Work on Former Deutsche Bank Building Set to Begin By Barry Owens Work is set to begin this summer cutting down, cleaning and hauling out the contaminated building materials from inside the Deutsche Bank building, damaged in the Sept. 11 attacks. Once empty, the building's remaining structure will be painstakingly dismantled floor by floor and similarly carted off in pieces. The deconstruction of the building at 130 Liberty St. is expected to be complete by December of 2007. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which owns the building, told a committee of Community Board 1 on June 6 their latest plan for safely leveling the structure, now holding contaminates from the World Trade Center collapse. "We need to treat everything in the building as if it were contaminated with World Trade Center dust, which it is," said Ed Gerdts, an environmental consultant on the project for the LMDC. "And everything we do will be done under asbestos [removal] procedures." There will be decontamination stations and showers for workers leaving the site and four air monitoring devices installed throughout the building to watch for dangerous levels of dust. "There are trigger or action levels," said Gerdts. "If we do hit one of those levels, work would stop until correct action is taken." At the urging of Community Board 1 and local environmental groups, 911 will be the first number workers are expected to call in the event of an emergency, rather than the LMDC or other agencies. "I'm happy to see that the LMDC finally sees the importance of that," said board member Marc Ameruso. Aside from dialing 911, residents are urged to call the LMDC emergency hotline at 646-942-0694. Concerned residents can also call Lou Mendes, director of construction for the LMDC, at 646-942-0694. A scaffolding will go up around the 40-story building beginning in late July and by August crews will be picking through the building floor by floor to remove all the materials. Those materials, including sheet rock, ceiling tiles, flooring and any porous pieces will be cleaned and sealed in containers on trucks parked inside the building and shipped out of the neighborhood down Cedar Street where the trucks will undergo a wash before turning onto West Street. It is expected that 10 to 15 trucks a day will make the trip, though a landfill destination for the materials has not been selected. "The only thing left in the building will be the steel, the concrete and the outside skin," said Mendes. The LMDC will open the bid process on the deconstruction contract this month. Beginning in November, Mendes said, a net would go up around the scaffolding and crews would begin to shore away the beams and fold down the outer walls to the floor as level by level the building will be cut away. "It's a very slow process," Mendes said. "The cutting is going to be an even slower process." The deconstruction plan, nearly a year in the making, has been one of intensive public scrutiny. Last July, Congressman Jerrold Nadler and local environmental groups sounded an alarm during a press conference when they provided court documents that showed prior testing of the building indicated asbestos levels of 150,000 times the appropriate levels as well as dangerously large amounts of other contaminants. The LMDC has subsequently retested the building and the study found excessive levels of dioxin, asbestos, lead, mercury and other heavy metals on 77 percent of the 31 floors tested. The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the city's Department of Environmental Protection will review the plans before deconstruction on the building begins. The public will get a chance to hear and comment on the plan at a public forum at 4 p.m. on June 20 at Pace University. The plan is posted at www.renewnyc.com.