Jim Katsarelis, the stock exchange’s head of building operations who oversees efforts to keep the building clean every day, said he knows keeping the surfaces sanitized was not enough to prevent the spread of a virus that comes from bodies, traveling from a sneeze or a wiped nose and a handshake. They applied a probiotic layer - Z BioScience Enviro-Mist Microflora spray - that would stay on all the surfaces and buy them a couple more days until the process needed to start again. As the night wore on, they talked and joked a little more. They left the disinfectant there for about 10 minutes to allow it to cure. Using a specialized sprayer that looked like a paint gun, they coated everything with Anasphere, a biohazard disinfectant. Next, they rolled out a big yellow tank, and a couple of crew members put on tank backpacks. They threw out every paper they encountered, making piles of notes and printer paper. The hazmat suit-clad cleaning team wandered and sprayed every surface - computers, chair legs, tables, floor, everything - with Z BioScience Multi-Task Probiotic Cleaner. And so Friday, there were the scraps, along with piles of candy wrappers, water bottles, pizza oil-covered paper plates, tin foil, and many balled up napkins, which doubled as stress balls for the traders during the day. There is a long tradition of writing notes and arithmetic on scraps of paper and dropping them, ripped up, on the floor. The place was pretty messy, truth be told. They would clean every surface that people had touched. They filled spray bottles and fanned out across the floor. The disinfection crew wore matching hazardous material suits, reflective yellow vests, doubled-up blue gloves, goggles and purple respirators. “I mean look, I think it’d be a great idea to do it once a month even if there wasn’t a virus.” “It would be a very bad optic for the building to close,” he said, adding that he was excited about the sanitation effort. He said he had no intention of staying home from work. Tim Anderson, managing director of TJM investments, who works in a pod on the trading floor, said he had been trying to shake hands less and hug less. “But when you’re managing critical situations you want people involved, with human eyes on each stock.” Much of the work that once happened on the trading floor now happens online, executed by algorithms, quietly, with no handshaking.īut the work that traders do in person reduces volatility and adds a layer of human-guided assurance to the market, many of them said. There had been arguments to close the building. Now they had been fitted with new gear and the task of deep cleaning. They were familiar with the stock exchange - they usually cleaned the building’s ducts, fans, air pumps and heaters. They were from an outside firm, Tech Clean Industries. The regular cleaning crew came through with trash bags and brooms.Īt 6 p.m., the new crew came in through the colonnade, under the pediment with massive carved stone figures representing science, industry, agriculture and mining. But those in charge of the building and many of the traders themselves believe the New York Stock Exchange - a symbol of American economic might and stability - is too important to shut down. These deep cleanings are planned to be repeated weekly, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. The process took eight hours and a crew of 10 specialists. But it is not ready to close and send the traders home because of the coronavirus.Īnd so, starting late Friday, the stock exchange got fully sanitized for the first time since the iconic neoclassical building opened in 1903. The New York Stock Exchange was not built for social distancing. They shook hands, leaned over shoulders, patted each others’ backs, hugged. They stood in clusters shouting, sharing screens, sharing pizza, sharing pens. On a recent day on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, traders were cheek to cheek as stock prices flashed above them. Baltimore Sun eNewspaper Home Page Close Menu
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