The Associated Press

The Fire Department has found dozens of fire hazards at construction sites — including broken water pipes and elevators — in stepped-up inspections following a deadly blaze at a ground zero skyscraper that it hadn't inspected for more than a year.

After visiting hundreds of sites around the city, the department has uncovered more than 120 violations since the Aug. 18 fire at the former Deutsche Bank building. The inspections have caused the city to shut down construction sites at a rate twice as high since the fire, compared with the months before, according to city records.

Some of the sites, close to 500, are being inspected for the first time, despite city law requiring inspections every 15 days. The lapse in visits to the former Deutsche Bank tower failed to uncover a broken standpipe that supplies water to fire hoses, complicating firefighting efforts in the blaze that killed two firefighters.

"What's important is they're being inspected, and they're going to continue to be inspected," Fire Department spokesman Jim Long said.

The visits across the city will also soon extend to its most high-profile construction site, the World Trade Center, which has not been regularly inspected by the department because it is not on city-owned property.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bistate agency that owns the 16-acre site, will halt construction if ordered to by the Fire Department, even though the law doesn't require it, said spokesman Steve Coleman. Department officials are coming to the fenced-off site in the next two weeks to familiarize themselves with the construction there before beginning regular visits, he said.

The new inspections illustrate the challenge of inspecting every construction site in a city that is in the middle of a historic, $25 billion building boom. Glenn Corbett, a fire safety expert and a professor at John Jay College, said the city law to inspect sites every 15 days could overload certain firehouses where most construction is going on.

"You could literally spend your entire tour going on an inspection," Corbett said. "If you have a large number of buildings to inspect and those buildings are very hard to inspect, that can be unmanageable."

The citywide inspections started in late August, after Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta ordered the department to find every site where construction or demolition is going on, check for fire safety violations and other issues that could make fighting a fire difficult.

Besides the broken standpipe at the former Deutsche Bank tower — which was being dismantled — fire officials have said that sealed-off stairwells and a negative air-pressure system that pushed the fire downward created hazards the department didn't know about.

The department looked at 485 sites, which included just over 350 actual buildings, and reported 122 fire hazards that required a follow-up inspection by the city Department of Buildings, fire and buildings officials said. More than 200 other calls routed to the Fire Department from the city's 311 complaint line prompted more inspections.

The city Department of Buildings issued 27 stop-work orders that shut down construction sites in the six weeks since the blaze, according to records. Before the Aug. 18 fire, 67 orders had been issued in 2007.

A high-rise being demolished near Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan was cited on Sept. 14 for removing an interior stairwell that could be used by firefighters, and for defects in the building standpipe. The order has since been lifted.

A building being renovated into condominiums just blocks from ground zero was shut down after "accumulation of combustible debris resulted in fire on the first floor, which spread to the third floor," another report read.

"No standpipe, no elevator in readiness and no approved plans for site," read an order for a residential high-rise in upper Manhattan. The contractors working at the cited buildings didn't return telephone calls seeking comment.

Long said most of the issues that would trigger referrals to the Buildings Department would involve faulty sprinkler systems, standpipes, inaccessible stairwells or elevators.

None of the sites inspected, Long said, have the same features as the former Deutsche Bank tower - a building that was being cleaned, floor by floor, of toxic debris at the same time it is being dismantled.

Firefighters have said that the building was enormously difficult to inspect, requiring inspectors to don protective environmental suits and spend several hours going floor-by-floor through the former 40-story building.