Authorities stress that they’ve found no safety concerns so far. But they don’t yet have results for more than two-thirds of the projects, including hospitals, hotels, museums, and apartment buildings.
Jury selection is set to begin today in the Testwell case. Prosecutors have also charged another concrete testing company and its lab director with falsifying test results for the Sept. 11 memorial, LaGuardia Airport’s control tower, and nearly 100 other projects. That company and lab director have pleaded not guilty; no trial date has been set.
Fallout from the cases is still being felt on construction sites.
Inspectors have issued dozens of violation notices in three months of conducting new spot checks on concrete testing procedures, city Department of Buildings spokesman Tony Sclafani said.
More than a dozen of Testwell’s major projects have been retested and declared safe, including the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower now rising at the World Trade Center site, the future Second Avenue subway line, Yankee Stadium, a JetBlue terminal at Kennedy Airport, and a 40-story Times Square office building, authorities said.
Although large cracks appeared in the ballpark’s concrete ramps months after it opened this year, city officials said the fissures do not affect its stability.
But at least 71 projects have yet to be retested, Sclafani said Monday. It took the city months of consulting with engineers to set standards for the retests, which cost $100,000 for an average high-rise.
Concrete is carefully tailored for different uses and sensitive to variations in ingredients, storage, and other factors, making testing a necessity, said Christian Meyer, a Columbia University civil engineering professor who specializes in concrete technology.
