On April 30, if anyone had told Hodgson Russ Managing Partner Ben Zeffranieri that he’d be overseeing a major remediation of his law firm’s headquarters - the historic Guaranty Building in downtown Buffalo - he probably would have laughed at such a notion.
Ditto for Verizon and its landmark downtown building.
And, while the neighboring Beltz building is being demolished, remediation work is underway at both the Guaranty and Verizon buildings.
Zeffranieri estimates the damage to the Guaranty Building may exceed $2 million, while Verizon is still calculating the cost and level of damage to its building.
“On the fire-damaged west side of the building, we're going to need to clean the glazed brick between the Beltz building and the Guaranty building,” Zeffranieri said. “They're going to have to do the same for the telephone company because if you look at where the smoke and the fire were, you can actually see where the smoke went up the side of the building.”
Everything from carpets, upholstery, conference room chairs and the elevator shaft suffered varying degrees of damage
The building’s entire HVAC system had to be flushed.
“We have air cleaners running right now, and we have had those running since the time of the fire in certain areas of the building,” Zeffranieri said.
Chief among his concerns is the damage to the hundreds of small mosaic tiles that are original to the Louis Sullivan-designed, circa 1896, building.
“It's been a demanding and difficult process, but we've done it in a painstaking way,” Zeffranieri said.
The good news, the Guaranty Building remains open and no client information was lost, as it was all backed up in several ways.
