Safety News

Crews Prepare to Remove Fallen Manhattan Crane

03.16.08, NY Times

By John Sullivan and Robert D. McFadden

 Chip East/Reuters
Efforts to remove the collapsed crane continued on Sunday on East 51st Street.

Emergency crews prepared to remove the wreckage of a gigantic crane from the remains of smashed buildings on the East Side of Manhattan on Sunday afternoon, a day after it toppled across a city block, killing at least four construction workers, including the crane operator, and injuring more than a dozen others.


A construction accident on the East Side of Manhattan killed four and injured a dozen others.

Two other workers and a woman believed to have been in a town house crushed by the falling crane are missing, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at an afternoon news conference near the scene of the collapse. The search for the missing people continued on Sunday, but the mayor said emergency crews were moving carefully because of the dangerous condition of the rubble.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scopetta said firefighters had used listening devices to search for people but had not located anyone by early afternoon. He said with each “passing hour, things get a little more grim.”

The collapse occurred Saturday afternoon as the crane, about 22 stories tall and attached by girders to the apartment tower under construction at 303 East 51st Street, east of Second Avenue, broke away from its anchors and toppled south, across the block between 51st and 50th Streets, as workers at the site and people in high-rises for blocks around looked on, stupefied.

Witnesses told of a rising, thundering roar and clouds of smoke and dust as the crane — a vertical latticed boom for its base, topped by a cab and jib, the swinging arm that lifts building materials — fell across 51st Street and onto a 19-story apartment building at No. 300, demolishing a penthouse and shaking the building with the force of an earthquake.

The Buildings Department ordered 16 buildings vacated after the collapse and said at least six buildings — five on East 50th Street and one on 51st Street — sustained damage.

Workers are removing sections of the damaged crane to allow firefighters to search the rubble, Buildings Commissioner Patricia J. Lancaster said. She said the crane wreckage was concentrated in two spots: the lower section of the crane is lying in debris on 50th street, while a 130-foot section of the crane’s steel mast is leaning against a 19-story building on 51st Street. She said engineers will determine if the 130-foot section is stable and then remove it from the building without causing further damage.

“The operation is both delicate and meticulous,” she said.

The area around the collapse, 50th and 51st Streets between First and Third Avenues and Second Avenue between 42nd and 52nd Streets, remained closed to traffic on Sunday morning, the Department of Emergency Management said. Mr. Bloomberg said that the city was working to reopen most of the area to traffic by rush hour on Monday, but that 50th and 51st Streets would most likely remain closed.

The Fire Department said 24 people were injured, including 11 emergency responders. The condition of three people who had been hospitalized in critical condition had been upgraded to serious by Sunday afternoon, the mayor said. 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.

On Sunday, however, Mr. Bloomberg said the Building Department had inspected the crane before the collapse and everything appeared to be in order. He said that violations had been issued for other aspects of the construction job, such as material too close to the building’s edge, but that those violations “had nothing to do with this.”

“As far as we can tell all procedures that were called for appear to have been followed,” the mayor said.

Asked about a report that crane might have been improperly stabilized, Mr. Bloomberg said Buildings Department officials said the crane was attached to the building under construction at the third and ninth floor, and that Buildings Department officials felt the arrangement was appropriate. He said preliminary information indicated the accident occurred when workers were extending the crane to allow for work on higher stories.

As part of that operation, workers were preparing to attach the crane to the building under construction at a higher level. The mayor said Buildings Department officials believe that a large metal collar used to stabilize the crane by attaching it to the building under construction fell, shearing off steel supports lower down and toppling the crane.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the top of a construction crane detached and fell onto a four-story town house, destroying the building.

Part of a construction crane remained leaning across the street Saturday night after it toppled, crushing one building and damaging others on the East Side of Manhattan.

A victim of a crane collapse on the East Side of Manhattan was carried out on a stretcher as the search for other possible victims in the rubble continued.


Emergency workers at the scene of a crane collapse at 51st Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

Chip East/Reuters
Firefighters carried stretchers at the scene of the accident. People were feared trapped beneath the wreckage.

