reside on the 35th floor of a building, do you know how you’ll escape if the 34th floor is going up in flames?
Many of those in such apartments do not. In fact, most are simply advised to stay in their apartment in case of a fire.
“The best thing to do is to shut your door and pray,” said one New York fire fighter, who asked to remain anonymous. “We’ll be there as soon as we can, but until then, you want to keep the fire contained. So just keep your doors shut.”
Indeed, the Office of Emergency Management Web site instructs high-rise residents to do just that.
“If you live in a high-rise residential building, and the fire is not in your apartment, sta
y inside rather than entering smoke-filled hallways,” the Web site says. “Keep your windows closed, especially if the fire is in the apartment below.”
For one high-rise resident, the fire didn’t become apparent until it was well underway. Liz McNamara, who lives on the 12th floor of The Crest, a 36-story high-rise apartment at 63 Wall St., was spending a sunny day indoors when she thought she heard rain. Confused, she went to the window to find clear skies. And the “rain” she was hearing?
A fire two floors above her had set off the building’s sprinkler system, which was causing a flood in the apartment above hers. Soon, the water was coming through the ceiling into her apartment as well.
“I didn’t know there was a fire in the building until water started pouring from the ceiling,” she said. When she ran into the hall to notify the building manager, she finally heard the fire alarms going off in the stair well.
Fortunately for Liz (and the other residents of The Crest on Wall Street), the building is equipped with a sprinkler system. Without the sprinklers, McNamara could have been dealing with much more serious problems than her soaking wet furniture.
“New York was around 20 years behind the model codes in terms of requiring sprinklers in residential high-rises,” said Charles Jennings, Ph.D., a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he also received a Master of Science in fire protection management. Jennings points out that the sprinkler systems basically mitigate most evacuation problems by limiting the fire’s ability to grow and spread. New York finally decreed that all high-rise residential buildings constructed need to be equipped with sprinkler systems in 1999. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) claims that, no more than two people have ever been killed as a result of a fire, excluding explosions, when the building had a fully functioning sprinkler system.
Still, said Jennings, improvements can be made.
“What residential high-rises need is public address capability, so that residents can get instructions during an emergency,” said Jennings. “This was never required.”
Jennings suggested that residential buildings should be required to be outfitted with two-way communication capability – like that which is currently required in office buildings.
A representative from the Office of Emergency Management for New York City made a simple, somewhat frightening conclusion for those who seek an evacuation procedure for high-rise residences: “There’s nothing in terms of a wide-scale one for apartment buildings – individuals need to be prepare themselves for evacuation.”
PROTECTING YOURSELF IN CASE OF A FIRE: TIPS FROM THE FDNY
1. HAVE A FIRE ESCAPE PLAN
Have a family meeting to discuss what to do if there is a fire. Practice your plan.
2. USE APPROVED WINDOW GATES
Only use approved window gates. Do not use a padlock which will prevent your escape from a fire.
3. DECIDE ON A MEETING PLACE OUTSIDE OF THE BUILDING
By deciding on a meeting place outside and away from the building, you will know if everyone has gotten out safely.
4. SEND THE ALARMDial 911 to report a fire.
Use the local Fire Alarm Box.
5. WALK QUICKLY, DON'T PANIC
Feel the door on your way out with the back of your hand. If the door is hot, do not open. Close door behind you to slow the spread of fire.
6. USE THE STAIRS
Don't use the elevator. It may stop and trap you.Try to place one hand in contact with the wall. This may prevent you from getting lost.
7. STAY LOW AND GO
If there's smoke, escape by staying very low to the ground where air is cooler.
8. OPEN WINDOW IF TRAPPED
Open window at top to let out heat and smoke; and at the bottom to breathe.If you cannot get out, wave a sheet out the window.
9. DON'T GO BACK
Do not go back into a fire for anything! Your life is your MOST valuable possession.
-30-
Sources:
Charles Jennings, Ph.D.: cjennings@jjay.cuny.edu
Office of Emergency Management: www.nyc.gov/oem
OEM Hotline: (718) 422 4800
Liz McNamara: (301) 325-7206
The Crest: 63 Wall Street, (212) 344 6363, (212) 706 3030
National Fire Protection Association: http://www.nfpa.org/ – Research and Reports: Automatic Sprinklers
Fire Safety Tips: http://www.nyc.gov/html/fdny/html/safety/firesafety_escape.shtml
The news may come as a bit of a surprise for penthouse-apartment dwellers. If you reside on the 35th floor of a building, do you know how you’ll escape if the 34th floor is going up in flames?
Many of those in such apartments do not. In fact, most are simply advised to stay in their apartment in case of a fire.
“The best thing to do is to shut your door and pray,” said one New York fire fighter, who asked to remain anonymous. “We’ll be there as soon as we can, but until then, you want to keep the fire contained. So just keep your doors shut.”
Indeed, the Office of Emergency Management Web site instructs high-rise residents to do just that.
“If you live in a high-rise residential building, and the fire is not in your apartment, sta
y inside rather than entering smoke-filled hallways,” the Web site says. “Keep your windows closed, especially if the fire is in the apartment below.”For one high-rise resident, the fire didn’t become apparent until it was well underway. Liz McNamara, who lives on the 12th floor of The Crest, a 36-story high-rise apartment at 63 Wall St., was spending a sunny day indoors when she thought she heard rain. Confused, she went to the window to find clear skies. And the “rain” she was hearing?
