New York Construction Accident & Safety News

In the wake of building deaths, the need to hire a new commissioner has given rise to a healthy debate over the qualifications for the Building Commissioner for New York City. The New York Times reports:

As the city struggles to keep pace with a building boom, enforce safety laws and curb fatal construction accidents, architects and engineers are fighting Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s effort to downgrade the qualification requirements for the city’s buildings commissioner.

The mayor, with the support of the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, seeks to deepen the pool and managerial talent of candidates for the job, which has been vacant since Patricia J. Lancaster, an architect, resigned under fire last month.

To do that, Mr. Bloomberg hopes to drop the requirement in the City Charter that only a registered architect or licensed engineer can hold the post.

But the professional societies of architects and engineers, as well as the New York Building Congress, say that only a technical expert is capable of running a department with the seemingly conflicting tasks of promoting real estate development and overseeing public safety, while enforcing the city’s vast building code and complex zoning regulations.

“I’m tremendously concerned about construction site safety,” said John F. Hennessy III, chairman of the American Council of Engineering Companies, “but I’m also concerned about the long-term safety of buildings. Materials, products and building systems approved today have to last for the next 40 years.”

This seems like a good debate to be having as hiring a new Building commissioner becomes important on Michael Bloomberg’s agenda. Its certainly a difficult job which requires a delicate balancing act.

New York Newsday points out:

NEW YORK - Firefighters say construction debris from a luxury condominium building has plummeted onto a Harlem market.

The Fire Department says no one was hurt in the mishap Thursday afternoon at the Kalahari Harlem, an environmentally conscious condo building under construction on West 116th Street.

The Buildings Department is investigating and has no immediate comment.

Luckily it doesn’t appear that there is any substantive damage.

Globe St. highlights:

NEW YORK CITY-Only days before a scheduled court hearing on the matter, the Department of Buildings has issued a revocation order for the permits for 808 Columbus Ave., part of the massive “Columbus Village” development on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The action by DOB could halt construction of the development, which is considered the most extensive in any residential neighborhood in Manhattan, located between 99th and 100th streets here.

The action comes three weeks after a neighborhood resident filed a lawsuit against DOB and the developers, claiming “numerous zoning violations” and demanding an environmental review of the project. The lawsuit came months after the DOB failed to respond to an appeal letter by Manhattan Borough president Scott Stringer, requesting that the agency issue a final determination on the legality of the project.

Hugh Finnegan points out:

“The crane accident, the Deutsche Bank building issues, the high number of construction site accidents and fatalities, among other things, are ammunition for these cases,” he explains. “The DOB has been very busy trying to keep up with all of the construction and renovation projects. Now they will be very busy defending themselves.”

Findlaw has a great explanation of scaffold injuries and how the New York Labor law applies to occurences of scaffold injuries. Findlaw points out:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has estimated that 65% of construction employees work on scaffolds frequently, so it is not surprising that some of the most common accidents at construction sites involve scaffolds or other types of lifts, hoists, or ladders.

These accidents are typically the most serious in terms of severity of injuries, which can result from construction workers’ falls from defective, improperly installed, or unreasonably safe scaffold equipment; an employer’s failure to ensure the use of protective equipment; and by objects falling onto workers from scaffolds, lifts, and ladders.

New York Labor Law Section 240

New York Labor Law section 240, often called the “Scaffold Law,” was designed to protect construction workers from the extraordinary risks they face in working on and around scaffolds and other lift devices at construction sites. Section 240 imposes absolute liability on contractors and work site owners who neglect to provide adequate safety regulations and devices to protect workers from falls and falling objects.

So New York respects the safety of construction workers and applies a high degree of legal protection to construction injuries when scaffolding is involved. If you have a scaffolding construction injury or another building related injury, please contact a responsible lawyer.

The recent resignation of Ms. Lancaster from the New York Building Department has been receiving a lot of media coverage over the last few days. Writer Alan Feuer of the New York Times reports that problems in the building department reflect a larger theme of corruption:

For more than 200 years, the department has been plagued by allegations ranging from the dastardly to the absurd. Plumbing inspectors have been charged with taking bribes. Consultants have set up get-aways for influential councilmen. A deputy commissioner was once indicted for accepting an illegal gift of wine.

Given the history of corruption in the Building Department, its surprising that there weren’t more construction and building related accidents in New York City. Hopefully, the new appointee will establish more accountability so that construction workers and the citizens of New York City are ultimately safer.

