Regenhardt, Collett, and Schwartz (audio)

Hi All,

Here's the link to the Regenhardt, Collett and Schwartz talk from last Friday. I'm sorry it took so long to get on-line.

I think this is decent quality - just bad enough resolution to lose my obnoxious, snarky comments, but just good enough to catch Chad's. :D Frederic Schwartz has a voice (and a beard) for radio, and he and all the other speakers came through better than Pat Alex did.

Also, by some miracle, the batteries of my recorder cut off at just 3 minutes after 1 p.m., so we got basically the whole talk.

David, you missed it. Come see me in my office after class.

Andrew

Link: http://saveandrewgarib.com/audio/08.04.04-13h03m50s_INV_Schwartz_Regenhardt_Collett.wma

Molly's Project Progress Memo

I have narrowed my project to fire fighting gear...which is a big focus with lots of things to cover STILL: AEDs, air products, air management, ambulances, fire apparel, fire bags/cases, fire batteries, breathing apparatus, burnover protection, CO screening products, defibrillator, emergency lighting, silicone masks, fire vehicles, turnout gear, thermal imaging, storage systems, spinal/head immobilizer, sirens/alarms, simulation products, ropes, rescue stretchers, entry tools, radios, fire pumps, protective eye wear, fire nozzles, hoses, hoods, helmets, gloves, gas masks/detection, foam equipment, flashlights...
(to name a FEW)
To narrow it further, I have scheduled an interview with Vincent Forras, Co-Founder of the Gear Up Foundation, who are an organization inspired by 9/11 to bring equipment to fire fighters.

Alls good on the gadgets front.

Chad's progress memo/change of story idea

My first idea of reporting on sidewalk sheds and falling debris has gone, um, out the window.

So I've got something new.

The Tishman Contstruction Corporation. Their buildings include the new Bank of America building on 6th Ave., 7 WTC and the Freedom Tower. These guys are really at the forefront of the building safety movement. What I found most compelling was the fact that the new Bank of America building doesn't have to be all "safety'd out" — the way Freedom Tower does — but Tishman and BOA decided to surpass safety requirements anyway. They want to set the pace. And from what I'm gathering, not too many other builders are interested in doing that....So many of them are forgoing life-saving, wider staircases for marketable square footage. Not Tishman.

cs

Gariiiiiiib Progress Memo 4/03

Hey all,

Progress recently has not been great, but I'll try and cover what I'm working towards right now:

1. Finding an injured worker. The union-side option has not been working (i.e., for the past three months - they give me a very friendly run-around every time I ask) so I'm restaring my quest to find an injured hi-rise worker via personal injury law firms. The first time I tried this 2 months ago it wasn't a great success, but I didn't push the issue or go after more than 2 firms.

2. Getting more context from the opposition to the current safety regime. I already have a dialogue open with Council member Mendez from The Village, and I'm working on Councilmember Dilan from Brownsville. Both are on the Safety and Buildings committee. Mendez has already expressed her dissatisfaction with the current system to me.

3. I've been pelting the DoB with annoying questions for a while. They often do not result in great results. But I'll keep doing so. Specifically, I'm asking what the City is doing for safety for low-rise and non-union workers, but it's usually a press-friendly response, similar ot what you get fromt he unions and the Builders. The city says it's a priority and they're working on it, when I know pretty well they're not. They were so nice before... they got me the comish's full statement at that february emergency meeting and everything.

4. The fourth sign that my project is too big and cumbersome, I'm still looking for cities to compare NYC to when it comes to high-rise construction safety. I don't always get a lot of information in the way you might from the DoB website, for exmaple, and of course I'm limited to cities in the English-speaking world. Working, working... might not work out.

5. Academic sources. I haven't even started this angle - I'll keep you posted.

Thanks,

Andrew

Project Memo - Erika

Our experience with many buildings, once we enter them, is as a user. We have no control over how well built or safe a skyscraper or an apartment building will be. Until September 11, 2001, it can be surmised that few people considered safety in high rises important.

