The falling crane killed one person and crushed several cars parked along Worth St.
BY YANNIC RACK |
The deadly crane collapse in Tribeca last week was a wake-up call for construction-weary Downtowners, who say that tighter safety rules will be useless if the city cuts back on oversight.
Two days after a 565-foot crawler crane toppled over onto Worth St. and crushed a 38-year-old man, Mayor de Blasio announced new rules on securing cranes for high winds, and left open the possibility of further restrictions in the future.
“We’re going to leave no stone unturned in terms of learning from this accident and determining if we need other safety measures going forward,” the mayor said at a press conference in Tribeca on Sunday. “We all know there is a construction boom going on in our city, [but] there’s no building that is worth a person’s life.”
But Lower Manhattan’s leaders say that the fatal accident shows the need not only for better safety rules, but also better coordination of Downtown’s many construction projects.
“We’ve been calling for more construction safety and coordination for a very long time now, and unfortunately we have a tragic wake-up call today,” Catherine McVay Hughes, chair of Community Board 1, said at a press conference in front of the toppled crane on Friday.
Hughes and fellow Downtown leaders said the crane crash came at a critical moment — right as the city’s Dept. of Transportation is preparing to shutter its office dedicated to coordinating construction projects in Lower Manhattan.
“We have got to put a stop to this,” said Councilmember Margaret Chin of the imminent closure. “There’s too many construction projects down here and we need better coordination from the city.”
The department announced in December that it was “phasing out” its Lower Manhattan Borough Commissioner’s Office — charged with inter-agency communication on around 90 major ongoing construction projects below Canal St. — in March, due to lack of funding.
“We’re urging the mayor to put more resources into the Lower Manhattan [office], and we need more attention down here to make sure that this kind of tragedy does not happen again,” said Chin.
The crane-safety plan the mayor announced on Sunday requires crawler cranes — which run on treads like a bulldozer — to be secured whenever steady winds are forecast to exceed 20mph, replacing the previous threshold of 25mph.
Fines for failure to safeguard equipment were more than doubled to $10,000, and rules on protecting pedestrian safety during crane operations, as well as requirements for advance notification of crane activities, were sharpened.
Investigations into the crane collapse are still ongoing, including a forensic investigation of the equipment itself, as well as probes by the police and the Dept. of Buildings. On Friday, the mayor also ordered all of the city’s 376 licensed active crawler cranes to be inspected by the Dept. of Buildings before they are put back into service.
The collapsed crane, which was based at the corner of Worth and Hudson Sts., toppled over just before 8:30 a.m., crashing down along two blocks of Worth St. As the crane fell, it damaged four neighboring buildings, raining debris down onto the sidewalk below.
David Wichs, a 38-year-old trading firm employee from the Upper West Side, was killed by the impact and three more people were hurt by falling debris, according to city officials. One of them, 73-year-old Thomas O’Brien, was in serious condition with a head laceration, according to police. The other two passers by sustained minor injuries.
For Downtowners along Worth St., the extremely loud and incredibly close catastrophe evoked traumatic memories.
“We fell down in our apartment, it was worse than 9/11, the sensation,” said Bruce Ehrmann, who lives on the block where the crane was stationed and was at home with his wife when it collapsed. “She was screaming, we both were. It was terrifying.”
Diane Lapson, who lives nearby, said her daughter thought it was some sort of natural disaster.
“My daughter came out of her room and said, ‘Mom I think we just had an earthquake. My whole room shook,’” said Lapson, though for her, the incident recalled a man-made cataclysm.
“Almost immediately we started hearing sirens,” she said. “And in this neighborhood, when you hear sirens after a big jolt, your antennas go up. It brings back a lot of memories of 9/11.”
The crane, which is owned by Bay Crane and operated by Galasso Trucking and Rigging, had been replacing generators and air conditioning units on the roof of the former Western Union Building at 60 Hudson St. since Jan. 30, and had been inspected the day before the crash by the Dept. of Buildings, city officials said.
A crew had arrived there at 7 a.m. on Friday and was in the process of lowering the crane as a safety precaution due to strong winds, mayor de Blasio said at a press conference in Tribeca after the accident. There had been no construction work going on that morning.
Several blocks around the site were cordoned off on Friday, as Fire Dept. crews searched the crane as well as the surrounding buildings. More than 140 firefighters and emergency medical personnel from more than 40 units were deployed to the site, according to the F.D.N.Y.
A wide area was blocked off over the weekend, but by Sunday, crews had chopped up and removed the crumpled crane from the street.
Officials with the Dept. of Buildings and Con Edison said a water main also broke and four buildings between W. Broadway and Church St. sustained damage, at least one of them part of New York Law School. According to press reports, the crane’s 4,600-pound lifting hook was sent swinging into one of the law school’s fifth-floor offices, but luckily didn’t hurt anyone.
The mayor credited the crane’s crew — who had cleared the street of cars and pedestrians while working to secure the boom — for avoiding even worse carnage.
“If you go out there in the street, as I did, and see what happened there — thank god it was not worse,” de Blasio said after the incident. “You can see how powerful the damage was, but you can also see that it was something of a miracle that there wasn’t more impact. This is an area that would have normally had a lot of people around during rush hour.”
Not everyone was entirely surprised by the accident, however.
“I’m stunned, but not surprised,” said Ehrmann. “We’ve been predicting that this would happen since the crane went up,” he said. “We asked [the operator] what are the odds of it collapsing when they started the work. And Galasso [Trucking and Rigging Inc.], which is in charge of the job, said, ‘you have a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery.’”
Ehrmann said he had taken a picture of the crane dangerously swaying in the wind just the night before and forwarded it to CB1’s Hughes.
“It should not be the responsibility of residents to be the watchdogs of these major construction sites,” Hughes said, emphasizing that the city is responsible for oversight, and shouldn’t shirk its obligation.
CB1 passed a resolution in December calling on the city to reverse its decision to phase out the Lower Manhattan Commissioner’s Office.
“The community has been very clear that construction coordination in Lower Manhattan is a huge concern, and that this construction site is a particular concern,” said State Sen. Daniel Squadron after he surveyed the scene on Friday.
As for Ehrmann, who is also on the community board, he warned that residents could take matters into their own hands if the city doesn’t take action.
“There will be no more work on Worth St. from now on without the informed consent of the neighborhood. If it involves civil disobedience, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “This is a wake-up call, and we will not allow it to happen again.”
