Newsday

But there is perhaps a greater mystery: Months before the Aug. 18 fire that killed two firefighters, numerous senior fire chiefs spent weeks at the demolition site and apparently never reported those conditions. The battalion chiefs were at the building to search for remains of Sept. 11 victims.

Now, those who played a role in the remains search are being questioned by investigators. Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned this week that the chiefs' judgement must be questioned.

"It's troublesome that there were a lot of senior fire officials that had come through that building when we were searching for remains," he said. "They saw the kind of conditions that were in that building, and as far as I can tell so far, none of them brought it to anybody's attention."

A series of dangers existed in the former Deutsche Bank building before the blaze. They include barricades in stairwells, combustible debris strewn about, signs that workers ignored the site's no-smoking rule and a tangle of polyurethane sheeting and other materials used to seal against asbestos and lead leakage.

Fire inspectors were required to check the building every 15 days and never did, investigators found. Meanwhile, battalion chiefs were there nearly every day last spring as part of the city's renewed search for remains of Sept. 11 victims, Bloomberg said.

The Fire Department declined to identify those officials or make them available. Spokesman Frank Gribbon said the matter was under investigation.

According to a June 1 memo written by Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler, searchers had been in the building since March 15 and completed the job on May 29.

Numerous fire officials were said to have worked on those search teams, spending hours amid the conditions that investigators now say probably worsened the fire earlier this month.

Firefighters who responded to the blaze quickly found that the inside of the building was nearly impossible to navigate.

Barricades on the stairwells and among the floors made it easy to get disoriented or lost.

And as part of the asbestos containment operation, a system had been set up to create negative air pressure on some floors. Officials believe this caused the fire to behave differently - flames were quickly sucked downward instead of creeping up, which surprised firefighters who typically set up a base of operations a few floors under the point of origin.

Firefighters also couldn't get water out of the building's supply network known as its standpipe. Marshals later found pieces of it lying in the basement.

Bloomberg said that the battalion chiefs who were there for the remains search would not have known about the standpipe problem, but should have raised objections about the many other problems.