By James Barron
New York Times
Copyright 2008 New York Times
 AP Photo/via WABC TV FDNY crews pull survivors out of a wreckage after a construction crane collapsed in New York, Friday. Two men died in the incident. |
NEW YORK — This time, it was the top of the crane that fell. The huge pieces smashed into the penthouse of a nearby building, then tore off a row of balconies and plummeted to the street in a shower of bricks, dust and debris. Two men, both workers, were killed.
It was the second time in less than three months that a crane had tumbled from high above a construction site in New York City: On March 15 an entire crane — its tower, cab and boom — collapsed thunderously to earth on East 51st Street, killing seven. Then, as on Friday, city officials began an investigation.
The Friday collapse occurred just after 8 a.m. at the site of a tower at 91st Street and First Avenue that is to house Intermediate School 114 and apartments. Witnesses said the boom — the long arm that hoists materials onto the building’s newly laid concrete slabs — snapped off its turntable, the platter-like platform that holds the cab for the operator. Then, witnesses said, the cab and the boom flopped to one side.
They went into free fall, slamming into a corner of the 23-story building across 91st Street at No. 354, shearing off balconies and leaving a trail of pockmarks as they clattered to the street.
“It was like an earthquake,” said Tara Hamilton, who lives at No. 354. “It was really bad, and it felt terrible. I didn’t know where to run. I knew it was the crane.”
Investigators were looking at whether a bad weld had caused the top of the crane to snap, a city official said, and whether the turntable was one that had recently been repaired after developing a bad crack.
The accident left New Yorkers with fresh worries about more construction-site problems in a city that is caught up in a building boom — a city where construction cranes have long been familiar sights on the skyline, never more so than in recent years. And some of that worry turned to anger, especially with another accident coming so soon.
“You would think there would be much stricter safety to make sure this wouldn’t happen again,” said Brad Barnett, who also lives at 354 East 91st Street. “I mean, it’s insane that this has happened twice. You know, I walk the dogs three, four times a day, I’m always walking under the crane, around the crane, I’m always looking up, because, you know, you get paranoid.”
The dead men were identified as the crane operator, Donald Leo, 30, of Staten Island, and Ramadan Kurtaj, 27, of the Bronx, another worker on the job. Mr. Kurtaj died of cardiac arrest after being taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, the police said. One person was seriously injured.
The death toll from crane collapses this year now stands at nine, with 28 people injured. No one was killed in the eight crane-related accidents last year; 10 were hurt. Fifteen people have died in all high-rise construction accidents this year.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg seemed to echo residents’ frustration at a news conference down the block from where pieces of the crane still lay in the street. “What has happened is unacceptable and intolerable,” he said.
Still, the mayor said the crane had been properly inspected, and he bristled at the notion that there were lingering problems at the Department of Buildings, whose commissioner, Patricia J. Lancaster, resigned in the aftermath of the March collapse. “I don’t think you can say anything’s wrong at the D.O.B.,” the mayor said. “D.O.B. didn’t crash, it was the crane that crashed.
“Construction is a dangerous business, and you will always have fatalities,” the mayor said later in the news conference. “Sadly, the two crane accidents, in a short period of time, look like a pattern, but there’s no reason to think there is any connection.”
But other officials quickly criticized the city for not doing enough about high-rise accidents. “We thought the March accident was a wake-up call for the Department of Buildings,” said the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, “and that a change of leadership would bring a change in safety levels. Now it appears that instead of waking up, the Department of Buildings hit the snooze button.”
The city evacuated eight nearby buildings with more than 200 apartments total, but by evening, residents had been allowed back into all but one, 354 East 91st.
The March collapse occurred while the crane was being “jumped,” or raised to a higher level. City officials ordered a sweep of all cranes in the city and said they would require inspectors to be on hand at construction sites when a crane is jumped. The Buildings Department had just ended that policy on Wednesday, saying that it would switch to conducting spot checks and “safety meetings” for construction workers.
