Liability changes everything

October 27, 2005 10:11 AM

You park, they pay NYC Port Authority found negligent by having parking under WTC. Jury finds terrorists 32% responsible for exploding van there in 1993. 400 plaintiffs seek $1.8 billion, NYCPA will have to pay 100% of the damages that might be awarded.
posted by dand (45 comments total)

[Mr. Goldmark's 1985 report to the NYCPA] concluded: "A time-bomb-laden vehicle could be driven into the W.T.C. and parked in the public parking area. The driver would then exit via elevator into the W.T.C. and proceed with his business unnoticed. At a predetermined time, the bomb could be exploded in the basement. The amount of explosives used will determine the severity of damage to that area."

Among the report's recommendations was: "Eliminate all public parking in the World Trade Center." It also recommended a series of compromise steps, including guarded entrances to the parking lots, random searches of vehicles and restrictions on pedestrian access.
posted by dand at 10:11 AM on October 27, 2005

Isn't the port authority funded by taxes?
posted by odinsdream at 10:16 AM on October 27, 2005

So, there should be no underground parking in any buildings? Do you have any idea how many underground parking garages there are in New York City alone? I don't, but I'd be willing to guess that it's on the order of hundreds of millions.
posted by Plutor at 10:20 AM on October 27, 2005

68% of the blame for people who allowed public parking in a public building and 32% of the blame for the people who actually, you know, built and exploded a bomb?

That's completely fucked up.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:22 AM on October 27, 2005

odinsdream, they issue bonds, so technically no (click the "governance" link.) Now, if it's the government buying some of those bonds, you might be partially right, at least in the short term.
posted by Opposite George at 10:27 AM on October 27, 2005

I don't, but I'd be willing to guess that it's on the order of hundreds of millions.

What makes you guess so high?
posted by biffa at 10:27 AM on October 27, 2005

The way you fight terrorism is, among other things, by not changing how you do things.

Holding the Port Authority responsible for not foreseeing the actions of madmen is, itself, insane. Does that mean that everyone, everywhere, must now plan for terrorist attack?

If shopping centers don't have armed guards and car searches, are they liable for an act of terrorism? Are we now supposed to reduce ourselves to quivering masses of people in armed, gated camps?

I would very much like to administer one bitchslap to each juror.
posted by Malor at 10:28 AM on October 27, 2005

biffa, I've told you a million times not to take things so literally.
posted by found missing at 10:30 AM on October 27, 2005

biffa: "What makes you guess so high?"

It was a hilarious joke. I was guessing a comically wrong number because I really don't know. But my point stands: it's probably a really big number (at least a thousand, I can virtually guarantee).
posted by Plutor at 10:31 AM on October 27, 2005

Holding the Port Authority responsible for not foreseeing the actions of madmen is, itself, insane. Does that mean that everyone, everywhere, must now plan for terrorist attack?

Particularly given the environment in 1993: No Cole bombing, no Oklahoma City yet. If the PA had come out and said, 'ok, we are banning parking under the WTC', the public reaction would have been vehement. The effort it would have taken to convince the public, let alone Rudy Giuliani of the cost of such an effort would have been near impossible. You're talking about a serious impact on business in the financial district - it most likely would have been seen as a greedy move by the PA to get more people to use the PATH or ferries rather than drive in and they probably would have been painted as opportunists using scare tactics to pad their wallets.

The idea that actual people who blew up the freakin explosives are only 1/3 culpable for the act is absolutely absurd. So, is UHaul 65% responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing because you can fit a ton of home made explosives in their trucks?
posted by spicynuts at 10:39 AM on October 27, 2005

Holding the Port Authority responsible for not foreseeing the actions of madmen

Seems like what killed them with the jury is that they WERE told in a written report.

there should be no underground parking in any buildings?

That's a good question: if you owned a building in NYC with underground parking, what do you need to do to avoid this sort of liability? Do you have to actively prevent every possible damaging outcome?

Isn't the port authority funded by taxes?

And who ends up paying for the liability, and its prevention?
posted by dand at 10:42 AM on October 27, 2005

68% of the blame for people who allowed public parking in a public building and 32% of the blame for the people who actually, you know, built and exploded a bomb?

