The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 125

WTC site cleanup was a mess and information released in connection with a variety of lawsuits against the city documents some of the problems:

Kenneth Becker, chief of the city Law Department's WTC unit, sharply disagreed. "Safety was the city's number one priority at Ground Zero," he said.

He said no worker died in the cleanup, and serious injuries were few. He also said the city and the feds distributed more than 200,000 respirators to workers, and reminded them daily to use them. Safety was addressed twice a day in meetings among entities working on the pile, he said.

But documents cite the persistent problem of workers, from supervisors on down, not wearing "PPE," or personal protective equipment, including respirators required by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Violations were flagrant, records suggest. "PPE is donned while OSHA is around, then it is not worn when OSHA is not around," say minutes of an Oct. 19, 2001, site meeting. That day "more than 100 persons were counted on the pile not wearing all necessary PPE."

At a Dec. 12, 2001, site meeting, Adams quoted a construction supervisor as asking flippantly: "Why are we going to follow OSHA rules now? Since we haven't followed them so far, why should we start now?"

A Jan. 13, 2002, memo to Adams from fellow staffers reports that "as few as 20 percent" of workers within the WTC slurry wall were wearing protective gear.

Safety at the memorial is being slammed. Again.

And families, along with Sen. Charles Schumer, are calling on the federal government to step in and search for additional remains considering the large number of remains found within the past several weeks at the Deutsche Bank building.

UPDATE:
I was watching a Port Authority video screen on the way home tonite, and saw a blurb from a New York Post business news story. In it, the story claimed that experts were expecting prices for office space to double within the next few years. That's curious. Very curious in fact. Admittedly, this is an incomplete story (and I'm efforting to find a link if any), but Mayor Bloomberg and other opponents of rebuilding at Ground Zero often suggest that a full rebuild of the 10 million square feet of office space would depress the market. Well, the failure to build new modern office space is pricing out businesses that might otherwise choose to locate their businesses in New York City. This particular story would tend to support the contention that rebuilding at Ground Zero would not only improve the business climate, but would avert a tremendous run up in the prices of office space in the city. Bloomberg, in particular, has sought to revise the Ground Zero master plan to significantly reduce office space.

Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center, spitzer, silverstein.