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Pickles
Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)
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Here's your cages:
(this just happens to be the top of the google list. Feel free to search for more.
http://www.thevillager.com/villager_70/pier57pens.html
Quote:
Pier 57 pens are called ‘Guantanamo on Hudson’
By Albert Amateau
A prominent civil liberties lawyer and a Transportation Workers Union raised questions yesterday about asbestos and diesel oil contamination at Pier 57, the former bus depot at 17th St. serving since last week as the N.Y.P.D.’s holding pens for people arrested in Republican National Convention protests.
Norman Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and Ed Watt, financial secretary of T.W.U. Local 100, called on Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to determine whether asbestos and bus fuel oil are a health hazard to R.N.C. detainees.
Siegel also charged that protestors are being held on the pier without access to lawyers, food or medical attention for 18 to 36 hours in a legal process that ordinarily takes six hours or less. The delay in completing desk-appearance tickets for detainees is part of an attempt “to criminalize dissent” and is intended discourage detainees from returning to protest demonstrations, Siegel said.
Siegel and Watt aired their concerns at a Tuesday news conference across the street from Pier 57. Siegel sent a letter dated Mon. Aug. 30 to Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly about the environmental concerns.
However, Paul J. Brown, deputy police commissioner for Public Information said in a statement on Tuesday that tests the Police Department conducted Monday night “found no problem with air quality at the detainee center on Pier 57.”
In a statement about the treatment of detainees, Brown said, “The main factor in the delay in issuing desk-appearance tickets is the refusal of detainees to identify themselves.” He also said that people arrested are given the opportunity to make telephone calls.
Nevertheless, Andrew Lynn, a videographer who works for Manhattan Neighborhood Cable Network and who was one of 250 arrested during a bicycle demonstration Fri. Aug.27, said at the news conference that he was held for 18 hours at Pier 57 in one of the 30-ft.-by-16-ft. pens made of 10-ft.-high wire fencing that run the length of the pier. After detention on the pier he was moved to a precinct lockup and was not issued a desk-appearance ticket for another nine hours.
The packed pens had only two or three benches, so many detainees had to lie on the floor, which was covered with black oil, Lynn said. “People had rashes from the oil and after 15 or 18 hours they gave us antiseptic for the rashes,” he added. Lynn also said he heard a police officer on duty laugh when a detainee asked to make a phone call.
United for Peace and Justice, the group that sponsored the Aug. 29 protest march, described the detention center on Pier 57 as “Guantanamo on the Hudson.” The group intends to demonstrate in front of the pier at 10 a.m. Wed. Sept. 1 to protest the conditions detainees have to bear.
The 300,000-sq.-ft. pier, completed in 1954, last served as a Transit Authority bus depot a year ago and in June came under the control of the Hudson River Park Trust, which is seeking a developer to transform the pier into a commercial and park destination.
Watt and Jay Bermudez, a T.W.U. official who worked at Pier 57 from 1982 until it closed as a bus depot, said they believed asbestos in the building has long been a health hazard.
Bermudez said that a fire at the pier in January 1995 released asbestos dust that covered virtually everything. “It was all over the cars, on our shoes and clothes,” he said. The abatement that followed only included the area destroyed by the fire, Bermudez added. He also said he doubted that Pier 57 has an operable fire-suppressant system
However, Chris Martin, spokesperson for Hudson River Park, in a statement on Tuesday said, “Asbestos is not considered to be a health problem unless there is an exposure pathway to airborne asbestos.
“Prior to the Police Department occupying the pier, the Trust was informed about the type of construction they would be performing there. None of that construction involved the types of invasive work to floors, walls, pipes or ceilings that could create such exposure. The only parts of Pier 57 where the Trust has observed exposed asbestos are not being used by the police to our knowledge,” Martin said.
Martin acknowledged that oil stains are visible in areas of the Pier 57 floor.
“These are typical of the building’s former use as a bus depot,” he said, adding, “The Trust has no involvement at all in the pier’s operation this week. Our focus has been on working with the Police Department to maintain public access to the bikeway and other park areas as usual.”
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And here's some contamination info:
http://www.thevillager.com/villager_...scityknew.html
Quote:
Attorney says city knew Pier 57 was contaminated
By Douglas Fricke
Almost 2,000 protestors detained by police for demonstrating during the Republican National Convention in August may have been held in a contaminated facility, an environmental lawyer has charged.