A fire two floors above her had set off the building’s sprinkler system, which was causing a flood in the apartment above hers. Soon, the water was coming through the ceiling into her apartment as well.
“I didn’t know there was a fire in the building until water started pouring from the ceiling,” she said. When she ran into the hall to notify the building manager, she finally heard the fire alarms going off in the stair well.
Fortunately for Liz (and the other residents of The Crest on Wall Street), the building is equipped with a sprinkler system. Without the sprinklers, McNamara could have been dealing with much more serious problems than her soaking wet furniture.
“New York was around 20 years behind the model codes in terms of requiring sprinklers in residential high-rises,” said Charles Jennings, Ph.D., a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he also received a Master of Science in fire protection management. Jennings points out that the sprinkler systems basically mitigate most evacuation problems by limiting the fire’s ability to grow and spread. New York finally decreed that all high-rise residential buildings constructed need to be equipped with sprinkler systems in 1999. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) claims that, no more than two people have ever been killed as a result of a fire, excluding explosions, when the building had a fully functioning sprinkler system.
Still, said Jennings, improvements can be made.
“What residential high-rises need is public address capability, so that residents can get instructions during an emergency,” said Jennings. “This was never required.”
Jennings suggested that residential buildings should be required to be outfitted with two-way communication capability – like that which is currently required in office buildings.
A representative from the Office of Emergency Management for New York City made a simple, somewhat frightening conclusion for those who seek an evacuation procedure for high-rise residences: “There’s nothing in terms of a wide-scale one for apartment buildings – individuals need to be prepare themselves for evacuation.”
PROTECTING YOURSELF IN CASE OF A FIRE: TIPS FROM THE FDNY
1. HAVE A FIRE ESCAPE PLAN
Have a family meeting to discuss what to do if there is a fire. Practice your plan.
2. USE APPROVED WINDOW GATES
Only use approved window gates. Do not use a padlock which will prevent your escape from a fire.
3. DECIDE ON A MEETING PLACE OUTSIDE OF THE BUILDING
By deciding on a meeting place outside and away from the building, you will know if everyone has gotten out safely.
4. SEND THE ALARMDial 911 to report a fire.
Use the local Fire Alarm Box.
5. WALK QUICKLY, DON'T PANIC
Feel the door on your way out with the back of your hand. If the door is hot, do not open. Close door behind you to slow the spread of fire.
6. USE THE STAIRS
Don't use the elevator. It may stop and trap you.Try to place one hand in contact with the wall. This may prevent you from getting lost.
7. STAY LOW AND GO
If there's smoke, escape by staying very low to the ground where air is cooler.
8. OPEN WINDOW IF TRAPPED
Open window at top to let out heat and smoke; and at the bottom to breathe.If you cannot get out, wave a sheet out the window.
9. DON'T GO BACK
Do not go back into a fire for anything! Your life is your MOST valuable possession.
-30-
Sources:
Charles Jennings, Ph.D.: cjennings@jjay.cuny.edu
Office of Emergency Management: www.nyc.gov/oem
OEM Hotline: (718) 422 4800
Liz McNamara: (301) 325-7206
The Crest: 63 Wall Street, (212) 344 6363, (212) 706 3030
National Fire Protection Association: http://www.nfpa.org/ – Research and Reports: Automatic Sprinklers
Fire Safety Tips: http://www.nyc.gov/html/fdny/html/safety/firesafety_escape.shtml
Starkey - The Overview Draft
Glenn Corbett was driving north on the New Jersey turnpike just before 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.
A professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, Corbett was taking his normal route toward the park-and-ride in North Bergen, N.J., to catch a Manhattan-bound bus when he saw smoke billowing from a building Downtown. The A.M. radio station Corbett checked for news was ominously silent. Once parked, Corbett boarded the bus and traveled about a mile east before the bus was stopped by officers blocking the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Another park-and-ride bus had just made it through to New Jersey. Then, no traffic was allowed in or out of Manhattan. The city had been cordoned off by the officers. Corbett boarded the outbound bus that had stopped to pick up passengers, knowing nothing except that there was a major fire Downtown.
"I just went back to my firehouse because I didn't know what we would be doing," said Corbett, also a volunteer firefighter in Waldwick, N.J. "We really essentially didn't do much. Some of the firefighters knew it immediately it was a terrorist attack. I didn't know it at the time"
****
In 1962, the Port of New York Authority awarded a contract to Yamasaki and Associates, a Troy, Mich.-based architectural firm led by Monoru Yamasaki, to design the World Trade Center. The centerpiece of the design would be two towers, envisioned as the flagship buildings of Lower Manhattan and, at 110 stories and 1,350 feet tall each, the tallest buildings in the world, two monuments to American extravagance.
In 1966, officials broke ground at the site. Construction would begin in 1968. On Dec. 6, 1968, New York City adopted new building codes that relaxed building codes related, among other regulations, to stairwells and fireproofing, some of which had been in place since the adoption of codes adopted after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Greenwich Village. Locked doors, a lack of stairwells, faulty fire escapes and doors that opened in instead of out had trapped factory workers in the building, leading many to leap to their deaths below and many others to be trapped and burned to death. Others died from after a fire escape collapsed. In all, 146 factory workers died. The fire led to the first movement to make high-rise buildings safer, not just in New York City, but countrywide. Buildings with more than 2,500 square feet were required to have two staircases, for example, under the new codes. Another staircase was required for each additional floor of 5,000 square feet.
