A fatal inability to get the job done

Add the names Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino to the list of 9/11 victims. The two New York firefighters were killed Saturday in a fire that spread through the Deutsche Bank building in lower Manhattan. That building, you may remember, was heavily damaged by the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, and was abandoned. Yet nearly six years later, it was still standing. Correction – it IS still standing. The process of demolition, or “deconstruction” as they like to call it now, was just underway.

Why six years? The building has been the focus of arguments, lawsuits and political posturing ever since 9/11: who would pay for its demolition and how; a tangled insurance liability mess; worries about hazardous materials in the structure such as asbestos, dioxin, lead and more; concerns from 9/11 victims’ families that some tiny fragments of their loved one’s remains might still be in or on the building. These are all legitimate issues, but the intransigence of the “stakeholders” on those issues led to a failure to accomplish a vital task.

And so a fire standpipe and a valve in the long-abandoned building failed Saturday. Firefighters had to haul hoses up 17 floors full of plastic curtains and “negative air pressure” plywood decontamination stations. Two of them didn’t make it down from a building that should have been razed long ago. The chairman of state corporation that owns the site said Saturday’s fatalities were caused by a “perfect storm of misfortune.” Yes, that, plus incompetence, narrow thinking and a lack of common sense.

We see too much of this paralysis these days, in places such as Cincinnati as well as New York. Projects don’t get done because too many interested parties have too many agendas and issues that have to be satisfied before anything happens. If our society eventually collapses, it may well be from a chronic inability to look at the whole picture, consider the optimum common good and just get it done.