Defense lawyers in the Deutsche Bank manslaughter trial continued to shift blame for two firefighters’ deaths away from the building’s severed basement standpipe — today grilling an FDNY lieutenant about how the breach in pipe could have been easily bypassed during the blaze.
Simply using a valve to close off the breached portion and pumping water directly into the building’s vertical “riser” pipe could have quickly fed the hoses of firefighters on the upper floors, one lawyer suggested in questioning a lieutenant testifying for the prosecution.
But the witness, Lt. Simon Ressner, described to jurors a firetrap building where firefighters had to cut through padlocks and follow arrows spray-painted on plywood barricades just to reach standpipe connections, only to find the standpipe itself inexplicably useless.
Protocol requires that before threading hoses up stairwells, firefighters first attempt the easiest remedy — to run up and down the stairwells checking for jammed pipes or turned-off valves, Ressner, of Ladder 12, explained after his testimony.
“The last thing we expected was missing pipe — and certainly not a pipe that is going to cripple the system,” he told reporters.
It took an hour to get the system functional — too late for firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino, who ran out of oxygen and died of smoke inhalation after collapsing on the 14th floor.
Three officials, Mitchel Alvo, Salvatore DePaola and Jeffrey Melofchik, are charged with manslaughter for allegedly intentionally doing nothing about the busted standpipe to save time and money on the demolition of the 9/11-damaged high-rise. Testimony is in its fourth week.