Joel Kupferman, an attorney with the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, said that “scores and scores” of detainees have complained of skin rashes and respiratory disorders after being held at the former bus depot at Pier 57 in Chelsea. Kupferman blames the maladies on motor oil and transmission fluid that dripped from parked buses over many years, soaking into concrete floors, and possible asbestos contamination as well.
A spokesperson for New York City Transit, which turned the site over to the Hudson River Park Trust last year for redevelopment into a cultural or recreational facility, denied the claims. “We handed that depot over clean,” spokesperson Charles Seaton said. He acknowledged that some chemicals are present at the site, but would not call them contaminants. “It was a bus facility, so there was bound to be oil around,” Seaton said. “Oil and transmission fluid in a bus facility is not contamination.” He said his agency knew nothing of asbestos particles in the air.
The structure, at W. 16th St., was built in the 1950s as a terminal for passenger and cargo ships. It was converted to a bus garage after the shipping company moved out in the 1960s. Last year the buses were shifted to a depot in Harlem, leaving the hulking building empty.
The vacant building found a temporary new life in August, when the New York Police Department turned it into a holding facility for about a week. “We made over 1,800 arrests [during the convention] and everyone we arrested went to Pier 57,” said New York Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Hayes.
Attorneys at the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project have sent clothing worn by detainees held at the site to a lab for testing.
“We are quite certain what’s going to show up in the clothing due to the prolonged exposure the detainees had while sitting on the contaminant-laden floor,” said Kupferman. He said that he expects the analysis to find traces of diesel fuel and transmission fluid.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information, called Kupferman’s allegations “nonsense.” Browne said that oil contamination is confined to the end of the building closest to the street and detainees were not housed in that section. The contaminated area, he said, was used to park Corrections Department vans used for hauling the detainees from demonstrations and, after several hours, downtown to Central Booking at 100 Centre St., where they were processed, held for an additional length of time and eventually released.
Browne added that the charge of asbestos contamination was a fabrication. “We tested it before and after,” he said.
But Kupferman said that he does not trust the Police Department’s test results. “We question their ability to find asbestos,” said Kupferman, adding that the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project found traces of asbestos from the World Trade Center on supposedly decontaminated fire trucks eight months after Sept. 11.
In written response to a request filed by Kupferman under the New York Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, the N.Y.P.D. said it could not release data on testing done at the former depot because such records “if disclosed would interfere with law enforcement investigations or judicial proceedings.” The statement did not specify the nature of the investigations or proceedings.
Kupferman said he filed four other FOIL requests: one each to the city Department of Health, the city Parks Department, the Public Employees Safety Health Bureau of the state Department of Labor and H.R.P.T. He said the Health and Parks departments said they had no records of contamination at the site; the Labor department is still searching its files, while the park’s operating agency, H.R.P.T., has not replied.
Jim Flynn, an amateur photographer, was taking pictures of antiwar demonstrators on Aug. 31 who planned to march from Ground Zero to Madison Sq. Garden. But the marchers, who did not have a permit for the protest, were halted at police barricades near Fulton St. Two hundred twenty-seven of the protestors were arrested and transported to the pier and Flynn was swept up with them.
Flynn said that he did not notice any signs of contamination at the former bus depot. “As far as the chemicals in there, I don’t know,” Flynn said. He added that in his opinion conditions at Pier 57, contaminated or not, were still better than Central Booking. Fortunately for Flynn, his holding pen may have been better than others. Other individuals held at Pier 57 have said their pens did have oily floors and that they did not want to sit or lie down on them because of it.
Kupferman said that at some point police finally provided carpeting to cover the unsanitary floors.
Flynn said he was held at Pier 57 from about 6 p.m. until about 3 a.m. the following morning. There are reports, however, of others being held at the pier significantly longer. The pier’s conditions and the lengthy holding times earned it the moniker “Guantanamo on the Hudson” during the Republican National Convention.
Kupferman has said that government agencies must have known that the building was contaminated by oil and transmission fluid spills.
A March 2001 report submitted to the New York State Department of Transportation by an engineering firm found that plainly visible oil stains were present to such a degree that the oil was seeping through joints in the concrete deck.
And another engineering study of the site, done in April 2004 by a Manhattan firm hired by H.R.P.T., makes reference to a second document, which it describes as “an environmental report” on the facility. Chris Martin, H.R.P.T. vice president for public affairs, would not confirm the existence of the environmental report, referring queries to the Police Department. “We don’t comment on pending litigation,” said Martin.
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And yea, that was the 2004 RNC.
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We Must Dissent.
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