The Waiting Game

This morning’s meeting of the City Council Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Committee began with a moment of silence for firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino, who were killed in the fire at the former Deutsche Bank Building this past summer. On the committee’s agenda were efforts to protect workers and the public when demolition on the site resumes.

Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Chairman Avi Schick asserted that the remaining floors of the building would be down by the end of this year if all goes as planned. However, the LMDC has yet to set a date for restarting the work. New York City based LVI Services, whose president and CEO Robert A. McNamara (pictured above) also spoke at the hearing, has been selected as the new demolition contractor.

Promised by the LMDC are safety improvements including the construction of two sheltered stairways that will run from the basement to the top floor, “round-the-clock, 24/7 site-safety personnel on the building…whether work is going on or not” to monitor progress, and a different approach to decontamination that will clean out the entire building first and then demolish the floors instead of doing both floor by floor.

While the city waits wait for work to begin again on the site, it also waits for answers to the innumerable unanswered questions about the contracts, shady deals, mismanagement, and tragic incompetence that surrounded the fire and deaths last August.