Things Fall Apart
Thomas Beller's account of the collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel
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In 2019, the Hard Rock Hotel construction site in New Orleans collapsed, killing three workers and injuring many more. But for one undocumented worker who survived, the aftermath of the situation brought on more challenges than injuries. This week we’re sharing a story by Thomas Beller from our New Orleans guide that looks at this moment of public disaster and the reality of today’s increasingly punitive immigration system.
“Rubble & Dust,” Thomas Beller. Stranger’s Guide: New Orleans.
New Orleans is perched at the edge of the continent, at the mouth of a great river—“the colon of America,” remarked a friend who grew up here—and yet it is small enough in scale that you can almost see and hear the gears of its municipal life turning. To live there is to toggle between a necessary oblivion and being constantly alert to threat. The threats that get the most attention are the ones you can see—hurricanes, tornadoes, floods. But the ones that most unnerved me were the menaces unseen.
There is a smell that wafts over New Orleans now and then, an aroma that is distinctly toxic even if it is faint. It usually comes late at night. I would open my front door on a midnight errand to bring the trash out to the bin, and there it would be, an invisible, airborne toxic event. Now and then you would wake up to it and find yourself at the top of your front steps in the soft morning air, breathing it in, trying to decide if you could get used to it, or should get used to it. It’s a chemical smell, the source undetermined.
Everyone I’ve talked to thinks it emanates from a plant across the river, on the West Bank. The culprits are both generic and specific. The city is surrounded by refineries and factories producing toxins; the state legislature’s attitude towards industrial pollution could be called lax, to put it mildly. My awareness of the unseen threats became most acute when a neighbor sanding their old house in preparation for having it painted, an unfortunately common practice in New Orleans, gave the surroundings, including our house, a visible dusting of emulsified lead paint, predictably alarming for parents of two small children. It heightened my awareness of the invisible dangers of New Orleans.
In the summer of 1853, at the height of a yellow fever epidemic in which 8,000 people would die, The New Orleans Courier, seeking to assuage the fears of its readers, advised them: “Above all, keep your imagination from being frightened.” The Illustrated London News, editorializing that same summer, remarked, “New Orleans has been built upon a site that only the madness of commercial lust could ever have tempted men to occupy.”
…
The corner of Rampart Street and Canal Street is now, in the spring of 2022, returning to something like normal. The street cars are still not running, their return put off another year, though auto and pedestrian traffic has resumed. The newly restored Saenger Theater, one of the city’s jewels, is again hosting shows. Bob Dylan played there just this past Spring. But for nearly two years, from 2019 to 2021, the theater was dark. The theater, and the whole intersection, was closed when the building across the street, an unfinished 18 story structure, collapsed. The structure was supposed to be a Hard Rock Hotel. But after 9am, October 12th, 2019, it became known as the Hard Rock Collapse.
The name, “Hard Rock Hotel,” is handy, useful and ironic—the cement and steel with which the building was constructed turned out to be as soft as wet paper mache. But beyond a financial transaction and a banner hung by string, the structure was designed and built by the Kailas family, the project’s developers, and Citadel builders, the project’s lead contractor. Shortly after the collapse, when the city was galvanized by a state of outrage, David Hammer, a local reporter for WWL news, showed up at the offices of Mohair Kailas, cameraman in tow. It was like the old 60 Minutes doorstep interviews, except that there was no interview, no confrontation. When Mohan Kailas—the family’s patriarch—saw the camera through the glass doors of his office, he turned and ran inside, out of sight. The way he scurried away was the physical manifestation of a sense almost everyone had in the aftermath of the disaster: whomever was most responsible for this would not be held to account.
The collapse took place on the morning of October 12th, 2019. For almost two years, New Orleans was shadowed by a ruin. To gaze at the structure from the many available angles was to observe a structure that looked like a highrise devastated by a bomb and then meticulously transported—from Beirut, Gaza or Mariupol, or any other landscape torn to shred by war—into the landscape of one of America’s most recognizable tourist destinations, the French Quarter of New Orleans.
