State Help Sought Months Before WTC Fire

The head of a construction agency overseeing the dismantling of a ground zero skyscraper wrote a memo warning its state owners three months before a fatal fire that more resources were needed to take down the building safely.

Charles Maikish, then the executive director of Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, said in the May 25 memo that the state owners needed to add staff at the dilapidated former Deutsche Bank tower where two firefighters were later killed in a blaze.

"We assumed this role on an interim basis in order to be good soldiers," Maikish wrote to Avi Schick, chairman of Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the state agency that owns the building. "However, we also made it very clear that we could not perform it safely or efficiently without being provided the necessary resources."

Excerpts of the memo appear in Wednesday's New York Post.

Senior LMDC officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Schick and LMDC president David Emil, who was listed as receiving a copy, never got the memo. But Ken Frydman, a spokesman for Maikish, said the letter was hand-delivered on May 25 to Schick, Emil, deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff and two LMDC board members.

Bob Harvey, who was Maikish's deputy in May and is now executive director, said Wednesday he wasn't aware that Maikish had written or sent the memo.

The command center, created in 2004 by the governor and the mayor to manage billions of dollars of construction at the World Trade Center site and downtown Manhattan, has supervised the dismantling of the building since the middle of last year. At that time, the LMDC announced it was going out of business and reduced its staff, including two managers who had been on the site of the contaminated skyscraper every day.

Heavy work at the tower started in December, when contractors began taking down the building floor by floor and continued work removing toxic debris left there by the collapse of the trade center's south tower on Sept. 11, 2001.

It has been plagued by safety violations and accidents since then; investigators blame careless smoking for the Aug. 18 blaze that killed the firefighters.