Newsday

AP - Every two weeks, firefighters ascend a condemned, black-shrouded skyscraper, checking carefully marked exit signs, a rebuilt water supply system and wide-open corridors. They wear protective suits on floors still contaminated by toxic dust from the World Trade Center.

A year ago, more than 100 firefighters ran into the partly demolished building during a fire and had trouble finding their way out. Thick plastic sheets meant to contain asbestos on some floors also held in smoke. Two firefighters died on the building's 14th floor when their oxygen supply ran out.

The Aug. 18, 2007, fire at the former Deutsche Bank tower across a street from Ground Zero exposed the incompetence of multiple government agencies assigned to near-daily inspections of the building, which was being dismantled. It also unmasked a questionable subcontractor and the Fire Department's failure to point out dozens of hazards - including the cutting of a pipe meant to supply water to fire hoses.

"The community had been raising red flags for months and sometimes years" about the toxic tower, said environmental activist Kimberly Flynn. "It's a mystery to us how you can have the number of inspectors ... practically living in that building and have that level of disaster."

A Manhattan grand jury has been meeting for nine months, deciding whether to lodge criminal charges against contractors, the government or both. The office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is said to be considering charges of criminal negligence against the city, The New York Times reported yesterday.

The building had been damaged by the collapsing World Trade Center south tower on Sept. 11, 2001. Demolition of the 26-story building is now four years behind schedule and the original $45-million budget for taking it down has tripled. Planners hope to replace it with one of five office towers that will make up the new trade center.

Since last year's fire, officials have stepped up inspections, outfitted the tower with state-of-the-art fire safety systems and come up with dozens of proposals intended to make demolition sites safer. But they say the building posed challenges like no other.

Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler said, "It exposed an area that the city had never looked at this comprehensively." The blaze, believed to have been started by a demolition worker's cigarette, shed light on multiple lapses.

Regulators - including the city Buildings Department and federal, state and city environmental agencies - had not corrected multiple fire hazards. Among them were blocked stairwells and a negative air pressure system - a system of fans intended to pull air in and keep toxins from escaping - that sucked the fire downward. A standpipe had been cut into pieces in the basement, leaving firefighters without a water supply.

The Fire Department was required to inspect the site every 15 days but hadn't been there in more than a year. It also had not prepared a fire plan, as it has for more than 200 other sites that pose special challenges.

Since the fire, the lower Manhattan Development Corp. has switched subcontractors and resumed cleaning the building of toxic debris - but is not simultaneously demolishing other floors at the same time, a practice the city opposes.

The city has pledged to have the building's multiple regulators talk to each other more, and inspectors will be cross-trained to spot any kind of hazard. Firefighters now inspect the building regularly; a fire chief is assigned full-time to the site. Three fire officers were reassigned in the week after the blaze. The negative air pressure system now can be turned off on sealed floors.

Prosecutors are looking at how subcontractor John Galt Corp. was hired. Investigators have suggested Galt employees were transplanted from another contractor whose former owner had reputed mob ties. Galt, dismissed a week after the blaze, and the general contractor, Bovis Lend Lease, haven't commented on the probe.

The bank building now is set for removal by next summer; that had been expected in 2005.