But by 1968, more than a half a century had passed, and building Manhattan buildings had become a particularly expensive business venture. "Less restrictive" is how a government report issued in September of 2005 described the 1968 codes, which were written to ease the costs of building Manhattan high-rises. Beyond that, commercial rents had been surging in New York. The loss of even a hundred square feet could mean the loss of thousands in annual rent in a high-rise office building. So developers, considering the codes antiquated, petitioned New York City to relax the codes which they believed, according the National Institute and Standards Technology report, had not been revised to reflect technological advances. "The developers were arguing you were building bunkers and you've got way more safety than you need and its driving up costs," said Gregory Stein, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and native of Long Island who recently studied the codes for a review published in November of last year. "They may have been right."
The answers included changing requirements for stairwells, requiring only three stairwells instead of six in New York buildings 10 stories and taller. Fire towers, stairwells with additional protection, were no longer required. Doors leading to stairwells were reduced in size to 36 inches, instead of 48 inches in the code that had been comprehensively revised last in 1938. Stairwell width requirements were 44 inches, 22 inches "per unit," unit meaning person, according to the code. Fireproofing standards were relaxed and spray-on fireproofing was allowed. Structural columns were only required to last 3 hours instead of 4 hours, and floor framing, 2 hours instead of 3 hours. Under normal circumstances in the city, though, the new code would not have affected the building for World Trade Center. Its plans had been submitted, and construction had begun, before the codes were adopted on Dec. 6. But the land was owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which existed outside the jurisdiction of the city and the state. Officials there, recognizing the "less restrictive" requirements in the 1968 code, told its consultants to make that basis for the safety of the new World Trade Center towers.
****
Before reaching his firehouse in Waldwick on the morning of Sept. 11, Corbett put in a call to his colleagues at Fire Engineering Magazine, a 128-year-old monthly trade journal where he served, and continues to serve, as technical editor. He still did not know what had occurred but, whatever it was, there was a spectacular fire in Manhattan . "I knew this was a very large incident that this was going to be one of historic proportions," Corbett said. "I thought, 'The magazine needs to go over there."
At 8:48 a.m., a Boeing 767 – American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston destined for Los Angeles – had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. When another jet - United Airlines Flight 175 with the same departure point and destination – crashed into the south tower 18 minutes later, a theory that terrorists had attacked New York City became reality. Tragedy played out for most Americans, including Corbett, on network news stations. Workers leaped from windows to escape the fire, and death by entrapment. Horrified onlookers screamed on the street below and told of the horror on network interviews. At 9:50 a.m., the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, like its feet had been swept out from under it. Networks broadcast the collapse. Thirty-nine minutes later, the north tower came down in a sea of ash that spread like a wave through Lower Manhattan, blanketing it in soot. Countless were dead, to be sure. Others were trapped. Firefighters who had entered the burning building to save those inside were among them. That was obvious from just watching.
Ultimately, almost 3,000 people were killed, including 343 firefighters and paramedics and 60 police officers.
****
The Twin Towers had stood for 22 and 23 years, respectively, on the morning of September 11, 2001. A report issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in September of 2005 told of how the fireproofing had been knocked off of the steel foundation when the jets crashed into both buildings and the fire, fueled by thousands of gallons of jet fuel, caused the floors to sag. Even before the buildings fell, the crash, plus falling debris, had either destructed or blocked five of the six stairwells in the buildings. The NIST report said that the separation of the stairwells reduced their ability to evacuate people on higher floors because of the visibility loss related to fire. Deaths were lessened only, the NIST report noted, because the buildings were only one-third to one-half full at the time of the attacks. If the towers had been full, 40,000 people would have been spread throughout both buildings, and up to 14,000 would have been killed. It would have taken three hours to evacuate everyone from the buildings, even without the stairwells destroyed. Of the about 17,400 people spread throughout the buildings at the time of the attack, 87 percent survived, according to the report. Many of the survivors interviewed by NIST investigators cited previous evacuation drills as helpful. Most who survived were below the crash sites at the time of the attacks escaped. Most who were above the crash sites – workers, diners at Windows on the World on floors 106 and 107 of the north tower – were trapped and perished.
Many remain convinced that stricter standards for stairwells and fireproofing could have saved lives. Still others say that preventing an attack of such proportions may be impossible. David A. Lucht, an engineer, was the director of Fire Safety Studies at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts at the time of the attacks. He is now retired. Lucht said most buildings cannot be protected against jets, especially those bound for cross-country trips full of fuel.
"If it weren't for the building being impacted by an airplane, I can't imagine a fire that would have taken it down," Lucht said. "I can't imagine anyone designing a building that would withstand against that. You'd have to stop building them that tall.”
****
Corbett said it was a “few weeks” after the attacks on September 11 when he understood the need for an investigation of the collapses. “With the large number of firefighter fatalities, we needed to understand how that happened.”
