Initially, the disadvantages were an appalling smell and a greatly increased danger of fire from the naked jets of flame.
By Wednesday, the numbers she was calculating on a system that rates the danger of fire were worse than anything she had ever seen.
"There is some danger of fire, and it means we've had people responding to take care of them," Mr. Buchman said.
One of those bystanders, Larry Garlick, 38, filed a notice that he planned to sue the city, alleging, among other things, that the officers were not properly trained to recognize the danger of firing "into a crowd of people".
"What we do hear is complaints about excessive number of residents in illegal and unsafe dwellings, multiple electrical boxes that indicate the structure is not being used legally, excessive garbage buildup and the danger of fire," Ms. Marshall said.
Snaking under the streets of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn are 175 miles of thick cast-iron pipes that were laid nearly a century ago to help a developing city deal with the ever-present danger of fire.
"If you can't log it and you don't maintain it, it's going to be destroyed," said Melvin Crabb, a third-generation timber worker, echoing an industry argument about the danger of fire on unlogged land.
The pipe was removed even though the men knew that the building was in constant danger of fire, Mr. Fields said: torches were being used to cut steel, creating slag — dripping molten metal that burned whatever it touched — in a building filled with debris, plywood and other flammable material.
Israel on Monday closed a rickety footbridge leading to the holy compound revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary after a city engineer determined that the wooden walkway posed an immediate danger of fire or collapse.