Three men working in the building died. One body was removed almost immediately. The other two remained, their exact location within the rubble unknown, at first. More than any other American city, New Orleans is known for its cemeteries, with their above ground mausoleums. This legacy now had a new, unexpectedly modern chapter in the form of a partially collapsed building.
…
New Orleans, in October, 2019, began with record high temperatures. On Saturday morning, October 12th, it had cooled a bit. The sky was overcast, milky. The building was located on the corner of iconic Canal Street and North Rampart street—which runs alongside the length of the French Quarter—the site of a former Woolworth’s, where the first lunch counter sit-ins in Louisiana occurred in 1960. A few weeks after that action, a sit-in occurred at McCrory’s, a lunch counter located just a few doors down Canal Street. Though not as widely photographed and publicized, it was the arrest of the McCrory’s demonstrators who made legal history, their case appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Among the ironies and echoes between these events and the Hard Rock Collapse are the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote in his decision, "These convictions, commanded as they were by the voice of the state directing segregating service at the restaurant, cannot stand."
By that October, the Hard Rock had reached its full height of 18 stories. The lower floors were enclosed in a purple cladding. The upper floors were still a concrete shell. A pool had been lifted to the roof the previous day by one of the two giant yellow cranes that loomed above the building.
At 9AM the hotel was standing just as it had been built—a commendation one doesn’t think to offer a building until it falls down. Then the top tiers of the corner on Rampart street began to collapse with the momentum of a mudslide. One layer sloughed down onto one next, each floor pancaking and drooping on the one below like wet paper mache. Debris, steel beams and dust rained down onto the streets below while an external hoist—an exposed steel elevator shaft—tipped over with the rigidity of a drunk passing out on his feet.
By mid-day Saturday, two videos of the event were circulating online. One was shot from the vantage of a Canal Street trolly. A tourist happened to be pointing their phone out the open window just as it approached the hotel. Suddenly, that which should be static—a building, a skyscraper—starts to move. We see the debris come down, followed by a cloud of dust, after which whoever is holding the phone begins jostling with the other panicked riders, trying to get out. There is a blur of shoulders and faces. In that footage, the collapse seems propelled by something, as though some explosion had occurred, but I think this is me adjusting my memory of it to fit my own needs—it's important that there be a reason, an action, a singular event, that causes a skyscraper to collapse. The alternative is too unsettling.
This video can no longer be consulted—it seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Another video has become the event’s Zapruder footage. Shot from within the silence of a car at a red light on North Rampart Street, it follows the long, straight perspective of that boulevard, which runs the length of the French Quarter and is lined with elegant black street lamps. The construction site looms in the middle distance, on the left. Across the street, on the right, is the much smaller Saenger Theater, a historic structure from the 1920’s which had been meticulously restored—at a glacial pace—after Katrina. The video shows the collapse from the start. A cloud of gray dust puffs out from the top—hence that feeling of an explosion—and soon the hoist topples and everything is a haze of gray dust that blends in with the overcast sky. Several construction workers can be seen running out of the building and across the street towards the Saenger. One of them wears a bright orange vest, for safety. A male voice intrudes into the silence of the car and, with a tone that mingles horror and adrenalin, which is to say excitement, exclaims, “Oh-my-God.”
“New Orleans streets have long, lonesome perspectives;” wrote Truman Capote, who lived in the city as a child. “In empty hours their atmosphere is like Chirico, and things innocent, ordinarily… acquire qualities of violence.” The remark could serve as this short video’s epigram.
Only after watching this short clip numerous times did I notice that the streetcar from which the first video is shot can be seen rolling into the frame. It comes to an abrupt stop as the building begins to fall. Something about the little red and white trolley has, for me, an echo of Little Red Riding Hood. It’s something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale as is the whole event and aftermath of the Hard Rock Collapse.