That's completely fucked up.


Pretty good parallel to the kind of blame Bush & the US get for terrorism in the world, if you were to believe MeFi. Surprised no one's found time to blame teh neocons for atrocities like this, but will never be surprised when no one dares to blame the bombers.
posted by dhoyt at 10:45 AM on October 27, 2005

dhoyt, do you really believe no one puts any blame on the bombers themselves? Do you?
posted by MrMoonPie at 10:57 AM on October 27, 2005

Uh, the Port Authority is a two-state entity. It isn't the New York City Port Authority.
posted by dame at 10:58 AM on October 27, 2005

That's just a plain dumb thing to say, dhoyt.

The US Admin has been primarily responsible for creating an environment in which the USA is despised so much as to cause people to kill themselves in protest against its policies.

One can not say a car park is responsible for causing terrorism.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:59 AM on October 27, 2005

When parking spaces are outlawed, only the outlaws will park.
posted by drezdn at 11:00 AM on October 27, 2005

dhoyt - Yes, all of MeFi obviously thinks that Bush is entirely to blame for terrorism. There's no way that all 20K members could have another opinion about the matter.
posted by bshort at 11:02 AM on October 27, 2005

Pretty good parallel to the kind of blame Bush & the US get for terrorism in the world

shit...i'm all out of popcorn. i think i have a beer in my office though. start the show!
posted by spicynuts at 11:03 AM on October 27, 2005

Also, I was under the impression that bonds do cost the taxpayer when they come due. And that they end up really costing more than a straight tax. Can someone who knows this sort of stuff confirm/deny that impression?
posted by dame at 11:04 AM on October 27, 2005

The US Admin has been primarily responsible for creating an environment in which the USA is despised so much as to cause people to kill themselves in protest against its policies.

Do you realize how many terrorist attacks in the past, say, ten years haven't involved the US whatsoever? The kinds where, say, innocent vacationers are senselessly killed or children are held hostage?

The US is not singularly capable of "creating a terrorist environment" all over the globe, nor do citizens of all perceived "oppressed" and poor countries blow themselves up with such regularity as those in the Middle East & Indonesia. If the US/Bush wasn't around to blame, there'd be some other scapegoat.
posted by dhoyt at 11:10 AM on October 27, 2005

That's completely fucked up.

This is the correct statement.

Keeping cars out of the buildings is a dumb waste of space and resources when lateral property (as opposed to vertical) is so prohibitively expensive. In Boston, new buildings are required to have parking spaces in them to help alleviate the off-site parking mess.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 11:25 AM on October 27, 2005

once we get all the cars out of garages, the people out of airplanes, the words out of mouths, and the thoughts out of minds, then, finally, we will have triumphed over terrorism. it's hard work. stay the course.
posted by quonsar at 11:32 AM on October 27, 2005

Now when they close the parking garage, all the people who can't park there anymore can sue them for failing to anticipate and prepare an invincible legal defense against this liability suit.
posted by sfenders at 11:37 AM on October 27, 2005

Also, I was under the impression that bonds do cost the taxpayer when they come due.

I thought the point of a bond was to generate funds through the actual sale of those bonds and that payment to the bond owners was based on a)interest accumulated during possession of the prinicipal by the state and b) profit or income generated by whatever was built, created, funded, etc with the principal. Also, there are many different kinds of bonds, some that will pay based on profit generated from say, tolls on a road or other infrastructure, and some that pay based on the amount of tax revenue a state can collect. Given that, I would say that bonds would only cost taxpayers in the case of fiscal mismanagement, poor planning or outright bankruptcy by the issuing state.
posted by spicynuts at 11:38 AM on October 27, 2005

I'm filing a lawsuit agains Miss Cleo, Sylvia Browne, and Jeane Dixon for failing to see any of this coming.
posted by Gamblor at 11:42 AM on October 27, 2005

The report proposed banning public parking, not employee parking. The building I work in has a parking garage for employees only; that doesn't eliminate the threat of terrorism, of course, but it does reduce the threat.
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:43 AM on October 27, 2005

If you have a good rationale for allowing under-building parking (availability, convenience, whatever), you also have to acknowledge the threat of bombing. Especially after someone tells you it's a threat.
posted by smackfu at 11:51 AM on October 27, 2005

The building I work in has a parking garage for employees only; that doesn't eliminate the threat of terrorism, of course, but it does reduce the threat.