The attacks on the World Trade Center highlighted how important design is to the safety of building occupants in the case of an emergency. In an interview with Rick Bell, president of the New York chapter of the Architecture Institute of America, I discovered that architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, LLC was the only firm in the New York metropolitan area to lose an architect in the attacks. When SOM won the competition to rebuild on the site at 7 World Trade center, they were motivated to innovate “contemporary building enhancements that [create] a new model for life safety and sustainable design.” But, to further the importance of life safety in high-rise buildings, SOM, in conjunction with the New York chapter of the Architectural Institute of America, put forth a set of affordable design guidelines that could be used in both new construction and existing buildings to make them safer.

Architects are only one part of the solution to making buildings safer. Developers have to see the importance as well and their concerns are more about square footage and the bottom line, than appealing to social concerns. They do not want to increase the costs of construction nor, in the case of commercial buildings, lose rentable floor space to features such as wider stairwells “just in case”.

The next steps in my project are to find out:

-The exact costs to include the affordable design features that SOM put forth (the costs are low per square foot, somewhere below $30, which is very inexpensive considering how much more money goes into other materials).
-Why developers are not including these simple, cost-effective solutions for those “just in case” scenarios.
-The reaction of commercial and residential high-rise building users to the question, “if you knew that it would only cost X dollars per square foot to make your building safer, would you care more about building safety?”

To do the above, I have to:

-Price the materials and safety features
-Interview developers, among them I hope to talk to Larry Silverstein about the World Trade Center redevelopment
-Do some man-on-the-street interviews to see what people’s reactions would be to simple, inexpensive safety measures that could save their lives one day.

Also, in following up with my interview with Rick Bell, I have an appointment to meet with the New York chapter of the National Society of Structural Engineers, to see what improvements and innovations are being made on the structural side of things and if they are attractive to developers. I will also speak to the architects at SOM about the work they did on 7 World Trade Center.

Building Safety Liability- Progress Memo Voien

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

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

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

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

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

Progress Memo: Mike Weiss, Air Quality

More interviews with:
Dave Newman, New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH)
Dr. Steven Markowitz, Dir. of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College

Both were on EPA’s WTC Expert Technical Review Panel, a group which was created in 2004 after Senator Clinton’s insistence that EPA take a greater role in the cleanup of indoor spaces surrounding the WTC site. The panel met for 18 months and was eventually disbanded by the EPA with no clear recommendations.

Steven Markowitz tells me:
1. Currently New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation is monitoring air quality in lower Manhattan. They are doing this from the tops of buildings, and when asked if shouldn’t someone be monitoring air quality at ground level he says no, they are doing the appropriate job.
2. Responsibility for monitoring air quality will be transferred to the NYC Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene under something called “The Mayor’s PLAN for NYC.”
3. If I really want to see how air quality monitoring is done, I should go to the lab of George Thurston, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, NYU. Then he tries to steer me away from this saying, “it will be really boring.”

Interview with Joel Kupferman, Executive Director of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project. Kupferman tells me:
1. A lot of so-called environmental scientists are biased in favor of their organizations. Of course air quality monitoring should be conducted at street level. Kupferman offers to give me the contact info for an independent scientist.
2. Kupferman emails me six documents including an article from the organization Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) detailing the ways the New York Times assisted in the dangerously negligent job of under-reporting the air hazards at 9/11. Other reports detail Kupferman’s office’s law suit against former head of EPA Christine Todd Whitman, as well as reports showing the federal government’s laxity in aggressively pursuing environmental safety and actively assisting in the cover-up to avoid responsibility.

I plan on finding the locations where the state is monitoring air quality in lower Manhattan and try to get access to their data. Then I plan on working with an independent scientist to monitor air quality in the same locations as the state’s, only taking readings from the ground. Then compare the two.