Just days into October, 2001, Corbett was in his office at John Jay in Manhattan when he received a call from Joe Calderone, the Daily News' chief of investigations. Calderone later wrote an article titled "2 Seek Probe of Collapse," which the Daily News published on Oct. 30. Corbett and Charles Jennings, another professor at John Jay, were the first to call for a private investigation of the collapse. "There are fundamental building and fire safety issues" that need to be investigated, Corbett told the Daily News. "This cuts to the heart of the way buildings are built and how we evacuate them."
Shortly after the article was published in the Daily News, a woman named Sally Regenhard called Corbett, asking for his consultation. Regenhard's son, Christian Michael Otto Regenhard, a 28-year-old probationary firefighter, was, and remains, missing at the site of the World Trade Center along with the entire Engine Company 279, of which he was a member. With Corbett as one of the lead consultants, Sally would soon form The Skyscraper Safety Campaign. The campaign’s goals were to initiate a subpoena-powered investigation; encourage stricter code compliance in the city and nationwide; ensure to ensure the safe development of land owned by the Port Authority; and educate those who create code by bringing more fire professionals in on the process. Some progress has been made, Corbett and Regenhard say, especially on the first two goals, but not as much as they would like. Both supported the bill that prompted the NIST investigation of the trade center collapse and continue to call for safer regulations and speak out against a hasty clean-up effort that resulted in the disposal that steel that Corbett says could have helped in a physical investigation. Corbett does point to The National Fire Protection Association’s adoption of a regulation that calls for 56 inch stairwells, a foot wider than the 44 inches required on September 11. But many of NIST's 26 requirements have not been acted upon.
Glenn Corbett, fire science professor at John Jay College
David Lucht, former director of fire safety studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Gregory Stein, law professor at University of Tennessee
NIST World Trade Center Report (Sept. 2005, wtc.nist.gov)
Daily News, “2 Seek Probe of Collapse,” Oct. 30, 2001
The Triangle Factory Fire, http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/
“Doomed to Repeat History,” Gregory Stein (November 2007, ssrn.com/abstract=964043)
The New York Times, “US Attacked,” September 12, 2001, By Serge Schmemann
A professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, Corbett was taking his normal route toward the park-and-ride in North Bergen, N.J., to catch a Manhattan-bound bus when he saw smoke billowing from a building Downtown. The A.M. radio station Corbett checked for news was ominously silent. Once parked, Corbett boarded the bus and traveled about a mile east before the bus was stopped by officers blocking the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Another park-and-ride bus had just made it through to New Jersey. Then, no traffic was allowed in or out of Manhattan. The city had been cordoned off by the officers. Corbett boarded the outbound bus that had stopped to pick up passengers, knowing nothing except that there was a major fire Downtown.
"I just went back to my firehouse because I didn't know what we would be doing," said Corbett, also a volunteer firefighter in Waldwick, N.J. "We really essentially didn't do much. Some of the firefighters knew it immediately it was a terrorist attack. I didn't know it at the time"
****
In 1962, the Port of New York Authority awarded a contract to Yamasaki and Associates, a Troy, Mich.-based architectural firm led by Monoru Yamasaki, to design the World Trade Center. The centerpiece of the design would be two towers, envisioned as the flagship buildings of Lower Manhattan and, at 110 stories and 1,350 feet tall each, the tallest buildings in the world, two monuments to American extravagance.
In 1966, officials broke ground at the site. Construction would begin in 1968. On Dec. 6, 1968, New York City adopted new building codes that relaxed building codes related, among other regulations, to stairwells and fireproofing, some of which had been in place since the adoption of codes adopted after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Greenwich Village. Locked doors, a lack of stairwells, faulty fire escapes and doors that opened in instead of out had trapped factory workers in the building, leading many to leap to their deaths below and many others to be trapped and burned to death. Others died from after a fire escape collapsed. In all, 146 factory workers died. The fire led to the first movement to make high-rise buildings safer, not just in New York City, but countrywide. Buildings with more than 2,500 square feet were required to have two staircases, for example, under the new codes. Another staircase was required for each additional floor of 5,000 square feet.
But by 1968, more than a half a century had passed, and building Manhattan buildings had become a particularly expensive business venture. "Less restrictive" is how a government report issued in September of 2005 described the 1968 codes, which were written to ease the costs of building Manhattan high-rises. Beyond that, commercial rents had been surging in New York. The loss of even a hundred square feet could mean the loss of thousands in annual rent in a high-rise office building. So developers, considering the codes antiquated, petitioned New York City to relax the codes which they believed, according the National Institute and Standards Technology report, had not been revised to reflect technological advances. "The developers were arguing you were building bunkers and you've got way more safety than you need and its driving up costs," said Gregory Stein, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and native of Long Island who recently studied the codes for a review published in November of last year. "They may have been right."
The answers included changing requirements for stairwells, requiring only three stairwells instead of six in New York buildings 10 stories and taller. Fire towers, stairwells with additional protection, were no longer required. Doors leading to stairwells were reduced in size to 36 inches, instead of 48 inches in the code that had been comprehensively revised last in 1938. Stairwell width requirements were 44 inches, 22 inches "per unit," unit meaning person, according to the code. Fireproofing standards were relaxed and spray-on fireproofing was allowed. Structural columns were only required to last 3 hours instead of 4 hours, and floor framing, 2 hours instead of 3 hours. Under normal circumstances in the city, though, the new code would not have affected the building for World Trade Center. Its plans had been submitted, and construction had begun, before the codes were adopted on Dec. 6. But the land was owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which existed outside the jurisdiction of the city and the state. Officials there, recognizing the "less restrictive" requirements in the 1968 code, told its consultants to make that basis for the safety of the new World Trade Center towers.