There were 112 workers inside the Hard Rock Hotel construction site when the upper floors of the 18 story structure began to collapse. Most of the workers got out. Three were trapped inside. By the end of the day, one had been removed, dead, while his wife, who had rushed to the scene vowing to wait as long as it took, looked on. Dogs and robots were sent into the structure to search for the other two men. It was too unstable for people. The second was located and confirmed dead by the end of the day. The last, buried in the rubble somewhere, could not be located. They would be interred in the Hard Rock Mausoleum for 10 months, until their removal in August of 2020.
…
The building, once the dust cleared, looked like a concrete souffle that had collapsed. By Saturday evening 18 workers were sent to nearby hospitals. One was a Honduran man named Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma. An Illegal immigrant, he had been in the US for 18 years, most of which was spent working in construction. He had a wife and three children.
Ramirez had worked on the Hard Rock site for three months by the time of the collapse, part of a crew that was framing windows and doing related structural work, and had on several occasions expressed concerns about the structure to his supervisors, telling them that his laser leveler was showing that the building was not level. It was off by 2-3 inches. He raised the issue repeatedly to his supervisor and was told to continue working, not to worry about it. When he brought it up again, he was told, in essence, if you don’t want to do that work, we will find someone else to do it.
He and his crew worked on the 8th through 14th floors. By the time he got to the 12th floor, he knew something was wrong. He was on the 14th floor Saturday morning when it began to collapse. The escape was frantic. He was jumping down from floor to floor.
Right after the collapse: Jambalaya News, a Spanish language news station, arrived on the scene and began interviewing workers on Facebook live, Ramirez among them.
That same morning, after the collapse, Ramirez, who was known to speak out on safety concerns, was standing with a group of his co-workers who were saying things like, you knew something was wrong, in earshot of several supervisors.
Sunday, the day after the collapse, Ramirez went to the hospital experiencing back pain, headaches and other symptoms of shock. Monday morning, he took his son, a US citizen, to school. And then, in an attempt to calm down from the events of the weekend, he went fishing in Bayou Sauvage, a bucolic bit of swampy parkland halfway between his home in Slidell and New Orleans. As he drove, he noticed a gray truck following him on the highway. Shortly after he arrived, the gray truck pulled over next to him. He had just gotten a line in the water. A fish and wildlife official emerging from the gray truck asked Ramirez for his fishing license.
He presented a valid fishing license.
As Mary Yanik, the immigration lawyer representing Ramirez, recounted to me, the official then asked for his driver’s license.
“I’m not driving,” Ramirez responded. “I am fishing.”
“I am going to write you up,” responded the official, and he wrote Ramirez a ticket. Perhaps for fishing without a driver’s license?
Another car with a Fish and Wildlife officer arrived. Soon after, two cars from Customs and Border Protection show up. Ramirez was arrested.
“This is a rural area,” Yanik told me. “There is no port, airport or border—Customs and Border Protection are not doing random policing in the community. Why was the Border Patrol two minutes away from this Bayou by Slidell?”
Ramirez was in ICE custody when I first spoke to Yanik, as was the ticket that Fish and Wildlife wrote. He was then moved to an ICE facility in Alexandria, LA, which Yanik said was a sign he would be imminently deported. While he was in custody, he was interviewed twice about his experience at the Hard Rock by investigators for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and his lawyers argued that he should not be deported until the investigation into the Hard Rock collapse was completed.
“The situation” she explained, “is that OSHA is trying to understand what happened at the Hard Rock, trying to speak to as many workers as possible, in an environment where people are very afraid to speak. And then there’s ICE, who is trying to deport him.” Yanik said, at the time: “I am hopeful that the information he has about that building, the working conditions and the structure before it collapsed, and also about his employers, will be recognized as important to this very public tragedy.”
The hope was in vain. Ramirez, married with three children, was deported on November 29th, 2019
Yanik specializes in immigration retaliation against workers. She was exasperated and depleted after the deportation, both from the specifics of Ramirez’s case, and also the larger implications of the Hard Rock Collapse. She shared data with me indicating that the government spends 11 times more on immigration enforcement than it does to enforce labor standards. “I think there is every reason to think this was retaliatory,” she said.
