NEW YORK, NY August 15, 2008 —One year ago Monday, a fire broke out at the former Deutsche Bank building, right across the street from where the twin towers once stood. The building, also known as 130 Liberty Street, was in the process of being decontaminated and taken down piece by piece. Two firefighters died fighting the fire. Public officials vowed to take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. WNYC’s Matthew Schuerman checks out how far they’ve come.

REPORTER: August 18, 2007, was a Saturday. Mary Dierickx, a historic preservationist, was sitting in her apartment on Cedar Street, right next door to the former Deutsche Bank tower.

DIERICKX: It was a beautiful day. It was a 9-11 kind of day. And it was sunny and dry.

REPORTER: Then she heard glass breaking from next door. Six months earlier, workers had begun to dismantle 130 Liberty, which had stood vacant and shrouded in black netting since the September 11th attacks. The Deutsche Bank company, its insurers and public agencies had spent years fighting over who would pay to take it down. In the end, the state took charge.

DIERICKX: And the glass kind of flew out kind of past the netting. It was pretty forceful.

The smoke was curling from the south façade and wafting up.

REPORTER: The fire blazed for seven hours. A tape of radio transmissions obtained by the Daily News shows how firefighters struggled to move about the building.

Nothing worked as it should have. Measures put in place to protect the neighborhood from toxic dust during the deconstruction process made it much harder to fight the fire.

Contractors had set up a negative air pressure system to keep asbestos and other pollutants inside the building. It ended up trapping smoke inside while feeding the flames with fresh oxygen from outside.

A standpipe was missing a whole section, so that any water fire engines pumped into the building ended up in the basement.

Workers had removed the stairwells and put plywood over the floor openings in order to seal in the contaminants. But that meant firefighters couldn’t get from floor to floor except by an external elevator.

Two fire fighters died. One was found right on top of the plywood, as if trying to claw his way through.

A few days later, after two other firefighters were injured in another accident at the building, the job was shut down. The mayor formed a task force. The District Attorney launched an investigation that is still going on.

In January, Avi Schick, the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the state agency that owns the building, announced it had gotten rid of the old abatement firm, a mysterious company named the John Galt Corporation. In came a new one, LVI Services.

SCHICK: Their record of safety, their record of professionalism is, we believe, unparalleled.

REPORTER: The LMDC, along with a spaghetti soup of other regulatory agencies, also revised the protocol for taking down the building.

SCHICK: The safest possible building going forward, safe for first responders, safe for workers in the building, safe for people who live and work around 130 Liberty Street.

REPORTER: The painstakingly meticulous abatement process became even more so. The new protocol calls for the contractor to remove those plywood divisions between floors and install a switch that can turn off the negative air pressure with one flick. They also cleaned up a lot of the debris that was just hanging around on the floors.

Catherine McVay Hughes, a member of Community Board One, has been one of the most tenacious critics of the building’s deconstruction. She took a tour of one of the decontaminated floors in May. She came away with the sense that, finally, things were beginning to change for the better.

HUGHES: The signage is impeccable. There is no way you could miss where the stairwells are--like very tidy.

REPORTER: Another neighbor, Pat Moore, says she likes it whenever she passes by the site and sees workers outside smoking. That’s because investigators suspect the fire began at a spot on the 17th floor where workers used to take smoke breaks.

MOORE: Now you can’t even take your pack of cigarettes in the building. You have to check your pack of cigarettes at the gate when you first come in.

REPORTER: But neighbors and others are wary of declaring that the Deutsche Bank building has shaken off its curse.

NEWMAN: Just in no particular order there is an NYC Department of Buildings violation around July 24th--

REPORTER: David Newman is an industrial hygienist at the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a union-supported watch dog group.

NEWMAN: --site conditions endangering workers, no site safety manager present—this is not acceptable on this kind of site. Here’s another one: a 3 foot-by-3 foot section of glass fell from the 15th floor.

REPORTER: An LMDC spokesman says the site safety manager was missing for just two hours and the piece of glass never fell.

In another reform, the Fire Department now checks the standpipe daily and posts a battalion chief at the site whenever work is underway. But Jack McDonnell, the president of the fire officers union, says the battalion chief can’t be everywhere at once. He has to put on protective clothing whenever he wants enter the building and shower when he comes out.

MCDONNELL: He can go in and be up close and personal with the contamination but he’s going to have to suit up and that’s where the difficulty lies with the fire department.

REPORTER: Abating the asbestos and toxic dust, which is the focus of the work right now, is only half the battle. Next, the LMDC will have to get the federal government to approve its plan to take the actual structure apart. When he unveiled the new protocol in January, Schick said the whole thing would be down by the end of the year. But speaking to the LMDC board earlier this summer, he called that a goal, rather a deadline.

SCHICK: I am confident it will be abated by that time. How far along we will be toward taking those floors down is something we are working on every single day.

REPORTER: The LMDC has been buffeted by a variety of forces. Business leaders and some residents at least started out wanting to rid the skyline of the haunting black mass quickly; some of the same residents, as well as advocacy groups, have pushed to have it done carefully. Some care more about potential contamination; others, especially now, about fire safety.

One of the big time pressures seems to be dropping away however. Last summer, JPMorgan Chase announced it would build its investment bank headquarters on the land once the Deutsche Bank building is removed. But its merger with Bear Stearns has changed its space needs. Now a spokeswoman says the company has not decided what it will do.

People in the neighborhood, like Pat Moore, have learned to control their expectations about what will happen and when.

MOORE: We’ve had many deadlines in the past that haven’t been met. We are just waiting to see.

REPORTER: Meanwhile, it still hasn’t been decided who is going to pay for all of this. The LMDC has allocated 240 million dollars of taxpayer money. Some of that went to acquire the building; the rest is being spent on taking it down. The agency wants to be reimbursed for some of that by the building’s insurers. But that part of the deal is already in litigation.

For WNYC, I’m Matthew Schuerman.