Its sad that during Construction Safety Week a New York construction worker suffered and construction related fall. Thomas J. Lueck of the New York Times reports:

Just one day after thousands of workers gathered to mourn the loss of the 13 people killed in construction accidents in New York City this year, a steel worker was critically injured on Tuesday when he fell 25 feet from a building under construction on East 29th Street in Manhattan.

Lueck claims:

Mr. Gunn fell to a concrete slab, fracturing his safety helmet and losing consciousness, according to witnesses.

The article continues:

The city and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration are looking into the cause of several fatal accidents.

Hopefully, as the Buildings Department cracks down and New York City begins to take safety more seriously, our cities construction workers will see a day in which safety is at the forefront of building projects rather than an afterthought.

The New York Times points out:

At least four people were killed and more than a dozen others were injured, and damage was expected to run into the millions of dollars in what the authorities called one of the city’s worst accidents — a calamity that turned a neighborhood near the United Nations into a zone of panic, pulverized buildings, wailing sirens, evacuations, searches in the rubble and covered bodies in the streets.

Many residents of the neighborhood around the site of the collapse — 51st Street between Second and First Avenues — said they had been worried for months about the possibility of a collapse, calling the crane, looming higher each week, a menace, particularly because so many residential buildings were being put up in the area with remarkable speed: several floors a week at times.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

NEW YORK — The city’s buildings commissioner resigned Tuesday from an agency that has attracted critical comments, some of them from New York’s mayor, for a rising number of fatal construction accidents.

Patricia Lancaster, an architect who overhauled the city’s 40-year-old building code and introduced several new rules to manage building safety, quit after six years on the job. Thirteen people have died in construction accidents in New York this year.

The New York Times details both sides of the Building Chief story:

“She did a terrific job in getting the department back on track,” the developer Douglas Durst said.

Ms. Lancaster also had her share of critics, who said her department had been too easy on developers even as they flouted building regulations and safety standards. But even some of those critics said Ms. Lancaster could not be blamed for all her agency’s shortcomings.

“Clearly, our city has been facing a crisis of confidence around construction safety,” said Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, “but the problem before us is not the making of a single person.”

Christoper Faherty of the New York Sun:

“This is the third fatal construction accident this year within one mile on the East Side of Manhattan,” a City Council member who represents parts of the Upper East Side, Jessica Lappin, said. “The real question here is whether the buildings department is doing its job.”

The article continues:

“A tragedy happened here today,” the commissioner of the department, Patricia Lancaster, said in a statement. “We will pursue the toughest enforcement to the full extent of the law. Development cannot be at the expense of the workers building our City.”

The developer of the condominium, Alexico Group, released a statement following the accident, sending its deepest sympathies to Kelly’s family and showing support for the construction company, Hunter Roberts Construction Group.

“Construction safety is our utmost concern and we believe that the construction manager, Hunter Roberts, has a good safety record. We will cooperate fully with the City’s investigation of this tragic event,” the statement said.

The New York Daily News reports:

The site has 38 open Buildings Department violations, 25 since construction began in April 2007, records show. They include such high-severity problems as failure to safeguard the public and property, lack of a site safety manager, no safety nets and lack of fire-safety standpipes, records show.

A site inspection - triggered by the March 15 crane collapse at East 51st St. that killed seven people - found there was no plumb and torque inspection report to ensure the crane there had been properly installed.

The condo, the Laurel, is next to Public School 168 on 67th St. between First and York Aves. Children were playing in the schoolyard when Kelly fell.

The tragedy comes amid a 12% jump in high-rise development and an 83% spike in construction accidents.

“You had a site known to be dangerous,” said Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, whose district includes the site of yesterday’s tragedy and the E. 51st St. disaster. “How do you allow business to carry on as usual?”

The city and the feds are investigating the accident.

The New York Times suggests the grave nature of this accidental tragedy and the wide scope of the legal ramifications:

“We will be holding the individuals responsible for this terrible tragedy accountable,” Ms. Lancaster said during a visit to the site. “Construction companies, owners, architects and engineers have to obey the law.”

Construction in New York has been proceeding rapidly recently, and there has been a string of fatal accidents. Ten people have been killed in high-rise construction accidents since January, including seven who died on March 8 when a 200-foot crane collapsed at another East Side condominium project, demolishing a four-story town house on East 50th Street.
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For more info on the accident click here.