Fatal Construction Accidents Are Rising in New York

If a falling air-conditioner is one of New Yorkers’ worst fears, what happened on Sunday could have been a nightmare of mammoth proportions: A 12-ton heating and air-conditioning unit broke free from a crane and fell 30 stories to the pavement on Madison Avenue.

Ten people were hurt, none seriously. But the episode was just the latest in what has been an unusually dangerous year in the construction industry.

Eight people have died in construction-related accidents this year, according to the city’s Buildings Department, as many as in all of 2014; the year before, three died. Not since 2008, during the height of the last building boom, has the number of construction accidents been so high, when a rash of episodes, including two falling cranes, claimed 19 lives.

The number of accidents has also been on the rise, with 231 in 2014, up 24 percent from the year before. (Accident figures for 2015 were unavailable.)

Most in the industry agree that there is a simple equation at work: The more construction, the more danger.

“The more jobs we have, it either means fewer workers doing more work, or more new workers who may not have as much experience or training,” said Richard Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress, a trade group representing contractors, developers and designers.

There was $36 billion in construction spending last year, according to Mr. Anderson’s group, a record that trumped the $32 billion spent in 2008. The number of new building permits issued by the city exceeded 98,000 in 2014, up from 74,000 in 2010.

Still, the rise in accidents and deaths is worrisome as Mayor Bill de Blasio calls for more construction to achieve his affordable housing and economic development goals.

In the mayor’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, the Buildings Department is one of the few city agencies seeing increased spending, to $148 million. That is 29 percent more than its current budget, by far the largest increase of any department.

“The department’s highest priority is safe development,” a spokesman, Alexander Schnell, said in a statement.

Officials were still trying to determine the cause of the accident on Sunday, which occurred around 10:30 a.m. The falling unit ripped holes in the 15th, ninth and eighth floors of 261 Madison Avenue.

Across the avenue, plywood had been placed on a few windows at 260 Madison Avenue, which belongs to the same landlord, the Sapir Organization.

Officer workers and tourists on Monday stopped at the metal fencing lining the sidewalks and juggled smartphones and umbrellas as they tried to take photos in the rain of the crushed and snarled steel above.

Construction unions and contractors that use union labor contend that the rise of cheaper, nonunion labor, an increasingly common practice in one of the most expensive real estate markets, is to blame for the rise in accidents.

“This is the second-most-dangerous job in America after mining, so you need guys who know what they are doing,” said Louis J. Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association, which represents unionized construction companies that have been trying to fend off nonunionized competitors. “We have the best training and the best safety standards, period.”

As evidence, he pointed to a 2012 report by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration showing six of the eight fatalities in New York City that year were on nonunion jobs.

Some of the recent serious accidents seem surprisingly mundane, underscoring the dangers inherent in construction work.

One worker died in December 2014 on a Lower East Side project after falling half a story from a ladder, while another died that month falling from scaffolding during an interior renovation in Times Square.

Another worker tumbled eight stories through a hole in scaffolding in April 2014 while repointing bricks on a West 55th Street hotel and died.

Other accidents can be unexpected, even freakish, as in March of this year, when a construction fence, meant to protect pedestrians from falling objects, came loose in the wind at the former St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, which is being redeveloped as condominiums. It struck a woman and killed her.

And a large section of flooring collapsed during interior demolition of an apartment building in Brooklyn last year, injuring nine workers, though all survived.

Source: New York Times