by DENNIS SMITH
THE tragedy of the fire at the Deutsche Bank building in lower Manhattan will not be alleviated by an arbitrary transfer and public humiliation of three good fire officers who were not even at the scene. If Deputy Chief Richard Fuerch, Battalion Chief John McDonald and Capt. Peter Bosco did something wrong, they should be tried in a court of law and given the same rights as all other people in our country. A sudden and unexpected transfer is a burdensome and embarrassing upheaval for a family. It is a department discipline tool that has no recourse and no court of appeals.
Firefighters do not like to point fingers after a line-of-duty fatality, but they also do not cower, hide or shift blame.
The deaths of Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia, yet to be explained, were followed six days later by serious injuries to William Carbettis and Neil Nally when a power tool fell 23 stories and collapsed a shed on top of them. Why, New Yorkers ask, is the greatest tragedy of our city's history lingering to cause death and destruction almost six years later? Silverstein Properties designed and built a 52-story building, and filled it with tenants, in the same amount of time.
Promises of full investigations ring hollow in the ears of the firefighters and their families, who pay the biggest price. Three fire officers are transferred, but that indicates nothing. Two men have been killed, and their deaths are almost certainly a result of some malfeasance. The biting question is, whose malfeasance is it?
New York real estate and construction is about money, and if reporters and investigators follow the contracts and the subcontracts of the Deutsche Bank building they are bound to find a clear line of responsibility for the conditions that led to the killing of these two men.
Risk assessment was extremely difficult in the beginning stages of the response to the fire. It was reported that many workers were in the building. It was only later that the reports of boarded-up stairwells, random holes in the floors, nailed plywood partitions, a dismembered standpipe system and rapid-burning polyurethane curtains came in. The interior condition of the building was seemingly, if unintentionally, designed to kill firefighters - as shown by the transmissions of 13 "maydays" and 18 "urgents" that were sent by seriously threatened firefighters during the blaze.
Given all this, it is clear that there is plenty of blame to go around. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation cannot escape its responsibility. It owns the property, and the building was not managed properly. Bovis Lend Lease, the construction giant managing the work, hired a dubious subcontractor, the John Galt Corporation. Neither Bovis nor the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation can simply pin the dangerous conditions on mismanagement by Galt.
Those to blame in this situation, however, do not include the transferred fire officers. There is much talk of a prefire plan for the Deutsche Bank building, and a paper trail will uncover on whose desk that plan landed. But that plan is not the most important issue created by this fire. I certainly do not think such a plan would have saved the lives of the two firefighters.
A fire often builds to a definable chaos before firefighters enter it to bring it - with great and dangerous effort - to a manageable order. New York's firefighters have died doing this 1,137 times since the department began. The response to a fire is never perfect, and no blaze is fought without errors.
But every fire, except for those sparked by lightning, starts with some person's attributable mistake, accidental or criminal. The families of these fallen firefighters need peace, and the millions of New Yorkers appalled by this reminder of the mismanagement of ground zero after 9/11 need relief and reassurance.
The Deutsche Bank building should be immediately razed. It has been a blight on the reputation of our city and state for nearly six years.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer should take over the management of the building from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, by eminent domain if he must. He has the power to abrogate the existing contracts for the building's management. And Mr. Spitzer should find an organization that will bring the building down in record time.
Dennis Smith, a retired New York City firefighter, is the chairman of a financial services company for first responders.
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