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Aug 19, 2007 8:59 pm US/Eastern
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SoHo Firehouse Repeats 9/11 Sadness Rituals
by Lou Young
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
It is another crushing tragedy and a cruel blow to the heart of New York's bravest. On Sunday, friends, family members, and regular New Yorkers remembered firefighters Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia.
Both died fighting a fire at the Deutsche Bank building. Colleagues placed a traditional black bunting outside the Greenwich Village firehouse that lost 11 members on 9/11 -- and lost two more Saturday night.
There is a sense of disbelief and outrage over the slow, protracted clean up downtown that has continued for nearly six years after the 9/11 attacks. The firehouse that paid so dearly on that day has now lost two more members, this time in a damaged abandoned skyscraper adjacent to Ground Zero, that was finally being torn down.
It was as simple as it was terrifying: a fire in the sky with no water available to put it out. The de-construction of the Deutsche Bank building was taking place without an operating stand pipe when the fire broke Satuday.
The two firefighters who died hauled fire hose 17-floors to try and do their job, and it cost them their lives.
"We lost two of the finest men that you'd ever meet in your life," said Capt. Patrick McNally. "You can't even say enough about them."
Graffagnano leaves a widow and a legion of grieving friends and family, some of whom gathered in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, but no one was in a mood to talk.
Beddia, a 53-year-old from Staten Island, had been doing this dangerous job for more than two decades and was a fixture at the SoHo firehouse where black and purple bunting hangs once again.
The inexplicable horror of two more firefighter deaths at the site of the attack 6 years ago brought Governor Eliot Spitzer to the abandoned Deutche Bank building Sunday.
Six years of haggling over ownership, insurance, and public health issues can be blamed for why the dangerous eyesore is still here.
Ironically, the very measures meant to protect the surrounding neighborhood, may have doomed the firefighters.
"I can tell you they walked into a horror show and they walked into an environment where those polyurethane layers that were there to protect the community from asbestos also in that context led to an environment where he smoke is being contained. They couldn't see, they could potentially get disoriented," said Gov. Spitzer.
As a result of the fire, the deconstruction of the Deutsche Bank is once again on hold.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)