The Mother of All Demolition Jobs

Sometime during the week of August 3rd, 2009, the last scraps of asbestos and other toxic substances will be removed from the Deutsche Bank building on 130 Liberty Street, lower Manhattan, according to officials. And in another eight months or so, the ruined building will be entirely demolished, they say.

Officials had also announced the demolition would be completed by 2006, however. When that deadline was missed, they promised the building — on prime business real estate, just a few minutes’ walk from the New York Stock Exchange — would be gone by 2007. Now they say 2010. New Yorkers are not marking their calendars.

The Deutsche Bank building — officially, the Bankers Trust Building — was once a 41-story office tower that stood in the shadow of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. On September 11, 2001, debris from the collapsing South Tower tore a 15-story gash in the Deutsche Bank building’s facade and knocked out a load-bearing column. Later, engineers marveled the structure didn’t collapse. Fortunately, nearly all of the 4,200 people who worked in the building had evacuated before the collapse. One custodian who remained in the building was killed.

Deutsche Bank decided the building was ruined beyond repair, but insurers went to court to block the building’s demolition. It just needed a little patching up, they said. As the court battles went on, the building remained abandoned, boarded up and covered by a black net shroud. Sealed inside was a toxic soup of asbestos, dioxin, lead, mold and other deadly contaminants. The asbestos alone contained the threat of diseases such as asbestosis and mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer.

In the nearly eight years since the terrorist attacks, demolition has been complicated by the extreme concentration of deadly toxins. Care has had to be taken to not release the poisons into the air of lower Manhattan, where hundreds of thousands of people live and work. Workers have also had to proceed with delicacy and caution as hundreds of human bone fragments were found on the roof and elsewhere in the building. The bones were of people in the South Tower whose bodies were ejected into the Deutsche Bank building as the tower collapsed.

A fire broke out in the wreckage in 2007 that caused the deaths of two firefighters. Investigations revealed corruption and incompetence in many quarters, but the most serious charges have been brought against one of the subcontractors, the John Galt Corporation. John Galt — named for a character in an Ayn Rand novel — was a shell corporation made up of several companies, at least one of which had been dismissed from other construction jobs at Ground Zero. In December 2008 the John Galt Corporation and three construction supervisors were indicted for manslaughter in the deaths of the firefighters.

This year, a former purchasing agent for the John Galt Corporation was charged with stealing more than $1 million from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which purchased the building from Deutsche Bank in 2004. The agent was accused of filing false invoices and using the money for expensive vacations and luxury cars. In July 2009, two businessmen associated with John Galt were charged with falsifying business records as part of a multimillion-dollar check-cashing scheme.

As of this writing, 26 of the buildings original 41 floors are still standing. Assuming there are no more glitches — a big assumption — the final cost of the demolition probably will exceed $300 million. The original estimate was $45 million.

— Barbara O’Brien

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 11:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.