Memo Warned Of Ground Zero Tower Dangers
Months before a fire at a condemned ground zero skyscraper killed two firefighters, a former construction chief wrote memos urging the state owners to add staff and funding to the project to ensure it was safe.The state agency that owns the former Deutsche Bank tower countered Wednesday that it added three new full-time staffers to the site this year and that it never got the latest memo by Charles Maikish, at the time the executive director of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center.
Several investigations of the Aug. 18 blaze at the building have exposed a litany of safety violations and accidents at the toxic tower and raised questions about which agency in the government-run project is most responsible for the failures.
Maikish, who ran the construction agency that was overseeing the tower’s dismantling since mid-2006, wrote in a May 25 memo that the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which owns the building, needed to put more staff on the project. The 41-story tower has been dismantled down to the 26th floor, while more work continues to remove toxic debris left there by the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of the World Trade Center’s south tower.
“We have been repeatedly denied resources,” Maikish wrote to Avi Schick, the LMDC’s chairman.
Of the work to dismantle the building, he said, “we also made it very clear that we could not perform it safely or efficiently without being provided the necessary resources.”
Maikish included a copy of a letter that he said he drafted in December to the LMDC but never sent at the request of the office of George Pataki, governor at the time. It expressed similar concerns about staff and funding for the project. A Maikish spokesman said the letter wasn’t sent because Maikish believed after talking with Pataki’s office that more funding would soon be available from the administration of Pataki’s successor, Eliot Spitzer.
Excerpts of the memos appeared Wednesday in the New York Post.
Rebuilding officials and Maikish’s spokesman, Ken Frydman, issued conflicting statements Wednesday about who knew of the letter and who received it.
Frydman said Wednesday that the letter was hand-delivered May 25 to Schick, LMDC President David Emil, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and two other LMDC board members. And he said that Bob Harvey, who was Maikish’s deputy in May and now heads the command center, “helped to prepare and review the memo” and put together a chart of work assignments for the project that was attached to it.
LMDC spokesman Errol Cockfield said Wednesday that no LMDC officials or board members “have any record or recollection of having received” the memo.
“I wasn’t aware of the memo or it going out, quite frankly,” Harvey said Wednesday.
The command center, created in 2004 by the governor and the mayor to manage billions of dollars of construction at the Trade Center site and downtown Manhattan, took a greater role in the building once heavier work began last year.
At that time, the LMDC announced it was going out of business and reduced its staff, including two managers who had been on the site of the contaminated skyscraper every day.
Contractors in December began taking down the building floor by floor and continued work removing toxic debris left there by the collapse of the trade center’s south tower.
It has been plagued by safety violations and accidents since then; investigators blame careless smoking for the blaze that killed the firefighters.