****
Before reaching his firehouse in Waldwick on the morning of Sept. 11, Corbett put in a call to his colleagues at Fire Engineering Magazine, a 128-year-old monthly trade journal where he served, and continues to serve, as technical editor. He still did not know what had occurred but, whatever it was, there was a spectacular fire in Manhattan . "I knew this was a very large incident that this was going to be one of historic proportions," Corbett said. "I thought, 'The magazine needs to go over there."
At 8:48 a.m., a Boeing 767 – American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston destined for Los Angeles – had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. When another jet - United Airlines Flight 175 with the same departure point and destination – crashed into the south tower 18 minutes later, a theory that terrorists had attacked New York City became reality. Tragedy played out for most Americans, including Corbett, on network news stations. Workers leaped from windows to escape the fire, and death by entrapment. Horrified onlookers screamed on the street below and told of the horror on network interviews. At 9:50 a.m., the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, like its feet had been swept out from under it. Networks broadcast the collapse. Thirty-nine minutes later, the north tower came down in a sea of ash that spread like a wave through Lower Manhattan, blanketing it in soot. Countless were dead, to be sure. Others were trapped. Firefighters who had entered the burning building to save those inside were among them. That was obvious from just watching.
Ultimately, almost 3,000 people were killed, including 343 firefighters and paramedics and 60 police officers.
****
The Twin Towers had stood for 22 and 23 years, respectively, on the morning of September 11, 2001. A report issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in September of 2005 told of how the fireproofing had been knocked off of the steel foundation when the jets crashed into both buildings and the fire, fueled by thousands of gallons of jet fuel, caused the floors to sag. Even before the buildings fell, the crash, plus falling debris, had either destructed or blocked five of the six stairwells in the buildings. The NIST report said that the separation of the stairwells reduced their ability to evacuate people on higher floors because of the visibility loss related to fire. Deaths were lessened only, the NIST report noted, because the buildings were only one-third to one-half full at the time of the attacks. If the towers had been full, 40,000 people would have been spread throughout both buildings, and up to 14,000 would have been killed. It would have taken three hours to evacuate everyone from the buildings, even without the stairwells destroyed. Of the about 17,400 people spread throughout the buildings at the time of the attack, 87 percent survived, according to the report. Many of the survivors interviewed by NIST investigators cited previous evacuation drills as helpful. Most who survived were below the crash sites at the time of the attacks escaped. Most who were above the crash sites – workers, diners at Windows on the World on floors 106 and 107 of the north tower – were trapped and perished.
Many remain convinced that stricter standards for stairwells and fireproofing could have saved lives. Still others say that preventing an attack of such proportions may be impossible. David A. Lucht, an engineer, was the director of Fire Safety Studies at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts at the time of the attacks. He is now retired. Lucht said most buildings cannot be protected against jets, especially those bound for cross-country trips full of fuel.
"If it weren't for the building being impacted by an airplane, I can't imagine a fire that would have taken it down," Lucht said. "I can't imagine anyone designing a building that would withstand against that. You'd have to stop building them that tall.”
****
Corbett said it was a “few weeks” after the attacks on September 11 when he understood the need for an investigation of the collapses. “With the large number of firefighter fatalities, we needed to understand how that happened.”
Just days into October, 2001, Corbett was in his office at John Jay in Manhattan when he received a call from Joe Calderone, the Daily News' chief of investigations. Calderone later wrote an article titled "2 Seek Probe of Collapse," which the Daily News published on Oct. 30. Corbett and Charles Jennings, another professor at John Jay, were the first to call for a private investigation of the collapse. "There are fundamental building and fire safety issues" that need to be investigated, Corbett told the Daily News. "This cuts to the heart of the way buildings are built and how we evacuate them."
Shortly after the article was published in the Daily News, a woman named Sally Regenhard called Corbett, asking for his consultation. Regenhard's son, Christian Michael Otto Regenhard, a 28-year-old probationary firefighter, was, and remains, missing at the site of the World Trade Center along with the entire Engine Company 279, of which he was a member. With Corbett as one of the lead consultants, Sally would soon form The Skyscraper Safety Campaign. The campaign’s goals were to initiate a subpoena-powered investigation; encourage stricter code compliance in the city and nationwide; ensure to ensure the safe development of land owned by the Port Authority; and educate those who create code by bringing more fire professionals in on the process. Some progress has been made, Corbett and Regenhard say, especially on the first two goals, but not as much as they would like. Both supported the bill that prompted the NIST investigation of the trade center collapse and continue to call for safer regulations and speak out against a hasty clean-up effort that resulted in the disposal that steel that Corbett says could have helped in a physical investigation. Corbett does point to The National Fire Protection Association’s adoption of a regulation that calls for 56 inch stairwells, a foot wider than the 44 inches required on September 11. But many of NIST's 26 requirements have not been acted upon.