…
Once the dust cleared on the morning of the collapse, the building looked like a concrete souffle. The wreckage of the middle floors was as disturbing as the pancaked floors at the top—the structural material that would normally have been hidden within walls and ceilings lay exposed, a forest of torn and twisted metal, as though it had been hit by a bomb. To stand and stare at it from the street, which almost immediately became a pastime for hundreds of people, was to confront the visual paradox that something so brand new should look so ruined.
On the day of the collapse, it seemed plausible that the rest of the building would come down at any moment. An evacuation zone was created. The central location of the hotel, at the edge of both the French Quarter and the central business district, meant that the city would experience disruptions to public transportation; those commuting to work would need to work around the closed off blocks.
The Hard Rock Hotel collapse was not the only thing that went wrong that day. Uptown, a water main exploded, sending a huge chunk of asphalt flying into the air and flooding several blocks. This caused a loss of water pressure, resulting in a “boil water alert” for the whole neighborhood. While not exactly frequent, boil water alerts for the whole city are familiar occurrences.
Downtown, an electrical pole had toppled for no apparent reason, sending houses and shops in the vicinity into a period of blackout that lasted the day.
Then there was news that the new, billion dollar airport terminal, whose opening had been delayed three times in the year since it was first scheduled to open, had been delayed yet again. The architectural plans had called for a sewage line running beneath the concrete foundation of the airport to be supported by brackets at intervals of two feet. The contactor on the project had overrode the design and placed the brackets every three feet as a cost saving measure. And the pipes, even before the airport opened, cracked. The new terminal’s concrete foundation had to be jackhammered and the sewage pipes replaced, presumably with brackets every two feet.
The literary critic and historian Louis Mennand, writing in the preface to his book, American Studies, compared the progress of civilization to driving past a highway construction crew everyday—a bunch of guys in vests who seem to be doing not very much. And yet, one day, the highway has a new lane. The road has expanded. The workers have moved on. He seemed to be describing the progress of a culture in the same way that Hemmingway once described the process of bankruptcy: “Very slowly and all of a sudden.” Here in New Orleans, the road never seems to be completed; sometimes it simply collapses and disappears from view.
…
Soon after the collapse, it was established that the most pressing danger was not the building itself but the two steel cranes that had been building it. Each weighed over 145,000 pounds. Each had been damaged in the collapse. And now each was precariously perched over the site. If either or both fell over and hit another building—the Saenger, across Rampart Street, for example, or The Roosevelt Hotel, across Canal—they would not only do serious damage to the building being struck, but could potentially send fragments flying in every direction for blocks—a man-made asteroid attack on the French Quarter and the Central business district.
By Monday, an engineer from the company that built the cranes, Liebherr Corp, had flown in from Germany. He determined that it was impossible to take the damaged cranes apart with another crane. The city reached out to Mark Loizeaux of Controlled Demolition Inc.; he arrived on Monday, October 14th. Loizeaux flew down from his company’s headquarters in Maryland. By Tuesday he was up in a crane basket, inspecting the damaged cranes and studying the crane’s structural drawings.
I spoke to Loizeaux the following week, a few days after the demolition, and he gave me his view of events that the rest of the city had experienced in real through a slow drip of information that seemed to become outdated within days, or hours, or minutes—which is to say that the matter of transparency, or opacity, had already asserted themselves.
“Those cranes were in the process of falling,” he told me. “The question was when.”
You couldn’t attach the cranes to anything, because the building was damaged. “We couldn’t go up,” he said. “The cranes had to come down. By Wednesday, we had a tropical depression out in the Gulf that flirted with the coast and gave us 35 mph winds. The cranes were going to fall. Think of a beach umbrella stuck in the sand. Everybody knows if the wind blows, the umbrella blows over.
