Fires, Floods, and Taxicabs

It was eighty-three degrees in the city that day. The sun was shining, and lower Manhattan was abuzz with the sounds of demolition and construction. At 3:37 p.m., a citizen called 911 to report a fire on a scaffolding at a building near Rector Street, one block from the World Trade Center site. The NYC Fire Department (FDNY) sounded an alarm two seconds later to dispatch two engines, two ladders, and a battalion chief. Additional calls poured in, all reporting a fire at the vacant thirty-eight-story Deutsche Bank Building at 130 Liberty Street, which was undergoing abatement of hazardous materials and demolition due to the damage caused when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed onto it on September 11, 2001.

At 3:40 p.m., the responding units sent a 10-75 radio code, or “All Hands,” signifying that all the personnel from the responding units were engaged in fighting the fire. In other words, it was a serious fire and more resources were needed. Over the next hour, additional alarms were sounded to activate more emergency personnel. Hundreds arrived on the scene to battle the blaze, which was not behaving as most high-rise fires would. Something different was happening here.

At 4:38 p.m., a roll call was conducted by fire department personnel for the fire floors fifteen through seventeen. Some firefighters did not respond, so a Mayday was sounded for the missing members. This happened while crews stretched a hose line up the side of the building to get water on the fire, which was necessary because of an inoperable standpipe.

The inside of the building presented a maze, as each floor had been partitioned into asbestos and hazardous material containment areas for the abatement process, with temporary walls constructed to trap hazardous materials during the cleanup. These partitions blocked egress and stairwells. Negative air pressure ventilation systems designed to keep hazardous materials inside the building changed the behavior of the smoke and fire (Kugler 2007). The smoke was not rising into the air (as is typical of a high-rise fire) but was sucked back into the building. The negative pressure also changed the behavior of the fire, pulling it inward and forcing it downward from the fire floors to lower floors.

The building had been under floor-by-floor demolition while abatement was done simultaneously. The crews would conduct the hazardous material abatement on one floor, and when they finished, they’d move to the next floor down while a demolition crew worked on the floor just vacated. The standpipe and sprinkler system were inoperable as a result of the teardown.

The entire project to take down the Deutsche Bank Building had been filed under a series of alteration permits (NYC Fire Wire 2016) that regulated partial demolition practices for dismantling “structural members, floors, interior bearing walls, and/or exterior walls or portions thereof.” The project was not filed as a full building demolition, which would have been treated differently and was defined as the “dismantling, razing, or removal of all of a building or structure” (City of New York 2008).

At 5:20 p.m. that day, two firefighters were found unconscious and transported to an area hospital. At 5:36 p.m., a third member was found and also transported to the hospital. Less than half an hour later, two of the members experienced full cardiac arrest; firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino tragically gave their lives in battling the fire.

The tower continued to burn for seven hours before firefighters finally extinguished the flames. Black smoke had pumped into the air from this sacred spot near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. The death of two firefighters demanded answers, and the city needed to understand how a fire of this magnitude had occurred and killed two of NYC’s bravest. Mayor Bloomberg called the incident “another cruel blow to our city and to the Fire Department” (Rivera and Santos 2007), alluding to the FDNY’s losing so many (343, to be precise) only six years earlier at the World Trade Center.

A few days after the fire, my boss told me I needed to understand the process of building demolition in NYC. This was my first job in NYC government, in the Mayor’s Office of Operations where I worked as a policy analyst at the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s second term. Diving right into this experience was my only option because, as the new guy, I didn’t know much of anything. I had few relationships in city government at the time, but I dived in with a curious mindset and started to paint a picture of the situation with tools I knew would help me.

Start with Curiosity

The first step in any project is to be curious and dive in. Strip away what you think you know and start asking questions. I always relished figuring out how things worked (or didn’t work as the case may be), and you should enjoy the process of digging into an operation and learning how people do their jobs.

In this case, city hall had enlisted our team’s help in understanding the information flow among the principal city agencies that had a regulatory role in the teardown of buildings. Our team, the Project Management Group at the Mayor’s Office of Operations, was essentially a group of in-house consultants who were tasked with large-scale, interagency projects of mayoral priority. We excelled at dissecting complex projects into actionable steps and understanding the nuts-and-bolts processes that made the city’s vast government hum.

Being curious and knowing little about this specific problem set allowed me to ask questions from a fresh perspective with absolutely no baseline assumptions or inaccurate perceptions.

The main question from my perspective was why no one had fully understood what was going on inside this building when three key city agencies played a regulatory role in its razing.

What Goes On inside the Black Box?

We convened an interagency task force to kick off the work about to take place. Representatives of several city agencies would gather to discuss how the city was going to ensure that the problems that led to the deaths of two firefighters would be fixed and never allowed to happen again.