Glenn Corbett, fire science professor at John Jay College
David Lucht, former director of fire safety studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Gregory Stein, law professor at University of Tennessee
NIST World Trade Center Report (Sept. 2005, wtc.nist.gov)
Daily News, “2 Seek Probe of Collapse,” Oct. 30, 2001
The Triangle Factory Fire, http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/
“Doomed to Repeat History,” Gregory Stein (November 2007, ssrn.com/abstract=964043)
The New York Times, “US Attacked,” September 12, 2001, By Serge Schmemann
Parkins - Design for Safety
Designing for Safety
By Erika A. Parkins
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, LLP was the only architecture firm in New York to lose one of their employees in the World Trade Center attacks. They also won the bid to design Seven World Trade Center, the first building to be rebuilt on the site. But whether their model efforts will set the safety standard for the city remains to be seen.
“We've done all sorts of extremes to make this a building that is responsible in every possible way,” David Childs, an architect at SOM who worked on Seven World Trade Center, said on NPR shortly after it was built.
“It has all of the safety redundancy features that one can imagine, that is safe long enough for people to get out if there is a fire, or a hurricane that breaks glass, or whatever disasters could happen,” Childs said. “So I think we've made a tremendous leap forward for how we build skyscrapers in the United States.”
Architects have long been design innovators, exploring new ways to work with materials and structures to meet people’s basic needs for as long as the concept of shelter. From the use of masonry in the 12th century to steel in the 19th and 20th centuries, designers have helped to set the standard for the way we live and work.
The attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were an opportunity for designers to innovate, once again, ideas about the way we work and live. The primary issues after the attacks were terrorism and safety. Yet, as the years increase between 2001 and now, it has become apparent that designers can consider safety but cannot work with fear.
“We, rank high in paranoia,” said Rick Bell, president of the Architectural Institute of America in New York. “Maybe not the highest in the world, but we are certainly up there. I see a diminishment of that over the past two years, though it intensified immediately after the attacks,” he said.
As far as continuing to innovate or design for safety: “I don’t see a competition. We’re nowhere on that.”
As many New Yorkers, the design community has effectively moved on from the issues of September 11, 2001 but, not without struggle and change.
The attacks on the World Trade Center helped push improved building codes through faster. The nexus of community activists in the public sphere, such as Sally Regenhard and the Skyscraper Safety Campaign; designer input such as the recommendations put forth by SOM and the AIA; and, government inquiry into the collapse of the World Trade Center, provided the impetus to seriously examine what could be done to improve safety standards in high-rise buildings. As the old saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease: because of the confluence of concern from all corners, particularly the public sector, codes that had been in limbo for 10 years were reworked and passed into law in two years.
“If the public was more interested in the built environment and pressured and acted upon political leaders and the building industry to build better, buildings would be better,” said J.C. Calderon, an architect who was also an advisor to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign.
“But, the public does not consider themselves a part of the building process. It would be more beneficial if more people saw architecture as a public good.”
On July 1 of this year, New York City’s new building codes will go into effect. Unfortunately, all of the building code changes brought about by the World Trade Center attacks do not directly affect the buildings that will be rebuilt on the site.
The main reason the World Trade Center was not up to code was because it did not have to be. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey governs the World Trade Center site, and is not under New York City jurisdiction. The Department of City Planning, the Department of Buildings and the New York Police and Fire Departments could cite as many violations as they wanted, but it was always the Port Authority’s choice to comply.
“9-11 was not only a major failure on a federal level, a state level, a New York City level and certainly on the Port Authority level,” Regenhard said. “I’ve never known the Port Authority to be concerned about anyone’s safety, especially in connection to the World Trade Center. Those buildings were above the law.”
A system of checks and balances should exist among city agencies, developers, contractors, engineers and architects, so that no one arm in the process of making a building, has more control over critical aspects and functions than another. However, in New York, the system has been flouted through political connections, money and sheer oversight, as the recent resignation of New York City Department of Buildings commissioner, Patricia Lancaster, suggested.
“It’s about the money, that’s all it is,” said Frederic Schwartz, an architect who has worked with the city and other designers to think of ways to redevelop the World Trade Center site.
Money is very influential, and when it is time for a building to finally be erected, the developer calls many of the shots. They try to match the aesthetic mind of the architect to the desires of the public, in the most profitable way.
“It would always be beneficial if more people saw architecture as a public conversation it would inspire architects and developers to do better buildings,” Calderon said. “But since there is no critique, or very little critique, in the media or in the public as to the success of buildings the developers behind those buildings don’t get the impression that the public cares and won’t invest in their buildings to make them better.”
Calderon concluded, “Investors and developers won’t spend more money if they don’t have to and they won’t do it unless they think the public wants it.”
Developers in New York have been resistant since September 11, 2001, to including safety measures such as wider stairwells. According to the architects and engineers interviewed, the developers’ resistance is due to not wanting to lose square footage on rentable floor space. The image of developers and real estate investors could use a positive boost since they do not have the best public image; their concerns narrowly generalized to more profit and less on the bottom line on construction costs.
No developers were able to return comment in time for this publication.
In the end however, developers, outside of those on the former World Trade Center site, may no longer have a choice in whether or not to include some of the improved safety standards in the new building codes. New construction, at minimum, will be required to subscribe to minimum structural, accessibility, sustainability and fire protection standards such as requiring fire sprinklers and detectors in all buildings and improving escape routes. The code also allows more room for innovation with new materials and construction techniques as long as they meet the requirements of the building codes.