“In order to shorten the radius in which they could fall, and do it at a known time, I placed explosives on the hanger to the boom and the hanger to the counterweight. I shot those to let the umbrella close.”
Controlled Demolition Inc. is a family firm. It was started by Mark’s father Jack in 1947, whose business, at first, consisted largely of using dynamite to remove the stumps of trees killed by Dutch Elm Disease. Then it expanded into the current business of blowing up buildings and related items, such as cranes. Mark and his brother joined the firm, and now their children work there, as well.
“The first family of a decidedly distinct business” is how the New York Times described the Loizeauxes in a 2007 profile. They quoted Loizeaux as saying “One of the reasons why this is a family business is that anybody in this building is capable of taking all our lives with one mistake at any point in time. There needs to be a high level of trust.”
The cranes, it turns out, had names: Alpha and Charlie. Alpha was closer to Canal street; Charlie, the more damaged crane, was on North Rampart Street, across from the Saenger. They were two large yellow T shapes looming way up in the air. They seemed light, almost avian. It took a while to grasp that they were heavy. The counterweights alone on the booms—the top of the T—weighed 40 tons.
The demolition of the cranes was supposed to happen on Friday. But tropical storm Nestor swept through and the Kailas family (the developers) had not paid the demolition fee. The storm moved through on Friday night. The money arrived Saturday morning. Crowds gathered to watch. But it didn’t happen on Saturday, either. Men were seen up near the cranes, adjusting the position of the explosives; the cranes were more damaged than initially thought, and adjustments had to be made. The storm had moved off the coast by then, but every gust of wind added to the sense of urgency. On Sunday the detonation was scheduled for noon. The evacuation zone was enlarged in response to the expected crowds. There was a Saints game—an away game, fortunately, as the SuperDome was just a few blocks away—scheduled for 3pm. Noon came and went. 1pm came and went.
The weather was warm, the air was very still. New Orleans on a Sunday, with the Saints playing, always feels deserted, quiet, dreamy.
I had wanted to see the structure first hand all week, but I had put it off. The city’s neighborhoods, like the city itself, feel nested, self enclosed. The Hard Rock felt so far away. Now though, I couldn’t help but feel that the demolition was becoming a kind of de facto pregame show for the city. The event took on a quality beyond the morbid and sad. Something festive and absurd was gathering. I got on my bike and headed down St. Charles Avenue to see what there was to see.
The Live Oaks on St. Charles are hypnotic. Beads hanging from the branches from the last Mardi Gras, more than half a year ago, were gleaming in the sun. Nothing remarkable about this, they hang there all year, but the day now had a halo of heightened strangeness that made the faded beads gleam with portent.
As I approached downtown, I could see other cranes looming over the modest skyline. They seemed innocuous. But they also seemed unquestionably erect. Steady. When I first came into view of the Hard Rock ruin, the straight lines of a construction site, the vertical lines, went wobbly. As I approached the downtown area on my bike, the city streets became deserted. This always happens on Saints game days, but this was different. The authorities had warned people to stay away. It seemed they had.
I arrived at the perimeter of the security zone on Canal Street. The air was soft. The sky was blue. A group of thirty or so people stood around, gazing at the tableau of the partially crushed building, its upper floors concrete gray, and the two yellow steel cranes rising beside it, askew. The cranes were like T’s, and their shape echoed the street signs in the foreground that ran down Canal Street like hurdles on a track. A light summer breeze moved the fronds of the palm trees. Staring at the ruin, I wondered when it would explode. It could happen in a minute or never. I imagined there would be some warning before the explosion, but the warning didn’t come. Neither did the explosion.
After a while, I set off in search of another vantage point. I moved in and out of the perimeter, through deserted streets, seeking a view. I drifted for a while, passing an RV park and then ending up under the Claiborne Overpass, just on the other side of the security perimeter.
