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.