The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 119

Some families are looking to stop the demolition at the Deutsche Bank building because of the ongoing discovery of human remains at the building. The deconstruction of the Deutsche Bank building has finally gotten underway after years of delays:

Some 9/11 relatives say they may go to court to stop demolition of the Deutsche Bank building at Ground Zero. They say they're upset that workers are still finding victims' remains in the structure. They want the building thoroughly searched before it's taken down.

Yesterday, officials announced that nearly 300 more human bone fragments were recovered in the past four days from the roof of the skyscraper badly damaged by the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of the World Trade Center.

Workers have been going through the former Deutsche Bank building to remove toxic chemicals and trade center dust before they begin dismantling it floor by floor. They found 10 bone fragments on the rooftop when the cleanup began last fall and had found more than 80 in recent weeks.

Also, the FDNY is ordering a new review of 9/11 tapes.The Health Department is conducting followup surveys of the nearly 70,000 people exposed to the dust and debris from the collapsing towers. There are still questions over the toxicity of the dust and you've got experts debating exactly what Officer James Zadroga's autopsy results mean:

Proving the cause of a disease, even when the cause may seem obvious, is difficult. Dr. Michael M. Baden, former chief medical examiner of New York and a forensics expert, said the phrase "reasonable degree of certainty" is the standard term used in court to mean that given the available information, "it's very likely that that opinion is correct."

That said, Dr. Baden noted that given the impact of such a finding, he would have expected the medical examiner's office to consult with doctors who had tested or treated other first responders before coming to such a conclusion. Other experts said that tests should have been done on the particles found in Detective Zadroga's lungs to compare them with the dust from the trade center.

Neither step was taken. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Gerard Breton, a 73-year-old retired pathologist who has been on contract to the medical examiner's office in Ocean County for a decade.

Dr. Breton said in a telephone interview yesterday that he did not attempt to classify the "innumerable foreign body granulomas" containing "unidentified foreign materials" in Detective Zadroga's lungs. He also did not consult any doctors besides the detective's physician, who he said had informed him of Detective Zadroga's work at ground zero.

Nonetheless, Dr. Breton said what he found was unmistakable.

The Post lambasts the LMDC and its handling of the entire Deutsche Bank building affair. This time it appears that the LMDC air quality plan for the deconstruction doesn't meet the EPA requirements.