Clumps of people were standing there in the shade of the overpass. Everyone was checking their phones impatiently, looking for any news. There were a couple of families, which was odd. There were couples, for whom this seemed to be a kind of date, also odd. But a great many people waiting there were like me—the oddest—solitary figures in search of some thrill or feeling they probably couldn’t have named. Seeking some closure for things that had nothing to do with the spectacle, but such a spectacle might possibly provide. All of us were driven by some primitive need to see what was going to happen next. to witness the explosion that would, in a way, be the erasure of a huge mistake.
There was a 2pm time set for the detonation, but 2pm came and went.
A elderly man tapped me on the shoulder—beige windbreaker, button down shirt, thin gray hair parted on the side.
“Excuse me,” he said, “Do you know what’s going on? When will they let me pass?”
His name was Lee. Every Sunday, he told me, he drives all the way from Alabama to play Zingo.
I explained the situation. He nodded. “We heard about it in Montgomery,” he said. “Three dead.”
He went on to tell me that he had had two heart operations and had lost three members of his family all at more or less the same time in the past year. He didn’t say how and I didn’t ask. He had a pacemaker now, he said, and tapped his chest. He enjoyed these weekly trips to New Orleans, parking under the underpass and taking a long walk to the St. Louis Cathedral, and then over to the river, and finally to his Zingo game. Zingo, he explained, is like Bingo. He was not part of the gallows throng on purpose, but he fit right in. I helped him plan out the best route to the river, and off he went. I had the faint sense he was wandering into a war zone, or a storm, even if it was only a summery autumn day for which he was slightly overdressed.
It was approaching 3PM. It was almost as though fate, or some other force, was conspiring to make the demolition transpire at the same time that the Saints game began. I gave up my spot under the overpass and started to head home, not to watch the game, but out of a sense that I had reaped the strangeness I had come for, and there was no need to linger for more.
But then, on Canal street, I saw the crowd had grown considerably, and I pulled over. The sun had become less punishing.
“They're gonna take us by surprise,” said a kid on a scooter to his dad.
A breeze picked up, sending a hanging steel beam into a barely perceptible sway. I could see, from where I stood, the old hulking structure that had once been Charity Hospital, the city’s hospital for the poor. It had been shuttered since Katrina. I turned again to the Hard Rock Hotel. I could just make out the little black spots on the yellow steel of the cranes where the dynamite had been affixed.
Into this murmurous sense of anticipation, the festive, watchful calm, when the guys selling cold bottles of water had showed up and were doing a brisk business, and the afternoon light had softened and festivity filled the air, came the thudding explosions, one echoing the other. There was supposed to be a two-minute warning. But there was no siren, no warning, at least none that was heard by me or any of the crowd around me, assembled just beyond the police barriers about four blocks away from the site. There was softening afternoon sunlight, the deep blue sky, the hot October air, all of which were convulsed by two balls of flame appearing within black balls of curling smoke and a terribly, terribly loud boom. A concussive boom. It shocked me and hurt me.
A cheer rose up in the crowd a moment after the explosion, expressing something ugly and destructive.
Within about 10 seconds I was on my bike, heading away from the plumes of smoke rising in the sky. I wanted to cry. The feeling was childish and it came up within me at child speed—it engulfed me. I thought of 9/11. I had a similar experience on that day: Racing down Broadway on my bike in order to see, and then racing away, feeling sick with what I saw.
On Canal Street, I realized my ears were ringing from the thunderous sound. Why was there no siren, no whistle, no tweet, no warning of any kind?
…
It’s been over two years since the hotel collapsed. For two years it has sat like a ruin at the center of the city, both a kind of negative icon of indeterminate meaning and logistical nightmare. It’s also a crypt, for it contained, somewhere within its rubble, the bodies of two men. There was an announcement of a planned demolition in January of 2019. Then it was canceled. Then the plan was to dismantle the building enough to get at the two bodies in March, and to demolish the rest in the summer.
