Manuel Colorado, a 36-year-old construction worker, was
installing decking last year at a new building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when
he lost his balance and fell 19 feet to his death.
A few weeks later, a guest at the Dream Hotel in Midtown
Manhattan heard someone screaming outside. Gurmeet Singh, a 58-year-old Indian
immigrant doing facade work on the building, had tumbled eight stories off a
scaffold and landed atop a sidewalk shed.
Twelve days after Mr. Singh’s death, Lukasz Stolarski,
33, plummeted 110 feet from the roof of an office building in Midtown where he
had been attaching plywood to the parapet ledge.
New York City is experiencing a building boom that has
transformed barren blocks and led to a frenzy of construction on commercial and
residential buildings across all five boroughs. But that activity has come at a
sobering cost: In the last two years, the number of workers hurt and killed in
construction accidents has surged.
Manuel Colorado, 36, was killed last year as he installed
decking at a new building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At left is part of a
federal safety inspector's notes on the accident.
The rise in deaths and injuries — mostly among
undocumented immigrant laborers — far exceeds the rate of new construction over
the same period. It is stark evidence of the view increasingly held by safety
inspectors, government officials and prosecutors, that safety measures at these
job sites are woefully inadequate.
A review of every construction fatality in the past two years by The New York
Times has found that many could have been, as a federal investigation into one
accident put it, “completely avoidable.” Time and again, in thousands of pages
of safety reports, handwritten notes, crude drawings, lawsuits and other
documents, as well as interviews with the workers’ relatives and friends, the
same issues emerged.
Most construction sites where workers died failed to take
basic steps to prevent them from falling. Workers frequently did not wear
harnesses or helmets, as required by law. Supervision was often lacking. In
many of the projects, a premium was placed on speed, causing workers to take
dangerous shortcuts.
About a quarter of the deaths took place in Midtown,
attracting a vast majority of news media attention for such accidents. But the
rest occurred, largely unnoticed, all over the city. They usually involved
smaller projects, using nonunion workers, who were often poorly trained. Often
the contractors had been previously cited for safety violations and failed to
pay penalties.
Seven workers have died on the job since July, including three in a
nine-day stretch before Labor Day, according to records of the federal Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA.
The city’s Buildings Department keeps its own count of
construction deaths, injuries and accidents, offering a broader look at safety
year over year. There were 10 construction-related fatalities in the most
recent fiscal year, from July 2014 to July 2015, according to city figures. In
contrast, the annual average over the previous four years was 5.5.
Meanwhile, 324 workers were injured in the last fiscal
year, a jump of 53 percent, and the Buildings Department recorded 314 accidents
over all, an increase of 52 percent from the year before. The total was more
than two and a half times what the city tallied in 2011. In comparison, permits
for new construction projects grew by only 11 percent in the last fiscal year
and permits for renovation and other work by 6 percent.
“There is absolutely no doubt that there is a real
problem with construction safety,” said Mark G. Peters, the commissioner of the
city’s Investigation Department, which looks into construction fatalities.
Rajwinder Kaur of South Ozone Park, Queens, with a family
album. Her father, Gurmeet Singh, was killed in a fall from construction
scaffolding at the Dream Hotel in Midtown in 2014. She said she and her husband
were never contacted by the construction company.
An improving economy and low interest rates helped fuel
the current building boom, but there are signs that more is to come. Mayor Bill
de Blasio is embracing
vertical construction to help make housing more affordable. And uncertainty
over the future of a lucrative tax abatement program for developers caused many
to rush to file new construction permits this year.
The deaths make clear that the city is being built, or in
some cases rebuilt, heavily on the backs of recent immigrants, particularly
from Latin America, most of them not authorized to work in this country.
Immigrants, of course, have long dominated the
construction trade, from the Irish in earlier generations to Eastern Europeans
more recently. But among those who have died over the past two years, many were
especially vulnerable because of their legal status. They were frequently
poorly trained, paid in cash and afraid of speaking up about unsafe conditions,
according to records and interviews with friends and relatives. Having largely
existed on society’s margins, in death, there was often little to mark that
they ever lived.
Such was the story with Mr. Colorado, who arrived from Veracruz, Mexico, about
15 years ago, and is survived by his girlfriend, Haydee Vazquez, and their two
sons.
