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Vol. 72/No. 24      June 16, 2008

 
New York crane collapse
kills two more workers
(front page)
 
BY DAN FEIN  
NEW YORK—A crane collapsed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan May 30 killing two construction workers and seriously injuring one other.

Dead were crane operator Donald Leo, 30, who was a member of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 14, and Ramadan Kurtaj, 27, a recent immigrant from Kosova.

Three days later, a man power-washing the facade of a building in Brooklyn fell four stories to his death. Houssain Mosharrf, originally from Bangladesh, was not wearing a safety harness.

The three fatalities bring the number of New York construction workers killed on the job this year to 17.

The May 30 disaster occurred when the upper part of the crane, which includes the turntable, operators’ cabin, and boom, snapped off the tower. The crane then crashed into the apartment building across the street, tearing off balconies on the way down.

Investigators’ initial report is that a bad weld in the crane’s turntable was the cause. The turntable had been rebuilt last year after a crack was discovered.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has opened a criminal investigation. Investigators have seized boxes of documents and computers from the office of New York Crane and Equipment, which owned the crane.

“The inspectors are responsible for the crane collapsing,” said Shawn, a construction worker at a site in Harlem who declined to give his last name. “They just inspect the perimeter. These welds they say might have been bad, well, they should have inspected the weld offsite. The inspectors cut deals.”

Paul Davis, an electrician at the same site, said, “The company is fully responsible. On the nonunion jobs, the companies don’t care about safety. Everything is different between union and nonunion sites—the pace, the pay, the benefits. When you get pushed, that’s when accidents happen.”

Pointing to the building he was working on, Davis added, “We’re good enough to build this, but not good enough to live here. The corporate class will live in these buildings when we’re done.”

Ten weeks ago, on March 15, seven people were killed in mid-Manhattan when a crane fell. Shortly after that the city’s building commissioner, Patricia Lancaster, was forced to resign.

Several residents in the neighborhood where the crane fell May 30 had called the city’s hotline to say the crane appeared unsafe. A city inspector found no problems when the crane was erected on April 20 and 21. But the following day, the inspectors suspended work at the site after the crane failed a load test. The stop-work order was lifted on April 23, but it failed a second test that same day. Work was allowed to resume on April 26.

New York City is in the midst of a construction boom. For the last three or four years, the amount of money spent on construction has grown by 18 percent annually, according to the New York Building Congress. It will be more than $30 billion this year.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has rezoned large areas of the city to accommodate larger buildings. The number of construction permits for new buildings or major renovations has jumped 23.3 percent in the last five years.

Bloomberg held a news conference after the collapse and said, “Construction is a dangerous business and you will always have fatalities… . We have no reason to believe there was anything we could do to prevent this.”

Martín Koppel, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Congress in the 15th District, said Bloomberg’s statement is “false to the core.”
 
 
Related articles:
Las Vegas construction workers strike for safety
Parents protest poor construction of schools after deadly China quake
11th coal miner killed on job
No construction worker has to die!  
 
 
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