Rotten to the Core

The Buildings Department in New York City is on quite a tear. One of their investigators was arrested in connection with the crane collapse last weekend, and now it's been revealed that the City is undertaking comprehensive inspections of 26 buildings after finding another inspector didn't thoroughly inspect a building involved in a 2001 collapse that resulted in the death of two firefighters.

The city’s Buildings Department has begun a comprehensive review of other construction jobs that were approved by an engineer who has been charged with lying about his inspection of a Bronx building that collapsed in 2006, killing two firefighters.

A city report on the collapse found that the engineer, Jose D. Vargas, who approved renovation plans for the Bronx building in 2001, never completed a required final inspection to make sure the job met the city’s building code.

A Fire Department report concluded that had Mr. Vargas completely inspected the building, he could have detected rotten pillars in the basement that caused the collapse. Mr. Vargas was charged this month with lying to investigators looking into the collapse of the building, a discount store at 1575 Walton Avenue.

The Buildings Department has been a mess for far too long, and it has put lives in jeopardy repeatedly by failing to detect failed or missed inspections, bureaucratic bungling that resulted in missing paperwork that would have gotten necessary work done to stabilize buildings, and it has little to do with the current building boom, but rather an ongoing and systematic problem within the Department itself.

Some of this has to do with a self-certification process, but it also has to do with failures within the Department.