Mr. Colorado’s shoulders chronically ached from lifting heavy wooden
beams, Ms. Vazquez said, but he felt that he needed to keep working, or some
other worker would just take his place. After his fatal fall in March 2014, she
was unable to learn anything more about the accident from his former employer.
“I still don’t know what happened,” she said, wiping
tears from her eyes, in an interview at her apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “I
don’t know if he had any last words.”
Big Jobs
Gurmeet Singh came to America on a tourist visa about 13
years ago from a farming village near Kapurthala, in the Punjab region of
northern India. He did not return home until his body was shipped back in April
2014.
The rise in deaths and injuries on New York City construction
projects — mostly among undocumented immigrant laborers — far exceeds the rate
of new construction in the last two years.
Mr. Singh, a former soldier in the Indian Army, found
brick-pointing and other construction work in New York. For a time, he shared
an apartment in Richmond Hill, Queens, with a rotating cast of three or four
men, usually fellow Sikhs. He eventually began sending money back to his family
in monthly installments of around $2,000, according to receipts provided by
relatives.
Two sons later came to the United States and roomed with
him briefly; both are now in Kentucky, one working at a gas station and the
other at a restaurant, said a daughter, Rajwinder Kaur, who now lives in South
Ozone Park, Queens. Before his death, Mr. Singh told relatives in India that he
hoped to return soon. But he decided to stay for one more job: the Dream Hotel on West 55th
Street.
“The boss said: ‘Can you just finish this job? I’ll give
you $10,000 and a free ticket to India,’” his other daughter, Palwinder Kaur,
said in a telephone interview from India.
That boss, Mr. Singh’s family said, was Adalat Khan, a
Pakistani-American businessman and fellow Punjabi speaker. Mr. Singh considered
Mr. Khan a friend, having long worked for him, Mr. Singh’s family said. But Mr.
Khan told investigators after the Dream Hotel accident: “I do not know the name
of the deceased.”
Mr. Khan was a subcontractor for a Queens firm, Alpha General
Contracting. And though he said he had been in business for five or six years,
he admitted to investigators that he did not know much about construction.
“I have no education for reading drawings,” he said, according to interview
notes by safety administration investigators released under a federal Freedom
of Information Act request.
Medical issues also limited Mr. Khan. “I do not work on
the scaffold myself because I have a stent,” he said. “I did no inspections on
site.”
The safety administration concluded that Mr. Khan ordered
the employees “to remove planks” and modify the scaffolding in order to “finish
the job” quickly. No guardrails were installed, and Mr. Singh, who was a sturdy
5-foot-8 and 190 pounds, had to climb a makeshift array of frames and
cross-braces to get to workers’ platforms some 140 feet off the ground. But
those platforms did not reach the wall, the agency found. As a result, Mr.
Singh had two options to get the work done: lean over a gap and stretch several
feet to reach the wall, or step on a thin, monkey-bar-like piece of metal.
Claudio Patiño at a construction site. He was killed on a
job at 124 Ridge Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan last December after
telling his wife it was dangerously slippery.
After Mr. Singh fell, the other workers fled, according
to records.
Mr. Singh was not wearing a harness, as required,
investigators found. He also had a fake government safety card certifying he
had completed mandatory safety training. The card listed the name of a trainer
who had died several years earlier, according to people briefed on the
investigation.
The agency later concluded that the scaffold had been
“altered by untrained employees that were not supervised by a competent
person.” It imposed a $42,000 fine against Mr. Khan’s company, Pak National
Gen. Corporation
In February, Mr. Singh’s family filed a lawsuit in State
Supreme Court in Queens, alleging negligence. Mr. Singh had also not been paid
in three months, his daughters said.
The former construction site on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan where Claudio Patiño died in a fall last December.
“In this type of business, time is money, and there is
only one way to be more profitable, and that is to cut corners on safety,” said
Pat James Crispi, the lawyer for Mr. Singh’s family.
Mr. Khan did not return calls or answer text messages,
and the residents of the Brooklyn apartment listed as Pak National Gen.’s
headquarters said no one by that name had ever lived there. A lawyer for the
company, Kamilla Mishiyeva, declined to answer written questions, saying
litigation was still pending.
Mr. Khan has forged ahead in the construction business
since Mr. Singh’s death. Four months after the accident, another of Mr. Khan’s
companies, Tower General Construction, was granted a permit to renovate a
six-story rent-stabilized building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Repeat Offenders
Lourdes Gordillo lost her husband, Claudio Patiño, in a
construction accident last year. She is now raising her two children, Anthony
Patiño, 9, and Adely Patiño, 4, alone.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
While the Dream Hotel accident attracted a fair amount of
news coverage, most of the workers died the way they lived: anonymously.
