Metro

Struggle to douse WTC fire

Firefighters struggled for an hour to get water to a high-altitude fire at One World Trade Center yesterday morning because the tower’s standpipes were completely dry, sources said.

Fire experts said sheer luck prevented the 89th-floor trash fire on wooden decking from erupting into a major disaster.

“We dodged a bullet here,” said Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire science at John Jay College. “An hour is an unacceptably long time to wait for water.”

Firefighters responded at 7:15 a.m. after a construction crew discovered the flames.

The blaze was not declared under control until 9:13 a.m., nearly two hours later. No one was reported hurt.

“The damage was to the temporary wooden structures only,” said FDNY chief James Esposito. “It did not affect the building in any way.”

Building workers fought the flames with fire extinguishers before 20 firetrucks with roughly 80 firefighters arrived and pumped water to the site.

A Port Authority spokesman said that dry standpipes are common in unfinished buildings, and that 1 WTC “is in full compliance with both FDNY and NYC building codes.”

But Corbett said that the first two-thirds of the tower should have standpipes filled with water.

The building is especially vulnerable to fire because of its height and the amount of wood and other burnable material being used during construction, he said.

“Given that safety has to be the No. 1 priority down there, how did this even happen?” he said. “All this points to a significant lapse in fire safety in this building.”

Yesterday’s problems evoked the fatal 2007 Deutsche Bank blaze nearby, when two firefighters died of smoke inhalation after they became trapped on a 14th-floor stairwell without water.

A standpipe in the tower had been severed, and the Fire Department had failed to inspect the skyscraper in more than a year.

Esposito dismissed any comparison between the Deutsche Bank fire and yesterday’s, noting that 1 WTC was last inspected Wednesday.

“The temporary standpipe system was fully pressurized with air,” he said, which made it ready to move water in an emergency.

“It was viable. We knew we had a good pipe to get water onto the upper floors.”