A day or two later, I sat in the conference room for our kickoff meeting at 253 Broadway, directly across the street from city hall. The leaders of the three principal agencies had gathered to discuss the scale and scope of our project, and my boss laid out how we would delve into their operations and processes to understand what had happened. We packed in around the long table in the windowless room. Pens and notebooks rested on the table as my boss laid out our approach, commanding the room from one end of the table. That’s when a senior chief from the FDNY leaned forward and offered the following succinct statement: “None of this would have happened if we knew what goes on inside that black box.”

To abate the hazardous materials, the crews had built containment areas or structures that kept the hazardous materials from escaping into the air. These structures, combined with negative air pressure machines, kept the asbestos and debris inside the building as cleanup crews in hazmat suits and ventilators removed all the particles. The problem was that the building’s containment areas were built in ways that blocked exits, stairwells, hallways, and doorways (Baker 2008). A firefighter crawling on the floor with zero visibility faced a very hard time in navigating that labyrinth of structures and machinery.

This is what the chief was talking about. These containment areas were in effect mazes, and the FDNY had little knowledge of what was inside them. Why? Because the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), not the FDNY, regulated hazardous material abatement and how it was performed. And who oversaw the teardown of the building itself? The Department of Buildings (DOB). Meanwhile, the FDNY was responsible for overseeing the building inspections that ensured that no life-threatening safety issues were present in the case of an emergency, such as a fire. All told, this was a complicated, interconnected web of activities and regulations with no central authority overseeing all the components to ensure that each stakeholder had a complete picture of what was happening inside that building.

On the day I joined the chief, my boss, others from the city agencies, and members of the mayor’s staff from city hall, I had been in my role for less than three months and had only recently set foot in NYC for the first time to start my job in the Mayor’s Office of Operations. Just prior, I had completed studies for my master’s degree and, for a summer, had been an intern for James J. Fiorentini, the mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts. I knew from those experiences that city government, at any scale, was complicated and required a great deal of cross-collaboration and coordination. In my limited experience, I had seen how we managed to get a boardwalk project back on track by convening a meeting of all the stakeholders. The project, which had been stalled for years, was on hold because all the parties involved were pointing at one another and claiming that they were waiting for decisions or for this or that piece of information, even though they were all committed to completing the project itself. It reminded me of the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, pointing in two directions at once. In the case in NYC, I was not an expert who could provide insight into the complicated regulatory issues, but I knew my boss expected me to understand those processes and identify the issues that had led to those complications.

I needed a better understanding of our current status: the existing systems, people, and processes that had contributed to this situation. Had the FDNY known about the activities within the containment areas? Had the DOB ensured that the containment areas complied with the building code? Had the DEP surveyed the sites prior to this happening? I had a million questions as I determined how to proceed.

Know Where You Are

One of the main things I learned from this experience was that in order to change policy, you have to know not only your destination (although that is certainly necessary) but also where you are. Only by understanding the starting point can you begin charting a path to your desired end point.

End points, I have found, are the easier ones to identify. A leader commits to a bold vision, as in President Kennedy’s famous speech proposing that the United States send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s. The end point? To the moon and back safely. But what about the starting point?

Often, the harder part is defining the current reality—the start point. Many times throughout my career, I have seen project teams jump in without establishing a problem statement to define where they are. At best, part of the problem gets fixed. Maybe. At worst, resources, time, and money are invested in fixing a nonexistent problem.

In this instance, our team was able to paint a picture of the existing reality, which highlighted areas needing change. It was a lot of work and required painstaking research, collaboration, interviews, and staff time. No binder on a shelf offered a blueprint for how everything worked in government, and we had no simple map or how-to guide. What we had was a three-part strategy: collect, organize, and assess.

Collect

The best way to start? Get the on-the-ground truth. Collect as much on-the-ground data as you can, and if you cannot, ask others on the team to do it. Nothing offers more clarity than spending time with people doing the job and getting a firsthand sense of how things happen. This will either clarify things you were uncertain about or will highlight things that need changing that you had not even thought about.

During this project, we toured high-rise construction and demolition sites and learned how site safety was conducted. We joined DOB personnel as they inspected buildings for key safety concerns, and we rode along with FDNY fire units to understand the life and fire safety issues they looked for when inspecting buildings under construction or demolition. We also toured the DEP to understand how abatement inspections occurred. All these tours, interviews, and surveys gave us invaluable information on how things were done.

Starting with a concept on paper and then seeing it on the ground switched on a number of light bulbs and improved our understanding of the overall process. It also allowed us to ask questions of the people who actually did the work (to avoid getting answers that were filtered and potentially skewed by traveling through multiple layers of management). This created opportunities to engage with people who knew how the processes worked and could show me the systems they used, how they tracked information, and what resources would make their jobs better. Many of the ideas that emerged in this report and others were directly attributable to the good people who were doing the work every day.

Many tools and techniques are needed to gather this kind of on-the-ground data. The ones I’ve found most critical are interviews, ride-alongs, mystery shopping, surveys, and focus groups. These tools are helpful in almost any situation, and all of them will give you a deeper sense of where you are.