Weeks after pieces of debris blown from the 77-story Beekman Tower, under construction at 8 Spruce Street, brought much of Lower Manhattan to a standstill, developer Forest City Ratner promised new steps to prevent a repeat of the dangerous incident.

On Jan. 25, wind gusts approaching 100 miles an hour blew several small pieces of wood and metal from the upper floors of the Frank Gehry-designed, tower, forcing police to close several blocks near the tower for most of the day, including eastbound access to the nearby Brooklyn Bridge, crippling pedestrian and vehicular traffic Downtown.

Earlier this week, Forest City Ratner Senior Vice President Joseph Rechichi said the company has installed new rigging for the orange safety nets surrounding the outer edges of the building’s unfinished floors, as well as reinforced tie-downs for the plywood hole covers throughout the tower. Rechichi said that while the rigging and plywood restraints the company had in place before the Jan. 25 storm met city standards, the company acknowledged that even more needed to be done.

“We are absolutely committed to safety,” Rechichi said during a Feb. 9 meeting of Community Board 1’s Seaport/Civic Center Committee. “We’ve done new engineering calculations, and the reinforced systems will withstand winds of up to 125 mph. I’m professionally confident that the events of that day will not occur again.”

During the storm, sustained winds between 70 and 100 mph caused more than 40 of the metal turnbuckles holding up orange safety nets to come unscrewed, flying as far as 700 feet from the building into City Hall Park. He explained that the nets were left hanging over the edge of the building while the turnbuckles themselves were scattered over the city blocks below.

“The nets were shredded in place, you could see them dangling all the way up the building,” said Boris Faiguenbaum, a construction superintendent for Kreisler Borg and Florman, Ratner’s general contractor on the project. Apart from the netting, the unusually high winds also tested the limits of the metal tie-downs holding more than 20 plywood hole covers in place throughout the building’s unenclosed floors.

Days before the storm, the city told all construction crews to secure their sites against high winds. At the Feb. 9 meeting, Faiguenbaum told committee members that he and his workers believed they had taken the proper precautions.

“[This storm] was completely above and beyond what we expected to happen,” Faiguenbaum said. “In 30 years, I never saw something like this.”

Rechichi said the company has switched to self-locking turnbuckles and added a second layer of netting throughout the building. The company has also doubled the number of tie-downs on each of the plywood covers. Construction on the 867-foot tower finally resumed on Feb. 4, after workers were barred from the site for more than a week. The day of the incident, inspectors from the city’s Department of Buildings had to wait several hours for the winds to die down before they could investigate the tower’s upper floors.

“We’re comfortable with all of the remedial work that’s been done and all of the documentation that’s been provided to us,” DOB spokesman Steve Figueiredo said during the Feb. 9 meeting, adding that since the beginning of above-ground construction in 2008, the Beekman site has been one of the “cleanest” in the city in terms of safety violations.

“Until this incident, we really haven’t any issues as far as the building’s construction is concerned,” Community Board 1 District Manager Noah Pfefferblit said. “Some people don’t like the height, but that’s a separate issue.”