[NYTr] Ground Zero's Deutsch Bank: A Toxic Capitalist Mess

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Workers World - Sep 6, 2007 issue
http://www.workers.org/2007/us/deutsche-bank-0906/

Deutsche Bank fire: a toxic capitalist mess

Putting out a fire in the Deutsche Bank building here on Aug. 18 cost
the lives of two firefighters. Another 51 were injured, nine seriously.
Five days later, two more were seriously injured at the building in a
workplace accident involving a pallet jack—just two hours after Gov.
Eliot Spitzer had promised to quickly deconstruct the building in
complete safety.

Since 9/11, the Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty St. has been a
toxic menace to the workers and residents of lower Manhattan. When the
World Trade Center collapsed, some of the debris sliced into the bank
building, setting off the sprinklers on every one of its 41 floors.
Mold spread everywhere and the World Trade Center debris added
asbestos, dioxin and heavy metals to the mix.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (LMDC), a joint city/state
agency, took ownership of the building in 2004, after the bank and its
insurance companies resolved a lawsuit. The LMDC got assurances that
the costs of demolishing the building would be covered and its
extensive plans, which were supposed to keep the building’s toxic
contents from escaping, were approved by a raft of agencies.

LMDC appointed Bovis Lend Lease as the general contractor and hired the
John Galt Corp. in 2006 to do the demolition, even though a number of
other companies bid on the job. According to an Aug. 23 New York Times
article, John Galt had no experience at all. It was a shell
corporation, created to allow others to do the job. Among those others
were former executives from Safeway Environmental Corp., one of whom
had been twice imprisoned and was identified by federal investigators
as a Gambino crime family associate.

“John Galt” also happens to be the name of a character in the Ayn Rand
novel “Atlas Shrugged,” who became an icon of the libertarian right
wing.

The company drew its workers and supervisors from a Bronx scaffolding
corporation. The workers were mainly from immigrant communities that
have done most of the dangerous asbestos abatement work for the
construction industry. It’s not known how many were also vulnerable to
their employer because of being undocumented. Galt was not a union shop
and got a number of tickets and stop-work orders as it started to take
the floors down one at a time.

The Manhattan district attorney is investigating the fire. Gov. Eliot
Spitzer and billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg are vowing to get to
its real causes. The media are floating rumors that these immigrant
workers were smoking and drinking on the job.

Are the workers being set up to take the fall?

The LMDC took three years to gain ownership of 130 Liberty St., and two
years to draw up environmentally adequate plans for its demolition and
to hire a corporation to implement these plans.

Some 300,000 people live and work in Lower Manhattan and a few hundred
thousand more pass through it every day. The longer the Deutsche Bank
building stands, the longer all of them face serious risk. And of
course as long as the toxic building is still standing, the more
trouble the Port Authority is going to have renting the so-called
Freedom Tower nearby, which is to replace the WTC Twin Towers.

The New York Fire Department took 343 casualties on 9/11 and two more
on Aug. 18, yet it had no role in guaranteeing that the demolition work
at 130 Liberty conformed to the regulations in force. By law the fire
department is supposed to inspect a building being demolished every 15
days. There was no reported fire inspection of 130 Liberty after Galt
started work.

The fire department has two functions: to put out fires and to inspect
buildings to minimize the risks of fire breaking out. Both tasks are
very important in a city with so many tall buildings containing so many
workers.

Glenn Corbet, an associate professor of fire science at the City
University of New York’s John Jay College, told the Aug. 26 New York
Times that he was “startled that the Deutsche Bank system had not been
inspected more carefully.” Corbett stated, “You can almost expect that
there’s going to be fires in this building, because there are torches
being used.

“Ideally,” he said, there should have been an inspector on the site
“whose job is to patrol the standpipe system as each section is taken
out.” Standpipes allow fire crews to pump water at high pressure to the
floors of tall buildings.

What lessons can be drawn from this deadly mess?

The purpose of insurance companies is supposedly to spread risk.
However, under capitalism, the premiums they collect become their
private property. If the loss is big, they are extremely reluctant to
pay up. That’s why it took two years and government mediation to get
Deutsche Bank’s insurers to settle on a payment.

Once the LMDC took ownership of the building, it started acting like a
corporation instead of a government agency. It maneuvered with Deutsche
Bank and the insurers to limit its exposure to risk and then with the
real estate interests in Lower Manhattan to prevent their exposure to
the toxics entombed in 130 Liberty. It took another two years to
resolve the conflicting economic interests.

The LMDC’s reasons for hiring the untested John Galt Corp. for the
demolition remain murky. Galt turned out to be incompetent as well as
untested. It managed to keep the fire department out. Fire inspections
would have seriously slowed down the project and a Dec. 31 deadline was
fast approaching.

Legal struggles, payoffs and backroom deals are all used to settle
conflicts between competing capitalist entities. Competition and the
free market are supposed to work the best of any system. But this claim
is just hot air for 130 Liberty, still a toxic threat to hundreds of
thousands of people after six years, two deaths and nearly 60 injuries.


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