Vol. 76/No. 14      April 9, 2012

Ruiz, Sakim Kirby, 30, and King Range, 60, were demolishing a 100-year-old warehouse when the building collapsed around them. According to a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Buildings, the workers were cutting a structural beam that gave way.

“I’ve just seen brick falling down on the workers,” Willy Katende, who lives nearby, told DNAinfo.com. “It sounded like a bomb—boom.”

It took rescue workers 45 minutes before all three men had been dug out from the debris. Kirby and Range are in serious, but stable condition.

The building is owned by Columbia University. The collapse occurred at the 17-acre construction site for its new $6.4 billion Manhattanville campus.

Building inspectors have issued partial stop-work orders, and violations and fines over safety hazards a number of times for different parts of the site over the past two years. They include using a damaged crane, unsafe scaffolding, cracked walls, working without a permit, and walls that dislodge bricks, mortar and cement.

In February 2010 another construction worker, Jozef Wilk, 51, was killed after falling from scaffolding into an elevator shaft at a site just around the block from the warehouse.

The workers were all employed by Breeze National Inc., a company with a history of safety violations and hazardous working conditions. After Wilk was killed a Buildings Department investigation showed that the scaffolding was improperly constructed and the elevator shaft was open and unguarded.

On March 5 a stop-work order was issued for lack of safety harnesses and for not notifying the Buildings Department that the demolition was about to start. Two days later it was lifted.

Breeze National is a major company in demolition work here. It was one of the subcontractors cleaning up Ground Zero and did most of the $17 million demolition of Shea Stadium.

In a statement sent to the Militant Breeze said “this accident was the result of an unknown, unusual, latent condition in one of the structural beams…one that was truly no one’s fault.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 10,826 workers have been killed in the U.S. construction industry during the past 10 years, more than 1,000 every year.
 
 
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