The mayor said that the crane on East 91st Street was in use on Friday and was not being jumped. That occurred just last weekend, he said, and a Buildings Department inspector had been on hand to watch. He said it appeared that the contractors on 91st Street had followed city regulations in assembling the crane.
City records indicated that since then, several callers to the city’s 311 hot line had complained about relatively minor problems. On May 7, an inspector issued a partial stop-work order after observing a defective or inadequate safety guard rail. That order had been lifted by Thursday.
On May 13, a caller complained of unsafe construction, alleging that bricks, sand and wood had fallen to the sidewalk. An inspector who went by on May 17 found no violations.
A week later, a caller complained about the crane itself, saying that the platform reached over the sidewalk and into traffic. As on May 17, an inspector checked the site and concluded there was no violation.
The mayor said inspectors were sent to the site again on Thursday to investigate reports that the crane had improperly hoisted material over the street. Once again, they found no violations.
Many who came and went in the shadow of the construction site, in Yorkville, said that even before Friday, they had worried about another catastrophe like the one in March.
“My boyfriend would always walk by and say, ‘Something’s going to happen — that looks rickety,’ ” said Lorene Godlash, a pharmaceutical sales representative who was getting dressed in her apartment across East 91st Street when she heard what she figured was a tractor-trailer rumbling by.
Then the building started to jiggle. “The building just shook, shook, shook,” said Nathan Cochran, who lives on the 22nd floor of Ms. Godlash’s building. “I looked out my window and saw — I knew what it was. The only thing it could be.”
The Buildings Department said the new building sustained no damage in the collapse.
Witnesses said the day had begun like any other day on a construction site, with workers in hard hats climbing to the floors they were working on. Then, just after 8 a.m., there was trouble, and everyone on the site knew it. A construction worker, Asia Gibson, 24, said she was working on the 11th floor. “I heard the snap,” she said, and when she turned and looked, she saw that the crane was “leaning back.”
Then the cab — the little booth in which Mr. Leo spent his days, pulling levers and working the controls — tilted. Ms. Gibson said she had waved to him less than an hour earlier, as he was climbing in. Tevon Griffin, working on the 13th floor, heard people screaming and yelling. “I thought the floor above us was coming down,” he said. He saw the crane arm begin to turn, and he saw Mr. Leo try to steady it.
Another construction worker, Bolivar Quiroz, said, “We looked, and the crane was wavering back and forth.”
And then it plunged.
Caitlin Reeves, 25, who lives in a corner apartment on the 10th floor of 354 East 91st Street, was brushing her teeth when she hear the rumble. It was the sound of the crane slicing off her balcony, as she discovered when she ran into her room and saw “pieces of the wall and debris everywhere.”
She yelled to her roommates to get out. One of them, Hadley Jensen, 23, said she felt a rush of emotions as the building seemed to shift.
“I’m from L.A., so I assumed it was an earthquake,” she said. “It sounded like there was a huge crash on First Avenue, but then we felt something shaking the bottom of the building.”
As pieces of the crane slammed to the street, some so hard they became embedded in the pavement, workers poured into the street. Mark Watson, 25, an ironworker on the 14th floor, said that when they saw Mr. Leo in the wreckage, they realized that they would have to wait for the Fire Department rescue workers to arrive.
“We couldn’t get him out,” Mr. Watson said.
Battalion Chief Richard Tarello, the Fire Department’s on-duty chief at the scene, said it was “a miracle” that more people were not killed or injured. “It could have been a lot worse” if the crane had swung in a different direction, and sliced across busy First Avenue.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Charles V. Bagli, Al Baker, Jack Begg, Ken Belson, Sewell Chan, Jason Grant, Barbara Gray, Steven Greenhouse, Michael M. Grynbaum, John Harney, Corey Kilgannon, Alexis Mainland, Jennifer Mascia, Jonathan Miller, Colin Moynihan, Anahad O’Connor, Michael S. Schmidt, Maureen Seaberg, Mathew R. Warren and Carolyn Wilder.