Where I work, the employees are the ones who want to blow the place up...
posted by daveleck at 12:00 PM on October 27, 2005

Ms. Nash, 61, a plaintiff in the suit: more daunting, she said, are the wounds that remain invisible to the eye: the depression that dispatches her to bed without warning, the shattered short-term memory that prevents her from holding a job and the panic attacks that keep her from entering underground spaces. "I can't watch television or listen to the radio," she said. "There are days I just don't answer the phone."

If this woman the NYTimes chose to write about resembles the rest of the ~400 plaintiffs/'victims,' I suspect much of the public will be hoping the $1.8B helps them finally be able to GET OVER IT ... and will further appreciate all the added costs/hassles this judgment triggers.
posted by fourstar at 12:20 PM on October 27, 2005

I agree with people who think this split in responsibility is insane, however...

Knowing what happened in the WTC bombing, a good building design might well separate the parking and delivery areas. This would allow the building to ban delivery vans from the parking garage, which should make it less expensive to bomb proof the building.

Of course you would have to ban SUVs, because they could carry big bombs too - sounds good to me!
posted by Chuckles at 12:54 PM on October 27, 2005

fourstar: I suspect much of the public will be hoping the $.8B helps them finally be able to GET OVER IT

Well, this is absolutely true (I have no idea how you actually meant it). The thing is, even if the responsibility was 99% Terrorist 1% Port Authority the Port Authority would have ended up paying 100%. You can't exactly get money out of Osama Bin Laden until you catch him...
posted by Chuckles at 12:59 PM on October 27, 2005

It was a jury, nuff said
posted by Count Ziggurat at 2:06 PM on October 27, 2005

Uh, the Port Authority is a two-state entity. It isn't the New York City Port Authority.

dame is right. It has never been a city entity at all. The Port Authority of New York was merged decades ago with the Port Authority of New Jersey to form the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANY&NJ). It issues bonds to raise capital for building things like tunnels and bridges, but then uses tolls to finance maintenance, and rents or leases much of its property holdings to private, commercial entities: thus, the World Trade Center. There are no tax monies at stake.

Also, I was under the impression that bonds do cost the taxpayer when they come due. And that they end up really costing more than a straight tax. Can someone who knows this sort of stuff confirm/deny that impression?

The bonds are guaranteed by the states, should the PANY&NJ go bankrupt. But the expectation is that the Authority will have the ability to pay off the bond when it comes due from the revenues gained by the investment made possible by the bond. That, at least, is the intended outcome.

A few more things in this thread need parsing: "responsibility" and "fault" are not the same as "negligence". Our legal structure -- hidebound with certain case law -- makes it necessary to allocate negligence within reasonable bounds such that the biggest pockets are able to underwrite the payout. Changing that structure is called, of course, "tort reform" and has been a Republican project for years.

Keeping cars out of the buildings is a dumb waste of space

The WTC was served by one of the highest-density transportation networks in the entire world. Trains, busses, tunnels, ferries, and whatnot. Manhattan is not a place where anyone expects to drive to work except people at, or near, CEO level.

Still, the issue here was not parking per se, but parking which gave unrestricted access to a structurally fragile part of the building. There was a very real risk that in 1993 the bomb could have collapsed the towers, without warning, while they were full of people. The PA is criticized not for having parking itself, but for having unsecured parking.
posted by dhartung at 3:12 PM on October 27, 2005

This is just too bizarre for words. The world has gone stark raving mad when an organisation is penalised for providing car parking (secured or not - is there anywhere in a basement car park that is not vulnerable to a large enough bomb?) because someone could use it to plant a car bomb. I doubt that they would have been able to build or operate the complex without providing parking anyway. What's next - cities will be blamed for pedestrians getting run over because it was reasonably forseeable that cars would hit pedestrians?

