By Julie Shapiro
Ray Master, the person charged with bringing the Deutsche Bank building down safely, said his colleagues constantly tell him two things.
The first is that he’s crazy to take a job as safety director at 130 Liberty St., where a blaze last August killed two firefighters.
The second is that he’s crazy to go before the community board to answer questions.
But Master told Community Board 1 Monday night that being called crazy doesn’t stop him.
“I don’t mind coming here anytime,” Master, a Bovis Lend Lease supervisor, told the World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee, before briefing them on progress at 130 Liberty St. And board members certainly don’t mind having him — they heralded Master’s openness in contrast to the past reticence of Bovis, the general contractor, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which owns 130 Liberty St.
Master updated the board on work to decontaminate the building, which contains 9/11 toxins. Abatement is underway on floors 14 to 19, with floors 18 and 19 nearly complete. Workers are finishing decontamination chambers on floors 12 and 13, an L.M.D.C. spokesperson later added.
“We’re starting to get in a rhythm,” Master said. “It will start accelerating.”
Once the building is clean, the L.M.D.C. will demolish it so the Port Authority can build a vehicle security center and headquarters for JPMorgan Chase. But Master said it would be months before officials start crafting new plans to take the building down.
Master, a health and safety director, previously oversaw about 80 projects through Bovis’s New York office, but in January he moved to 130 Liberty St. full-time.
When he took over, the first thing he noticed was that the workers were not feeling good about the project. In the aftermath of the fire, the workers felt tense, stressed, guilty, angry and afraid, Master said.
He met with the workers to emphasize two points: No one would get hurt and no contamination would leave the site by mistake.
“I think we’re there,” Master said, but he added, “It’s a struggle day to day.”
The tower crane that has hovered over the building, immobile, since last August’s fire will start moving in three to four weeks, Master said. Workers will use the crane to remove debris, equipment, concrete and steel from the building’s roof, which will take another three to four weeks. Monthly maintenance inspections by the crane’s manufacturer show that it is in good working order, Master said.
After two deadly crane accidents this spring and the recent arrest of the Department of Buildings senior crane inspector, Acting Commissioner Robert LiMandri promised last week a “full operational overhaul” of the cranes unit. A D.O.B. spokesperson did not comment on how the department would decide whether the 130 Liberty St. crane is safe to operate next month.
Maintenance is a big part of Master’s job. Structures that workers built before the fire, like the hoists, are standing much longer than originally anticipated because the fire brought the project to a halt for months. To make sure everything is still in working order, Master stepped up the maintenance schedule. The increased inspections could prevent more accidents like the one last month in which a disc fell off of a hoist, Master said. The disc did not injure anyone.
One obstacle to progress is the building’s large elevator shaft, which must be blocked off to prevent workers from falling in, but which also has to be decontaminated, Master said. Another obstacle is the recent hot weather. Because the building is contaminated, workers wear hazardous materials suits and there is no ventilation from the outside. Master trains workers to stay hydrated and watch for heat exhaustion.
Since the fire last August, Bovis launched an emergency notification system that sends out text messages and e-mails to the project’s stakeholders, including government agencies and several members of the community. The messages would go out almost immediately, before a broader notification by the city’s Notify NYC.
Last week, Master sent out the first notification when pieces of glass damaged by the fire started to fall from the building. He shut down the Washington St. entrance to the site and started devising a better plan to keep the glass in place. He thought regulators should know what was happening, so he sent the message.
But word of the falling glass did not reach the broader community, so Master promised to add several members of the W.T.C. Committee to his list.
Once 130 Liberty St. is decontaminated, workers will begin demolishing the building floor by floor. First, the L.M.D.C. and Bovis have to draft a demolition plan. Master said he has not started working on the new plan, but he expects to start developing it within several months. That schedule will still allow demolition to proceed immediately after decontamination, he said.
The L.M.D.C. had committed to have the building down by the end of the year, but that timetable now appears even closer to impossible since after the demolition plan is written, it will still have to be approved by a bevy of federal, state and city agencies.
Master is thinking of the two halves of the project as two entirely separate jobs, with very different challenges. The demolition “is a much more dangerous job,” he said. Before demolition, he plans to retrain all the workers as though it was their first day on the job.
At Monday night’s meeting, the L.M.D.C. echoed Master’s goal of transparency.
Sayar Lonial, the L.M.D.C.’s director of planning, announced a public meeting on 130 Liberty St. for the last week in June. The community board has been clamoring for that meeting for months, hoping to ask questions of L.M.D.C. Chairperson Avi Schick and President David Emil.
Lonial added that the L.M.D.C. is opening the periodic private meetings it holds with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and others to a broader audience. Lonial invited members of the public to contact him to add their name to the list of attendees.
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