The draft outline of the new construction codes includes how a higher building standard can be achieved in a cost-effective manner. A number of agencies representing the real estate, design, construction, engineering and trade industries were a part of the process to update the codes and make them more tenable to the city’s needs. The dismissive claim of safety features being too expensive or extraneous should, in theory, no longer stand.
Older construction will also have to meet the new building code requirements in the next few years; no structure will be grandfathered in.
Structural engineers have been very instrumental in thinking about the design of buildings and creating safety measures for the structure and thinking about egress. Measures include, but are not limited to, the widening of stairwells, the introduction of sky lobbies, and elevators that firefighters can use in case of an emergency. However engineers are very cognizant of not working under the assumption of terror. First and foremost, the buildings have to function and they need to figure out the best ways that can happen.
In the seven years since the World Trade Center attacks, terrorism has taken a back seat within the design community, as other threats become more looming, such as global warming and the need for environmental preservation.
Designers and engineers have turned their attention to sustainable development- another tenet of the new building codes that also affects the way we all ultimately live. Though not mutually exclusive to the issue of safety, it is the more pressing, tangible threat the design community is thinking about and one in which the public can get behind and become involved.
“Global warming is another 9-11 because in a sense, global warming is the potential for many 9-11s and we need to prepare our buildings accordingly,” Calderon said. “What’s encouraging is that architecture is talking about these problems, now.”
“Safety is a basic requirement of a building,” said Calderon. “But building’s can’t just be safe, it has to be something more to have any value. Ideally it goes beyond and inspires us toward greater levels of happiness and grace.”
Sources consulted:
Frederic Schwartz, Architect
Rick Bell, President, AIA
JC Calderon, Architect and Advisor to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign
Carl Galioto, Architect, SOM
David Childs, Architect, SOM
Joe Tortorella, Structural Engineer
Sally Regenhard, Skyscraper Safety Campaign
New York Building Congress
Articles, documents and websites:
Nova transcript, “Building on Ground Zero,” PBS, September 5, 2006. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3311_wtc.html
“Lessons of 9-11 Alter Skyscraper Design,” Boston Globe. September 6, 2006.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/09/06/lessons_of_911_alter_skyscraper_design/
Draft Outline of New Building Codes
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob/downloads/pdf/mc_report.pdf
Safety Library – Fire Safety
http://www.thesafetylibrary.com/sites/firesbudes.php
“A Nation Challenged”, New York Times, March 28, 2002
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c06e6d7113bf93ba15750c0a9649c8b63#
“Sweeping Changes Pushed for Code on City High Rises”, New York Times, August 2, 2002
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9907E0D81E3BF931A3575BC0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Proposed Legislation to Improve Building Safety
http://wirednewyork.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-4032.html
By Erika A. Parkins
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, LLP was the only architecture firm in New York to lose one of their employees in the World Trade Center attacks. They also won the bid to design Seven World Trade Center, the first building to be rebuilt on the site. But whether their model efforts will set the safety standard for the city remains to be seen.
“We've done all sorts of extremes to make this a building that is responsible in every possible way,” David Childs, an architect at SOM who worked on Seven World Trade Center, said on NPR shortly after it was built.
“It has all of the safety redundancy features that one can imagine, that is safe long enough for people to get out if there is a fire, or a hurricane that breaks glass, or whatever disasters could happen,” Childs said. “So I think we've made a tremendous leap forward for how we build skyscrapers in the United States.”
Architects have long been design innovators, exploring new ways to work with materials and structures to meet people’s basic needs for as long as the concept of shelter. From the use of masonry in the 12th century to steel in the 19th and 20th centuries, designers have helped to set the standard for the way we live and work.
The attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were an opportunity for designers to innovate, once again, ideas about the way we work and live. The primary issues after the attacks were terrorism and safety. Yet, as the years increase between 2001 and now, it has become apparent that designers can consider safety but cannot work with fear.
“We, rank high in paranoia,” said Rick Bell, president of the Architectural Institute of America in New York. “Maybe not the highest in the world, but we are certainly up there. I see a diminishment of that over the past two years, though it intensified immediately after the attacks,” he said.
As far as continuing to innovate or design for safety: “I don’t see a competition. We’re nowhere on that.”
As many New Yorkers, the design community has effectively moved on from the issues of September 11, 2001 but, not without struggle and change.
The attacks on the World Trade Center helped push improved building codes through faster. The nexus of community activists in the public sphere, such as Sally Regenhard and the Skyscraper Safety Campaign; designer input such as the recommendations put forth by SOM and the AIA; and, government inquiry into the collapse of the World Trade Center, provided the impetus to seriously examine what could be done to improve safety standards in high-rise buildings. As the old saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease: because of the confluence of concern from all corners, particularly the public sector, codes that had been in limbo for 10 years were reworked and passed into law in two years.
“If the public was more interested in the built environment and pressured and acted upon political leaders and the building industry to build better, buildings would be better,” said J.C. Calderon, an architect who was also an advisor to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign.
“But, the public does not consider themselves a part of the building process. It would be more beneficial if more people saw architecture as a public good.”