This kind of decision makes me so mad that I almost foam at the mouth because of the sheer stupidity of it all. This is an extreme example, of course, but it is indicative of society's tendency to shift the blame from those who carry out acts onto the victim. It is the same kind of thinking that says a woman deserves to get raped for wearing a short skirt.
posted by dg at 4:30 PM on October 27, 2005

I claim 2% responsibility.

You can't exactly get money out of Osama Bin Laden until you catch him...

#1 rule in civil litigation: look for the deep pockets.

Ooooh, these are mighty deep.
posted by dreamsign at 4:32 PM on October 27, 2005

That was excellent dhartung, thank you.
posted by Binliner at 4:47 PM on October 27, 2005

The PA is criticized not for having parking itself, but for having unsecured parking.

Okay, what if the parking garage was gated though and required key-card access ... and let's say the terrorists knew this, so they stole someones key card. Who would be liable then? Because there were security measures in place, but then we would be arguing if they were adequate.

My point is that you can sit there and dream up things terrorists might do all day and ways to prevent them from happening. But if they want to badly enough, these terrorists can circumvent the security precautions you implement. And it's not just terrorists this applies to: the US-Mexico border is a good example -- people circumvent that all the time. Until we address the reason why people try to terrorize/illegally immigrate/etc. in in the first place, we can implement as many security measures as we want, and people will still figure out ways to get around them.
posted by fourstar at 6:37 PM on October 27, 2005

A related problem is that all the security measures in the world are completely ineffective against someone who is prepared to die for their cause. What can you do against someone who is, for example, prepared to strap explosives to thir body, walk into a crowded place and calmly detonate themselves? Nothing - not without implementing security restrictions so ridiculous that you may as well completely bar all access to anywhere.

As fourstar says, the only way to even get close to solving these issues is to address the cause which, of course, is almost impossible without quantum changes in the way the whole world thinks. I won't be holding my breath.
posted by dg at 6:54 PM on October 27, 2005

Time to find fault with the airlines for not heading warnings that terrorists hijack planes, or diesel and fertilizer manufacturers for not taking precautions in preventing that magical chemical reaction.

But then again it's hard to tell what the expert witnesses said.
posted by tomplus2 at 7:25 PM on October 27, 2005

I eagerly await the Port Authority being sued because they had erected an obstacle to unencumbered airplane travel. Those bastards shoulda known that a 110-story building would be in airspace!

Mud huts, man, we gotta go back to mud huts.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:38 PM on October 27, 2005

the issue here was not parking per se, but parking which gave unrestricted access to a structurally fragile part of the building

There's your problem right there.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:35 AM on October 28, 2005

I say let's blame Janet Reno. Now are you happy?
posted by warbaby at 8:26 AM on October 28, 2005

Come to think of it, I suppose the PA can be sued for maintaining an attractive nuisance.

Just like with homeowners and unfenced swimming pools: it must be assumed that such things will attract irresponsible people who will cause harm to themselves via their own unrestricted access to the pool.

You can't put up the tallest building in the world and expect that terrorists aren't going to be attracted to it like moths to a flame!

"Structurally fragile" just means one of the support pillars. The underground parking lot necessarily is choc-a-bloc full of them. You just can't have underground parking without also exposing the "structurally fragile" pillars!
posted by five fresh fish at 9:18 AM on October 28, 2005

five fresh fish, perhaps you missed my previous comment. Wik says the bomb was 600kg, the Oklahoma City Bomb was 2300kg.

There are other structural engineering issues to be considered too, of course. A building that will catastrophically fail when a single support member is displaced has a pretty big design problem. If such a support structure is necessary, for whatever reason, it would make sense to closely examine that member...

The same goes for the aircraft. Why haven't there been appropriately strong cockpit doors for at least 30 years?

I definitely agree that there are major problems in the way liability works, but the problems are better illustrated with Mrs. Jones icy front porch than hijacked airliners.
posted by Chuckles at 12:30 PM on October 28, 2005

You do understand that all skyrise buildings are anchored to the bedrock via cement columns, right? And that these columns span the entire footprint of the building, right?

Ergo, it's rather impossible to have underground parking and avoid being near the columns.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:44 PM on October 28, 2005