The persistence of this structure, the fact of it, became more and more surreal as time passed. Days turned into weeks and then months. I found myself going to view it with a kind of fascination that felt both edifying and unhealthy. I went late at night when it was just me and the security guard. I went in the afternoon, when I was joined by a small crowd of tourists. I gazed at it from several different angles. I took snapshots. Charlie crane had plunged straight down into the street and now stood impaled in the ground like a sculpture. Alpha dangled over Canal Street. The sense that this was an abomination standing in plain sight, with the city adjusting its rhythms to accommodate the fact of it—because what else could it do?—was absurd, so wrong, so perverse that I kept coming back to marvel at it, as though to be sure I had not imagined it or at least embellished the facts.
The structure was a kind of deconstructed mausoleum. Everyone knew the bodies were entombed within the ruined structure. Then, in January, a yellow tarp affixed to the wreckage that had seemed no more conspicuous than a handkerchief blew off in a storm. In its absence, a pair of legs were revealed to be dangling down. Just legs. The torso and head were crushed under the collapsed building. The legs were the remains of Quinon Wimberly. A sense of outrage and horror permeated the city anew, and when another tarp was affixed to the building to cover Wimberly's legs, everyone understood that this paltry gesture—literally a cover-up—meant to remove the idea of a victim, was, on some level, a desire to remove the idea of a culprit.
…
The Saenger re-opened at last. The safety zone shrunk. The building was finally taken down.
In the years since the collapse the questions of how and why the event happened have come into focus and yet the answers remain shrouded. The developer, the Kailas family, have previously been implicated in corruption and mismanagement; one of the reasons the project languished so long between the time it was approved in 2011 and when construction started was that the lead developer, Praveen Kailas, spent thirty months in jail for a fraud that has a uniquely New Orleans character—he took federal funds meant to renovate and rehabilitate houses damaged in Katrina, and diverted them so that the workers who were supposed to be fixing houses were instead working on a mansion he was building for himself.
As for the contractor, Citadel, they, too, have been involved in shady practices, in the rebuild after Katrina. Citadel Builders president Denzel Clark also runs Citadel Recovery Services, which is currently doing FEMA recovery work in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. There are reports of financial improprieties, the polite way of saying fraud.
To date, the only person charged with a crime is a city inspector who did not show up at the site on the days she claimed to have. Last fall, as the second anniversary of the collapse approached, the OSHA report, still unreleased, was leaked—it revealed that Mohan Kailas, the developer, had wanted high ceilings for the penthouse. Unable to raise the height of the building, the engineers redrew the blueprint and shrank the size of the steel beams used on the top floors to accommodate his demand. The beams that collapsed.
The deportation of Ramirez looms as a major legacy of the Hard Rock Collapse. Writing in the New York Times, Deniz Daser and Sarah Fouts outline a pattern in which, “I.C.E. is used as a tool to insulate private development projects from labor and safety regulations.”
Another legacy is the problem of impunity for the crimes that go unseen. The toxic smell emitted in the small hours that everyone knows about but which remains in the air, nevertheless.
In the immediate aftermath of the collapse, a spokesman for Citadel named Brian Trascher gave an interview attesting to the integrity of the firm, how they were doing everything possible to find the workers, to understand what happened. A local writer, Jules Bentley, made the astute observation in the New Orleans Gambit that the Hard Rock collapse had strong echoes of the BP Oil Spill. “Because of the complexity and seriousness of the BP disaster, we were told, only BP themselves had the resources to address it.” Trascher’s remarks seemed to echo this same logic in which the criminal would be in charge of the crime scene. Just before he gave the interview, Trascher changed his Facebook page. But someone got a screenshot of it first, and sent it to me. The epigram at the top read, “The only thing worse than cheating is losing.”
THOMAS BELLER’s books include Seduction Theory: Stories, J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, which won the New York City Book Award, and the forthcoming Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, he is an associate professor and director of creative writing at Tulane University.
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What fine writing - and what a world we live in. Are the size and strength of the supporting I-beams what the right wing is referring to when they complain about "job killing regulations"?