By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — An FDNY engineer who investigated why water could not reach firefighters battling the fatal Deutsche Bank building blaze said Wednesday a missing standpipe was the last thing he expected.
The real cause of the fire, which killed Robert Beddia, 53, and Joseph Graffagnino, 33, was something that he said would "never cross our minds" — a 42-foot piece of the standpipe, or emergency water supply, was missing in the basement of the Ground Zero skyscraper.
FDNY Lt. Simon Ressner, an engineer and 18-year veteran of the department, speaking to reporters after in the trial of three supervisors on trial for manslaughter for the deaths of the two firefighters, said he had never before seen such an egregious violation during an investigation.
The standpipe cut was "crippling the whole system" as a pressurized flow of water spilled into the basement instead of traveling upward. It was an unimaginable possibility at the time, said Ressner.
He also spoke about the practical problems the responders faced in battling the enormous blaze, although he was not working at the scene the day of the Aug. 18, 2007 fire.
The "desperate" team of responders, having just witnessed the soot-covered bodies of two of their own being carried from the burning building, made a "last ditch" effort to extinguish the fire which had been burning uncontrollably for more than an hour, Ressner said.
"At that point, things are going so badly — there is so much that's not working at that point," he said.
Ressner described a heroic effort by one firefighter, who performed a Spider-Man-like feat by climbing atop a construction elevator on the exterior of the building.
"The guy rode on the top of the elevator, reeling it out...to create an external riser," Ressner said, explaining how FDNY worked to manually get water to the upper floors.
The improvisational plan was far from ideal but it was all they could do.
"There were many, many firefighters trapped. Many of they felt they were not going to make it," Ressner said
Ressner discredited an apparent defense assertion that the FDNY could have gotten water to the blaze more quickly had they connected to the emergency water supply from another location.
But there was no way to know at the time why the standpipe was not functioning, so the city's Bravest took the unusual step of manually unravelling the hose to supply water to the upper floors.
Even though it was time consuming it was the safest bet they had, Ressner explained.
Defense attorneys have argued that supervisors on trial — Mitchel Alvo, Salvatore DePaola and Jeffrey Melofchik — were the fall guys for various city agencies who failed to notice the broken standpipe.
Testimony in the trial is expected to continue Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
