The Rebuilding of Ground Zero, Part 46

Today is a pretty important day. Two major reports have either been released or will be released today. The first deals with the Deutsche Bank building fire, which killed two firefighters and has caused innumerable delays in the construction timetables.

 

The report indicates that workers at the building waited 13 minutes before reporting the fire. The 176 page report blames the contractor, John Galt Corporation, the FDNY and Buildings Department, among others for a series of failures that led to the deaths of firefighters Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia.

The report reveals the building was being taken down even though there was no demolition permit for the tower.

The city Department of Buildings was allowing the tower's owner, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., to proceed with the work using only an alteration permit, which carries less strict inspection requirements.

While it makes note of the slew of building-code violations at the site - including blocked stairwells and doorways - it also points a finger back at the FDNY, acknowledging fire inspectors failed to conduct inspections that could have discovered the standpipe, which gets water to high floors, was broken.

That forced firefighters to improvise by running hoses up the side of the tower.

The report also focuses on other problems firefighters faced, including difficulties with their oxygen masks and radio communications.

Graffagnino's self-contained breathing apparatus had run out of its 45-minute air supply, the report said, while Beddia had removed his face mask even though he still had five to eight minutes of breathable air. Both died of smoke inhalation.

The report says there were a total of 14 mayday and 19 urgent signals during the fire, not all of which were heard in the confusion.

The report has been forwarded to the Manhattan District Attorney's office. Expect charges to be brought against the John Galt Corporation, which helped create the dangerous conditions. Also, the LMDC should get thoroughly gutted, since they were the owners of record at the time of the fire and permitted the construction to proceed in a manner that was dangerous and threatened the lives of those inside the building as well as pedestrians outside.

The FDNY isn't blameless either, given that they should have been conducting regular inspections of the building - any of which would have discovered the standpipe had been severed and was missing 40 feet in length. Had that condition been revealed, firefighters would never have been placed in the building without proper water support. The Buildings Department also didn't issue demolition permits, instead provided an alteration permit. That allowed fewer inspections to take place.

Meanwhile, the second report is being issued by NIST over the collapse of 7WTC on 9/11/2001. That report is being issued later today. Expect the troofers - those that believe that there was a conspiracy to destroy the building - to be out in force. They've been quite busy trying to ignore the facts and logic (physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.) to claim that 7WTC was purposefully destroyed on the afternoon of 9/11. They ignore the massive damage done to the building when the Twin Towers collapsed and the raging fires that were not contained because firefighting crews were told to pull back for fear of further collapses from the WTC buildings, to say nothing of the hundreds of missing firefighters and killed in the collapses. Screw Loose Change has been on top of the conspiracy nuts and will likely have additional coverage today. Jammie is also on the prowl.

While 7WTC has been rebuilt into a gleaming new tower with the most modern amenities and safety and security engineering, the Deutsche Bank building remains a hulking reminder of 9/11.

UPDATE:
It was a fire, not an explosion that brought down 7WTC. Uncontrolled fires in the building for hours weakened key structural members that failed under the stress (fire weakens steel, allowing it to bend and stretch).

“Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail,” said Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator. “Video and photographic evidence combined with detailed computer simulations show that neither explosives nor fuel oils played a role in the collapse that brought the building down.”

No one died when 7 World Trade Center fell, nearly seven hours after the twin towers came down. But the collapse of the adjacent tower — once home to branch offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service and to the Giuliani administration’s emergency operations center — is cited in hundreds of books and Internet sites as perhaps the most compelling evidence that an insider secretly planted explosives, intentionally destroying the tower.

It is the first skyscraper in modern times to collapse primarily as a result of a fire.

Mainstream engineers and government officials have rejected the speculation as ridiculous. But national polls have shown that perhaps as many as 1 in 7 Americans believe that the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was an inside job.

The investigators determined that debris from the falling twin towers ignited fires on at least 10 floors at 7 World Trade Center, which was about 400 feet north of where the city’s two tallest buildings once stood. The blazes burned out of control for six hours, as the city fire department, devastated by the collapse of the twin towers, abandoned its efforts to extinguish the fire, and the sprinkler system was incapacitated.

7WTC might have been the first major skyscraper to collapse as a result of a fire, but it is hardly alone.

The full report is here.