On July 1 of this year, New York City’s new building codes will go into effect. Unfortunately, all of the building code changes brought about by the World Trade Center attacks do not directly affect the buildings that will be rebuilt on the site.
The main reason the World Trade Center was not up to code was because it did not have to be. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey governs the World Trade Center site, and is not under New York City jurisdiction. The Department of City Planning, the Department of Buildings and the New York Police and Fire Departments could cite as many violations as they wanted, but it was always the Port Authority’s choice to comply.
“9-11 was not only a major failure on a federal level, a state level, a New York City level and certainly on the Port Authority level,” Regenhard said. “I’ve never known the Port Authority to be concerned about anyone’s safety, especially in connection to the World Trade Center. Those buildings were above the law.”
A system of checks and balances should exist among city agencies, developers, contractors, engineers and architects, so that no one arm in the process of making a building, has more control over critical aspects and functions than another. However, in New York, the system has been flouted through political connections, money and sheer oversight, as the recent resignation of New York City Department of Buildings commissioner, Patricia Lancaster, suggested.
“It’s about the money, that’s all it is,” said Frederic Schwartz, an architect who has worked with the city and other designers to think of ways to redevelop the World Trade Center site.
Money is very influential, and when it is time for a building to finally be erected, the developer calls many of the shots. They try to match the aesthetic mind of the architect to the desires of the public, in the most profitable way.
“It would always be beneficial if more people saw architecture as a public conversation it would inspire architects and developers to do better buildings,” Calderon said. “But since there is no critique, or very little critique, in the media or in the public as to the success of buildings the developers behind those buildings don’t get the impression that the public cares and won’t invest in their buildings to make them better.”
Calderon concluded, “Investors and developers won’t spend more money if they don’t have to and they won’t do it unless they think the public wants it.”
Developers in New York have been resistant since September 11, 2001, to including safety measures such as wider stairwells. According to the architects and engineers interviewed, the developers’ resistance is due to not wanting to lose square footage on rentable floor space. The image of developers and real estate investors could use a positive boost since they do not have the best public image; their concerns narrowly generalized to more profit and less on the bottom line on construction costs.
No developers were able to return comment in time for this publication.
In the end however, developers, outside of those on the former World Trade Center site, may no longer have a choice in whether or not to include some of the improved safety standards in the new building codes. New construction, at minimum, will be required to subscribe to minimum structural, accessibility, sustainability and fire protection standards such as requiring fire sprinklers and detectors in all buildings and improving escape routes. The code also allows more room for innovation with new materials and construction techniques as long as they meet the requirements of the building codes.
The draft outline of the new construction codes includes how a higher building standard can be achieved in a cost-effective manner. A number of agencies representing the real estate, design, construction, engineering and trade industries were a part of the process to update the codes and make them more tenable to the city’s needs. The dismissive claim of safety features being too expensive or extraneous should, in theory, no longer stand.
Older construction will also have to meet the new building code requirements in the next few years; no structure will be grandfathered in.
Structural engineers have been very instrumental in thinking about the design of buildings and creating safety measures for the structure and thinking about egress. Measures include, but are not limited to, the widening of stairwells, the introduction of sky lobbies, and elevators that firefighters can use in case of an emergency. However engineers are very cognizant of not working under the assumption of terror. First and foremost, the buildings have to function and they need to figure out the best ways that can happen.
In the seven years since the World Trade Center attacks, terrorism has taken a back seat within the design community, as other threats become more looming, such as global warming and the need for environmental preservation.
Designers and engineers have turned their attention to sustainable development- another tenet of the new building codes that also affects the way we all ultimately live. Though not mutually exclusive to the issue of safety, it is the more pressing, tangible threat the design community is thinking about and one in which the public can get behind and become involved.
“Global warming is another 9-11 because in a sense, global warming is the potential for many 9-11s and we need to prepare our buildings accordingly,” Calderon said. “What’s encouraging is that architecture is talking about these problems, now.”
“Safety is a basic requirement of a building,” said Calderon. “But building’s can’t just be safe, it has to be something more to have any value. Ideally it goes beyond and inspires us toward greater levels of happiness and grace.”
Sources consulted:
Frederic Schwartz, Architect
Rick Bell, President, AIA
JC Calderon, Architect and Advisor to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign
Carl Galioto, Architect, SOM
David Childs, Architect, SOM
Joe Tortorella, Structural Engineer
Sally Regenhard, Skyscraper Safety Campaign
New York Building Congress
Articles, documents and websites:
Nova transcript, “Building on Ground Zero,” PBS, September 5, 2006. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3311_wtc.html
“Lessons of 9-11 Alter Skyscraper Design,” Boston Globe. September 6, 2006.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/09/06/lessons_of_911_alter_skyscraper_design/
Draft Outline of New Building Codes
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob/downloads/pdf/mc_report.pdf
Safety Library – Fire Safety
http://www.thesafetylibrary.com/sites/firesbudes.php
“A Nation Challenged”, New York Times, March 28, 2002
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c06e6d7113bf93ba15750c0a9649c8b63#
“Sweeping Changes Pushed for Code on City High Rises”, New York Times, August 2, 2002
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9907E0D81E3BF931A3575BC0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Proposed Legislation to Improve Building Safety
http://wirednewyork.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-4032.html
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