There was Jorge Juca, 29, an Ecuadorean immigrant, who fell last year from a
ladder while doing demolition and renovation work at a supermarket in the Bronx.
Federal investigators concluded that his employer, R.S. Ecua Contracting,
“wanted job done fast” and “grabbed” as many “off the books” workers as
possible, even though the laborers were “not provided with general safety
training.”
Several months later, another Ecuadorean, Francisco
Quizhpi Quizhpi, 40, was installing siding on a house in Far Rockaway, Queens,
when he plunged more than 14 feet and died. There were no guardrails and no
supervision on site, according to federal records.
Many of the accidents were set against the backdrop of
neighborhoods that have undergone rapid gentrification, where construction has
been ubiquitous.
A federal safety investigator wrote about the death of
Lukasz Stolarski in Manhattan on April 14, 2014, and how construction workers
sometimes failed to wear helmets or harnesses. Mr. Stolarski fell 110 feet.
At 124 Ridge Street on the Lower East Side last December,
workers were remodeling a pair of connected five-story walk-up buildings when
Claudio Patiño, 32, fell through an opening to the floor below. His widow,
Lourdes Gordillo, said her husband had been scared that the site was getting
too slippery as winter approached but felt pressured to keep working.
“He told me it was all wrong, that any moment something
could go wrong,” she said in an interview in a three-bedroom apartment in
Corona, Queens, which she and her children share with two roommates. “He told
me, ‘It’s a miracle we’re alive.’”
The owner of the Ridge Street buildings, Croman Real
Estate, had been moving out longtime, rent-stabilized tenants to make way for
ones willing to pay much more. (The company is now being investigated by Eric
T. Schneiderman, the state attorney general, on allegations of improperly
evicting tenants at its properties.)
Croman had long worked with the building contractor,
Casur Management & Maintenance, from Long Island, even though it had a
spotty safety record. In August 2014, OSHA fined Casur $2,400 for “no guardrail
around opening” at 124 Ridge and warned that a “person could fall.”
New York firefighters treated a victim pulled from a
partly collapsed building on West 38th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 30. The
collapse killed one person.
Four months later, Mr. Patiño did.
Casur, which declined to comment, delayed reporting the
episode for 48 hours, violating an OSHA rule that all fatalities be reported
within eight hours.
The company agreed in late June to pay $9,750 in federal
fines related to the accident. But just one week earlier, the company was cited
by the Buildings Department for leaving a worker in an eight-foot-deep trench,
without adequate protection, at the Ridge Street site. Two months later, at
another renovation project just three blocks away, on Suffolk Street, Casur was
fined again by the city for unsafe conditions.
The pattern is a familiar one. Five of seven fatalities
since July — including the latest
on Oct. 30, at a new boutique hotel in Midtown — have involved contractors or
subcontractors that had been fined by the safety administration on previous
projects. Those fines totaled only about $60,000, essentially a slap on the
wrist, according to advocates for workers.
“Given the limited number of OSHA inspectors and low
fines for violators, many employers do not take OSHA violations seriously,”
said a recent report
from the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit
advocacy group with union ties.
Another company with a long history of safety problems
was Adar Steel of Brooklyn.
In 2012 and 2013, the safety administration fined Adar
for violations at two work sites in Far Rockaway, Queens, and Midwood,
Brooklyn, for failing to provide basic protections, such as ladders or safety
nets. Workers with no training were also used. But the company ignored almost
$20,000 in fines, causing regulators to issue a debt collection notice.
On March 6, 2014, disaster struck at another Adar
project, at 105 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg. Manuel Colorado was
passing some corrugated metal to a co-worker three stories above the ground,
according to federal records, when he jumped from an I-beam to some scaffolding
and fell two stories. Several workers, including Mr. Colorado, were not wearing
harnesses, inspectors later found. They also discovered three beer cans at the
site, though employees told investigators Mr. Colorado had not been drinking.
Adar, which federal regulators penalized $53,200,
promised to provide extension ladders and remove the unsafe scaffolding. But
the company did not pay, and the safety administration placed the company on
its “severe violators” watch list.
