Before the city officials left, they commended LeMessurier for his courage and candor, and expressed a desire to be kept informed as the repair work progressed.

Before the city officials left, they commended LeMessurier for his courage and candor, and expressed a desire to be kept informed as the repair work progressed. Given the urgency of the situation, that was all they could reasonably do. "It wasn't a case of 'We caught you, you skunk,'" Nusbaum says. "It started with a guy who stood up and said, 'I got a problem, I made the problem, let's fix the problem.' If you're gonna kill a guy like LeMessurier, why should anybody ever talk?" I was waiting for this line throughout the first 2/3rds of the story. The story began almost framing LeMessurier as criminally incompetent, failing on a flourish and retiring to his private island to consider it, but he not only acted with incredible responsibility but discovered flaws in NYC's building test codes and typical practices concerning joint construction while building an effective response team to fix it. I suppose it makes the whole thing more dramatically structured to insinuate a little bit of character transformation and reveal, but that guy deserves the kind of acclaim that was reserved until the last few paragraphs.