The dead construction workers, who were members of Local 15 of the Operating Engineers Union, were working on the crane at the time of the collapse. They were identified as Brad Cohen, Aaron Stephens, Anthony Mazza and Wayne Bleidner.

A construction worker on the 15th floor, Ismael Garcia, said he saw something fall and strike one or more of the girder ties, weakening or breaking the connections. “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a piece falling,” he said, and then the crane pulled away.

Mike Shatzkin, a resident of the 17th floor, said he was talking on the phone when it hit. “All of a sudden, I felt a very violent shake, and stuff fell off the walls, and my wife said a bomb went off.” After discovering that their building had been struck by the crane from across the street, he said, “We worried about this crane every day.”

The upper reaches of the crane — including the cab and the extended swinging arm — broke away from the boom, which was left leaning against the facade, and hurtled southward across the block toward 50th Street, tumbling in the air, some witnesses said.

The crane’s blue cab and white jib, itself a latticework of steel, made a direct hit on a four-story town house at 305 East 50th Street, a modern stucco structure with apartments upstairs and a bar called Fubar on the ground floor. The building, on the north side of 50th Street, was demolished.

The bar was not open, and the owner, John P. LaGreco, who had been the proprietor for a decade, said that Juan Perez, 38, a Queens resident and the father of three children, was in Fubar at the time, preparing to open about 4 p.m.

Mayor Bloomberg said one or two people were in the building at the time. The fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, said that a man, apparently referring to Mr. Perez, was taken alive out of the collapsed town house shortly before 6 p.m. He said there had also been reports of a woman in the building. The search for the woman, who was not identified by city officials, continued on Sunday afternoon.

In addition to the collapsed town house, the toppling crane jib sheared away the side of a six-story gray tenement building at 301 East 50th, just to the west, exposing tiers of apartments and haunting images of shattered homes: a pink suitcase dangling from the sixth floor, a mattress, a rack of shoes, broken bookshelves.

Debris also damaged buildings on the south side of 50th Street, and bricks demolished parked cars — a dark blue BMW flattened, a Mini Cooper battered with debris.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse, stunned people rushed into the streets from restaurants and shops, from apartment buildings in the surrounding blocks, many of them unaware of what had happened and fearing the worst.

Some residents of the area saw or heard the collapse from their apartments. Bruce Silberblatt, a retired building contractor who lives at 860 United Nations Plaza, said: “I heard this big double bang. Bang! Then, bang! The first bang must have been the crane hitting the first building, then the second must have been everything else going into the street.”

Mayor Bloomberg identified the site’s principal developer as James P. Kennelly, a former firefighter, and the construction company as RCG, an apparent acronym for Reliance Construction Group. He said the crane owner was the New York Crane & Equipment Corporation. The manufacturer, he said, was an Australian company known as Favco, which makes a tower crane with an eight-ton lifting capacity.

“There are no words to describe the level of devastation we feel today as a result of this tragic event,” Mr. Kennelly said in a statement on Saturday. While the mayor and other city officials said that there had been a relatively small number of violations issued against the construction site in the more than two years since work began, many residents questioned the safety record at the building site.

“We had been very unhappy with the way he was doing his work,” said Mr. Silberblatt, a member of the Turtle Bay Association, a civic group. He cited debris in the streets, a lack of a sidewalk bridge, and other faults.

According to records from the New York City Department of Buildings, the agency has issued 14 violations against contractors doing work at the site, 10 of them against RCG. The citations were issued between Jan. 17, 2006, and Feb. 8 of this year. The violations included failure to safeguard the public and property and failure to provide roof protection on adjacent property.

A Buildings Department spokeswoman, Kate Lindquist, said that of the 14 violations, 13 remained “open” — meaning that a court date is pending or the company did not appear at a scheduled court hearing and the violations are in default status.

At Sunday’s news conference, the mayor said the number of violations was not unusual for a construction project of that size. He said Buildings Department officials would determine the cause of the accident, but said there was no indication of any widespread problem related to other building sites.

“This is a very tragic, but also a very rare, occurrence,” he said.