Even so, Adar continued to work. The next month, a safety
inspector who was making random checks noticed an “imminent danger condition”
at a site in Harlem that lacked guardrails, safety nets or other protection.
The company was fined another $11,800, which it again did not pay.
In September 2014, the company was hit with a $2,400 fine
— this time by the Buildings Department — for safety failures while demolishing
a two-story house at a site in Kensington, Brooklyn.
The next month, the New York State Workers Compensation
Board canceled the company’s insurance policy for nonpayment, records show.
Despite all of this, Adar Steel’s owner, Daniel Adar, has
“no disciplinary history” with the Buildings Department, a spokesman said, and
is therefore not barred from construction work.
In a statement, the department pointed out that another
company had been issued a permit at the Williamsburg project where Mr. Colorado
was killed, so the city could not take any action against Adar. But the
department pledged that “in direct recognition of the recent increases in
worker injuries,” it would “work with OSHA to proactively share information
about bad actors to enhance both agencies’ enforcement strategies.”
Mr. Adar referred questions to his brother-in-law, Alad
Danino. In response to written questions, he said: “We are working out payment
plans for any open violations as we are a small company. I wish I can be more
helpful but at this point that’s all I could tell you.”
Regulators Overwhelmed
The sheer volume of construction activity in the city
makes regulating it challenging.
The Buildings Department breaks down complaints it
receives into dozens of categories. Code 91 means “site conditions endangering
workers.”
So far in 2015, the number of Code 91 complaints stands
at more than 2,000, which represents about 6 percent of all
construction-related complaints the department has received. In 2005, the
comparable figure for dangerous conditions complaints was 682, or less than 2
percent of the total.
According to The Times’s analysis of that data, the
property with the most complaints for dangerous working conditions, by far, is
a luxury project being erected at 252 East 57th
Street, at the corner of Second Avenue.
Since January 2014, there have been more than 40
complaints at the location. In one case, an employee told the department: “I
was working on a construction site yesterday. Two people were injured. They
were advised NOT to call E.M.S.”
But there have been no fatalities, and the project is
proceeding in earnest.
The de Blasio administration, concerned about safety,
plans to hire about 100 additional building inspectors, and is investing in
better data tools to identify and remove troublesome contractors. It has also
unveiled a new code of conduct for the construction industry.
But the Buildings Department and the Department of
Housing Preservation and Development have historically been plagued by
corruption. The most recent high-profile
scheme snared nearly four dozen people, including building and housing
employees and construction workers, for voiding building code violations and
tenant complaints for as little as a few hundred dollars.
At the federal level, the safety administration has just
33 inspectors covering the city and 66 inspectors in the entire state — the
agency’s lowest numbers in at least five years.
There have been attempts in the past to improve worker
safety, but that often simply gave rise to new methods of thwarting regulators.
After a spate of crane and scaffolding accidents in 2007 and 2008, the city
required workers to obtain photo identification cards testifying to the
completion of safety courses approved by the safety administration. But most
workers must pay the $300 fee themselves and take time off, usually two days,
for training.
As a result, fraudulent cards have proliferated,
investigators say; the going rate is now $25 to $80. Mr. Colorado had a fake
card, OSHA records show.
As a deterrent, the city’s Investigation Department has
conducted random inspections of the cards on construction sites since 2012.
This year, more than 20 people have been arrested. During a sweep in early
October in northern Manhattan, witnessed by The Times, investigators inspected
the OSHA cards of 74 workers. Three fake cards were confiscated, while 10 other
workers lacked documentation.
In an unusual move, because criminal liability is often
hard to prove in construction accidents, the Manhattan district attorney’s
office filed
manslaughter and other charges in August against two construction managers
and the companies for whom they worked in the death of Carlos Moncayo. Mr.
Moncayo, a 22-year-old from Ecuador, was crushed in April at a construction
site in the meatpacking district where the former restaurant Pastis will give
way to a Restoration Hardware store.
Private inspectors had repeatedly warned the company of
treacherous conditions, only to be ignored, prosecutors said.
The accident prompted the Buildings Department to post a
new warning, reminding inspectors to call either 911 or the agency’s emergency
hotline immediately — not the company — if they noticed any “uncorrected
hazardous conditions.”
“Why didn’t we do it this way five years ago?” Mr.
Peters, of the Investigation Department, said at a news conference. “Honestly
we should have. We didn’t.”
Source: NY
Times
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