Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and City Councilmember Carlina Rivera announced Monday that they have heeded locals’ calls for an outside expert to assess the East Side Costal Resiliency (ESCR) Project, hiring Hans Gehrels of the Dutch environmental consulting group Deltares.
“We’ve heard the requests of the community for an independent review before this goes into effect, and we listened,” Brewer said in a statement. “Dr. Gehrels will bring his vast experience and expertise to his analysis of this project, and I look forward to seeing the results of his review.”
This week, Gehrels is conducting interviews and surveying the current and former plans put forward by the de Blasio administration, which last September suddenly scrapped 70 percent of the project in favor of a new proposal that will bury East River Park with at least eight feet of fill. This would avoid tricky nighttime highway closures, but require the heavily-used park to go offline for some three years.
“There was a virtual bomb lurking beneath,” Assistant District Attorney Randolph Clarke Jr. told a jury during opening statements.
“All it took was 23 minutes to cause all this damage and destruction,” Mr. Clarke, the prosecutor, told the jury. He said the defendants’ actions were motivated by financial greed and a desire to rent the newly renovated apartments.
Lawyers for the defendants said their clients weren’t responsible for the blast.
“This is a tragic accident,” said Michael Burke, a lawyer for Ms. Hrynenko. He said his client was an inexperienced landlord who tried to do things right and hire the right people.
Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mr. Kukic, said evidence suggested the fire could have started in the kitchen of Sushi Park and not in the adjacent basement. He said there wasn’t enough evidence to prove prosecutors’ theory of the case.
A lawyer for Mr. Ioannidis, Roger Blank, told the jury that Sushi Park had a history of gas issues in its kitchen.
[He] recalled how his wife waited nearly three agonizing days after the March 26, 2015, blast to learn that the body of their 23-year-old son was recovered from the rubble.
“That’s the day I died,” said the 56-year-old, choking up. “I have a picture of my son’s face in the moment when he’s flying through the air and the anguish that he had and the pain when he knew he wasn’t coming back…it broke my heart.”
Come prepared to spend some money — egg creams, pretzels, t-shirts, toothpaste! — and take your photo with a surprise work of guerrilla street art, as an acclaimed group of cultural activists and designers radically transform Gem Spa into a dystopian vision for the new St. Mark’s Place.
Bing Fen is the iconic Chengdu summer snack. A sort of jello made (originally) from Konjac, it is refreshing, cool, sweet and fruity. The clear jello is mixed with ice, molasses, and a variety of toppings. These can include dried fruits, diced watermelon, mung beans, fermented rice porridge, mini sticky rice balls, and rose jam. It is a great example of the term ‘Shuang 爽’ which means cool, refreshing, and revitalizing.
A lawyer for Ms. Hrynenko did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Hrynenko did not tell detectives about the illegal gas line, prosecutors said, and she shredded nine garbage bags full of documents pertaining to her real estate business.
But legal experts and defense lawyers say that it is difficult to convince a jury that someone is guilty of manslaughter in cases where slipshod construction work has led to deaths.
Under New York law, prosecutors will have to prove that Ms. Hrynenko, Mr. Kukic and Mr. Ioannidis were aware that they were acting recklessly, and disregarded the potential risk of death to others. Prosecutors would also have to show that the risks were not something that a reasonable person would have ignored.
“Being aware of a substantial risk would seem to be inconsistent with maintaining their property and obtaining tenants, making it challenging to prove that level of reckless intent,” said Kevin McCarthy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who previously worked as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey and an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.
C&B is still in operation. We are operating weekends only at the moment while we work on growing Paper Daisy. Bar Ilegal is a collaboration between C&B and some friends who are doing a brief pop-up in the space during the evenings. While the space looks different for the time being, we are still serving the same product on the weekends as always.
MAN ALL HANDS 34 COOPER SQ, COMMERCIAL FIRE ON FIRST FLR,
— FDNYalerts (@FDNYAlerts) September 5, 2019
MAN ALL HANDS 34 COOPER SQ, COMMERCIAL FIRE ON FIRST FLR, UNDER CONTROL
— FDNYalerts (@FDNYAlerts) September 6, 2019
