The crew operating a crane in Lower Manhattan on Friday
morning took note of the wind gusts accompanying the falling snow.
The workers, officials said, decided they needed to lower
the crane to a secure level, and so around 8 a.m., they began to bring down its
boom, which stretched 565 feet toward the sky.
But instead of a steady, controlled descent, the crane
began to topple over suddenly before plunging into a free fall and crashing
onto Worth Street in TriBeCa.
A man walking on the street was killed by the falling
crane, and the surrounding blocks were littered with debris and stricken by
panic as people who had been headed to work fled from what some thought was a
bomb exploding.
“It shook the building,” said Robert Harold, a lawyer for
the Legal Aid Society, who heard an enormous crash from his office on Worth
Street and then saw the crane on the street. “You could feel the vibration.”
Three other people were injured. Two of them were
hospitalized with serious injuries from debris tossed off by the collapse,
which left tangled wreckage stretched over roughly two full blocks.
The crane, known as a crawler, collapsed on Friday as a
crew tried to secure it amid wind gusts. It was being used to install
generators and air-conditioning units atop 60 Hudson Street. Credit Stephanie
Keith for The New York Times
More than 140 firefighters converged on the scene, along
with scores of police officers and utility workers dispatched to handle gas
leaks and other damage caused by the impact.
For all the commotion that shook the neighborhood, not
far from City Hall and the state and federal courthouses, Mayor Bill de Blasio
said it was remarkable that the human toll was not worse.
“You can see how powerful the damage was,” Mr. de Blasio
said at a news conference near the scene, “but you can also see, again, that it
was something of a miracle that there wasn’t more impact.”
“And thank God,” he added, “we didn’t have more injuries
and we didn’t lose more people.”
The authorities identified the man killed on Friday as
David Wichs, 38, who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Mr. Wichs was
born in Prague and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, and later
received a mathematics degree from Harvard, his sister-in-law, Lisa Guttman,
told The Associated Press.
A 45-year-old woman injured her leg and had a cut on her
head, and a 73-year-old man sustained a head wound, officials said. Both were
in stable condition at Manhattan hospitals. A third person had minor injuries.
The crane, known as a crawler, was being used to install
generators and air-conditioning units atop 60 Hudson Street, the former Western
Union building, and had been inspected by the Buildings Department on Thursday
to approve an extension to its present length, officials said.
With the capacity to carry as much as 330 tons, the crane
was “very, very large,” said Rick Chandler, the buildings commissioner. Mr. de
Blasio said it was rated to withstand wind gusts of up to 25 miles per hour,
but as the wind neared 20 m.p.h. on Friday, the crew decided to secure it.
The crane was being operated by Galasso Trucking and
Rigging, in Maspeth, Queens. The company’s chief executive, Frank Galasso, did
not immediately respond to a message for comment.
As a precaution, officials ordered that 376 other crawler
cranes currently operating in the city, as well as 43 of the larger tower
cranes, be secured, the mayor said.
The damage from the fall caused leaks in a water main and
in multiple gas lines, though officials said those leaks had not reached
dangerous levels. Nonetheless, gas service in the immediate area was shut off.
Many streets were also closed, and subways lines skipped nearby stops.
Officials said the disruptions were expected to continue at least through the
weekend.
The Police Department and the Buildings Department have
opened investigations into the collapse.
The crane came down shortly before 8:30 a.m. Friday,
spanning more than the entire length of a city block, officials and witnesses
said. Credit Stephanie Keith for The New York Times
The episode comes amid a construction surge in New York
that has made the long booms of cranes ubiquitous fixtures across the skyline.
There has also been a spike in construction fatalities in
the city over the past two years. An investigation by The New York Times in
November found that the rise in deaths as well as injuries had far exceeded the
rate of new construction over the same period, that supervision at building
sites was often lacking, and that basic safety steps were not being taken to
prevent workers from falling.
Many of the cases examined by The Times involved
individual workers toiling on smaller projects in rapidly gentrifying
neighborhoods. But the dangers posed by construction cranes have long been part
of the New York streetscape, as well.
With construction accidents a growing cause for concern
in recent years, the city has responded by hiring more building inspectors. The
mayor said crane safety had improved significantly since 2008, when several
people were killed in crane accidents on Manhattan’s East Side.
“I want people to hear me loud and clear: We’ve had some
construction site incidents that are very troubling,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We
have more and more inspectors who are going to get on top of that. We’re going
to be very tough on those companies.”
“This is a totally different matter,” he added. “This was
a company that was putting their crane into the secure position as we would
have wanted them to.”
In 2012, one person was killed and four others were hurt
when a 170-foot crane collapsed at a construction site for the extension of the
No. 7 train. Last year, a crane dropped an air-conditioning unit 28 stories to
the street in Midtown Manhattan. Seven people suffered minor injuries in that
episode.
Roughly 300 large cranes are in operation in the city at
any given time, said Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller. On Friday, Mr.
Stringer cited two recent audits while repeating earlier criticisms of the
Buildings Department’s oversight of cranes.
“This report, and every major crane accident afterward,
should be a wake-up call,” he said. But, he added, the Buildings Department
“keeps sleeping on the job.”
Joe Soldevere, a spokesman for the Buildings Department,
said the city had already adopted many of Mr. Stringer’s recommendations. “We
need to all focus on responding to this emergency, not clouding the facts,” he
said. “There is more oversight of cranes in place than ever before.”
Mr. Soldevere said the city had six crane inspectors and
no inspection backlog. He also said the department would be hiring additional
crane inspectors — and 100 additional inspectors over all — to bolster the de
Blasio administration’s efforts to improve construction safety.
In TriBeCa, some in the neighborhood said they had
noticed the arrival of the crane that came crashing down on Friday. It was
installed on Jan. 30.
Wajid Hayat, who works at a sandwich shop near the site
of the collapse, said the crane caught his attention as he left work on
Thursday evening. People were taking photographs of it because of its height,
he said.
“When I saw the crane, it was looking very scary, like it
was shaking,” Mr. Hayat said. “I thought, ‘The snow is coming, maybe something
could happen.’”
Those who were nearby when the equipment fell said the
collapse was terrifying. Veronica Keegan, 57, was walking on Duane Street when
she heard one clang after another; she feared a building was collapsing. “I
heard what sounded like bending metal and it got louder,” she said.
“I was petrified,” she added. “I was going to run for
shelter.”
Julia Cheiffetz, 37, was leaving a doctor’s office at 40
Worth Street around 8:20 a.m. when she heard a creaking noise and a grumble. At
that point, debris began to fall from the sky. Thinking a bomb might have gone
off, she covered her head and sprinted toward Church Street as the crane
tumbled down not far away. Her leg was injured when it was hit by some of the
falling debris.
Ms. Cheiffetz, an executive editor at HarperCollins, said
she did not see any construction workers clearing the street.
“It was like something out of a ‘Transformers’ movie,”
she said, “where some giant thing comes out of the sky.”
Source: The
New York Times
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