The Giuliani administration official who led the rapid cleanup of ground zero after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks now works for the private construction firm overseeing the troubled demolition of the former Deutsche Bank building.

Michael Burton was the executive deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Design and Construction before he joined URS, one of the construction companies under investigation after a seven-alarm fire in the building killed two firefighters last week. Fire officials have said the fire was probably caused by careless smoking and exacerbated by safety violations at the site.

As manager of the ground zero cleanup, Mr. Burton was lauded by some for finishing the project early and under budget. He was criticized by others who said he emphasized speed over the safety of workers toiling on the toxic pile. Thousands are now suing the city for health problems they say are related to ground zero, where they say regulations requiring them to wear respirators were not enforced.

“Safety was something that was certainly a relative word,” Mr. Burton said in a 2003 speech in Michigan about decisions made during the ground zero cleanup, according to a news report.

In October 2004, two years after Mr. Burton joined URS, the company won a contract for the demolition of the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty St., which was damaged and contaminated by asbestos when the World Trade Center towers collapsed nearby.

URS, one of the nation’s largest construction firms, was hired as the construction manager for the project, and Mr. Burton was named the URS project principal.

URS was to oversee the demolition on behalf of the building’s owner, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which had purchased the property from Deutsche Bank for $90 million.

Construction managers typically are charged with locating construction companies and acting as brokers for property owners, including overseeing project timelines. In this case, though, the LMDC, independently of URS, hired another firm, Bovis Lend Lease, to conduct the actual deconstruction of the building. URS’s main job was to act as the LMDC’s representative at the site where, among other things, it would monitor safety conditions.

Unlike the ground zero cleanup, the demolition project was beset by numerous delays related to concerns about environmental hazards and, later, the discovery of human remains, leading the three demolition contractors to ask for millions of dollars in extra funds to cover unanticipated costs.

The project finally got under way in March. An undisclosed number of URS inspectors and a licensed structural engineer employed by URS were to be deployed to 130 Liberty St. on a daily basis once demolition commenced, LMDC representatives told community members at a meeting in March.

By August 18, when a fire broke out on the 17th floor in an area where workers frequently smoked cigarettes despite regulations forbidding it, nearly 20 safety violations had been filed against contractors working at the building — including one for a steel pipe that fell from a top floor and pierced the roof of the firehouse next door.

Other problems, such as a broken standpipe in the basement, didn’t come to light until after the fire, during which firefighters tried in vain to pump water through the pipe to reach hoses on the upper floors. Firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino died in the fire after running out of air while trying to escape a warren of debris and blocked stairwells.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation into the fire last week, and the FBI is attempting to determine how the pipe was broken.

URS inspectors were not the only ones responsible for monitoring safety at the site. Three fire officials were removed from their commands yesterday after fire investigators found that they had stopped inspecting the site. A subcontractor, John Galt Corp., has also been removed.

The executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, Joel Shufro, said a union representative had told him nearly 60 inspectors from various agencies and companies were at the site on a day he visited. Among them were probably New York City Department of Buildings inspectors, who arrived every day to examine the floors undergoing deconstruction.

“How is that you have such a highly monitored job that allows such sorts of conditions to exist and continue?” Mr. Shufro said.

Through a URS spokesman, Mr. Burton declined to comment for this article, referring questions to the LMDC. The LMDC did not respond to questions for this article sent on Monday.

URS is also linked to the recent collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis that killed at least 12 people.

Minnesota officials hired URS engineers to examine the Interstate 35W bridge for structural weaknesses. After finding more than 50 weak points, URS told officials it could reinforce the bridge, but also gave a cheaper alternative: inspecting the bridge regularly for cracks. Officials stopped the inspections a few months before the bridge gave way.

In a bio provided by the LMDC, Mr. Burton is described as one of the creators in 1997 of the Department of Design and Construction, a relatively new city agency when Mayor Giuliani assigned it to lead both city and federal agencies in the ground zero cleanup.

The bio says Mr. Burton has 18 years of experience and has been involved in dozens of demolition projects. It notes that he also has special expertise in establishing “excellent working relationships with government agencies and their staff.”

In an interview with New York Construction magazine a year after September 11, 2001, when he had already transitioned to URS, Mr. Burton discussed his desire to continuing working on the ground zero recovery as a member of the private sector: “Having witnessed one major national disaster, I feel a personal responsibility,” he said. “Our industry needs to respond appropriately to mitigate or to avoid this from happening again.”