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LATEST STUMBLE ON 'SLURRY' WALL

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Jenna Bluehut
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« on: June 28, 2009, 07:53:45 pm »

LATEST STUMBLE ON 'SLURRY' WALL



Last updated: 2:55 am
June 28, 2009
Posted: 2:42 am
June 28, 2009


Just thinking about Ground Zero can drive you to drink.

Look at the 16-acre site without even one completed project almost eight years after 9/11, and you want to slip into the Millenium Hotel's third-floor bar overlooking the pit and down a Slurry Wallbanger -- oops, Harvey Wallbanger -- to numb your brain.

But it's not an option for construction workers. The hardhats' lunchtime boozing, observed and photographed by The Post, reflects the lack of accountability that plagues the whole downtown rebuilding effort.

This outrage is much worse than when this newspaper found hundreds of pages of "confidential" rebuilding documents, including Freedom Tower architectural drawings, dumped in garbage cans last year.

The Port Authority had trouble explaining that. But when it comes to construction workers getting smashed on their lunch hours, there must be no failure to identify and punish the guilty.

Working drunk is forbidden on any legitimate construction site. It's more reprehensible at the World Trade Center -- "hallowed ground," indeed.

You'd think that after the 2007 blaze that killed two firefighters at the former Deutsche Bank hulk and brought demolition to a halt, everyone toiling in the crater across the street would go the extra mile to prevent accidents.

But prosecutors' failure to bring all those responsible for the catastrophe to justice, and the city's patty-cake treatment of Fire Department higher-ups, likely enabled a don't ask, don't tell atmosphere at Ground Zero, as well.

Scores of participants are involved: the Port Authority, the MTA, Silverstein Properties, Bovis, labor unions, and a zillion agencies and subcontractors no one's ever heard of. But prime responsibility lies with the Port. It owns the place, after all.

With a tight knot of massive projects under way right on top of one another, above and below ground, the WTC site is unbelievably hazardous. You learn that even on a carefully monitored, heavily escorted descent to the floor and on the long climb back up.

Today, there's much more work going on than I saw in spring 2008. No sane being would set foot there, much less venture out on a beam or operate powerful machines, with a molecule of alcohol in his system.

To find workers drinking themselves blotto midday is sickening enough, but not as appalling as the realization that nobody's watching. This is a job site where precision and attention to detail make all the difference. Everything is so interconnected, there's no margin for error.

It's particularly disheartening that some of the hard-drinking hard hats work on the memorial waterfalls. It will be a miracle if the engineers figure out how to make them work more than a few months a year in a city where the smallest fountains need to be turned off from October until May.

To learn that some of the people putting them together are wasted enough to get tossed from a dive bar is enough to cost you sleep -- and break your heart.

steve.cuozzo@nypost.com
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http://www.nypost.com/seven/06282009/news/columnists/latest_stumble_on_slurry_wall_176481.htm
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