Developing: Construction Accident At 2d Avenue Subway Project

Reports are coming in that there was some kind of construction accident a few minutes ago at the 2d Avenue Subway construction site at 72nd Street. There was a large plume of smoke and reports of damage to adjoining sidewalks and buildings.

This would appear to be in the vicinity of where a subway station cavern was being carved out by a combination of excavation and explosive demolitions.

There's no word of injuries, but emergency crews are on the scene.

As more information becomes available, I will update.

UPDATE:
Fox 5 is reporting that an overloaded air compressor was involved in the explosion. However, other news outlets, including CBS News, are saying that it was a controlled demolition blast that went awry.

The Rebuilding of Ground Zero, Part 166

It's been a streak of bad luck at 4WTC since the tower was topped out earlier this week.

Yesterday, a construction worker was impaled on a steel rod he was carrying when he fell about six feet. That worker is expected to recover from his injuries.

Today, workers at street level had to dodge falling glass when a piece of steel being raised on the south side of the tower struck the facade more than halfway up due to high winds.

Fifty firefighters responded to the scene after being alerted to the accident on the south side of the rising tower about 11:30 a.m., the FDNY said.

Construction workers at the scene said that the beam began to spin and crashed into a few panels of glass about 50 stories up due to high winds.

Police taped off Church Street between Cortland and Rector streets and closed Zucotti Park, and workers were asked to leave the building.

That follows problems earlier this year when a crane dropped a load of steel to the loading area between 3 and 4WTC near the WTC Memorial.

Construction Accident At 4WTC Resulting in Subway Service Diversion On 1 Line

A crane lifting a load on 4WTC apparently suffered some kind of problem and the load dropped 40 stories to an area that is off-limits.

The load plunged some 40 stories. Debris fell into a closed-off area of the construction site after the crane’s cable snapped.

The Fire Department says some of the beams fell on an unoccupied trailer. A construction worker nearby was looked at by emergency responders, but was not taken to the hospital.

Number 1 train service is suspended south of Chambers Street.

The incident took place at about 10 a.m. near Church and Cortlandt Street.

4WTC is expected to be completed and ready for occupancy at the end of 2013. It's not clear whether the crane accident will delay construction.

As they say, developing....

UPDATE:
I've had an opportunity to go by the site. As these photos at Gothamist indicate, the crane dropped the load 40 stories on the NW corner of the 4WTC site. This puts the accident close to the SE corner of the WTC Memorial but no damage was done to either the memorial or the 4WTC building itself.

Work on 4WTC appears to have been stopped and the crane wire appears to have snapped off near the top of the tower. After the series of crane accidents a few years ago, inspections were stepped up around the city to prevent further accidents. One avenue of the investigation into this accident will be whether inspection schedules were followed and whether the weather or other factors played a role in the accident.

I had heard a crashing and thunderous booming sound around the time of the accident, but didn't give it much heed (we get various construction noise at my location all the time) although the sound of emergency vehicle sirens did ring out a short time later.

Chinese Construction Accident Yields Photo of the Day

A 13 story building collapsed in Shanghai, killing one person who was believed to be a construction worker. However, collapse isn't quite the word to describe the situation, as the building keeled over to one side virtually intact, ripping up its foundations. Two other virtually identical buildings loom nearby.

You can be investigators will be looking at contractors taking shortcuts as a possible reason for the failure. They're lucky that the collapsed building was spaced far enough away from the other so as not to cause a progressive collapse taking out further buildings.

Here's the video background, via Reuters:

The Rebuilding of Ground Zero, Part 66

The situation at Ground Zero is rapidly deteriorating because of the political machinations of the Port Authority and the bi-state control of the Authority between New Jersey and New York. The Port Authority is ponying up billions to assist New Jersey in the construction of the Trans Hudson Express (THE) tunnel, which was originally meant to upgrade service for NJ Transit and Amtrak, but now appears to be a NJ Transit only tunnel.

Meanwhile, Ground Zero construction is lagging and the Port Authority is stonewalling on modifying a deal with Larry Silverstein to provide him with credit lines so that he can proceed with building office towers at the complex.

In other words, the Port Authority is not prioritizing Ground Zero appropriately. It's something I've been saying for some time as there is a genuine lack of urgency on the part of the Port Authority to build out Ground Zero. Yesterday, we learned that the Port Authority wants to go ahead and build stumps of office towers, dooming the site to decades of construction going forward, rather than building out the towers fully.

We also finally heard from Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver, who wants to throw a monkey wrench in the Port Authority plans - all of them. He notes that if the Port Authority doesn't come to terms with Silverstein and get the Ground Zero construction moving, he's going to stymie other Port Authority construction projects, including the THE tunnel. Where was Silver for seven years? He was largely absent from the discussions, and the lack of leadership among New York politicians on the matter - from US Senators on down to New York City officials is part of the reason that the situation has persisted for as long as it has.

Now, the Port Authority is looking to turn part of the planned 5WTC into a residential tower and hotel. Bear in mind that there was a Marriott hotel (former the Vista International) at Ground Zero, which was along West Street and was destroyed by the collapsing towers. The Port Authority is trying to downsize the amount of office space at Ground Zero because of what it perceives to be a loss of interest in office space.

I think it's a serious mistake as construction isn't just meant for today's conditions, but for those a decade and more from now. Silverstein says that he remains committed to fully rebuilding Ground Zero's office space. He's the only optimist in the whole bunch, as Mayor Bloomberg and others have repeatedly claimed and proposed cutting back office space to build residential or other space.

Meanwhile, there is finally some good to come out of the fatal fire at the former Deutshce Bank building as new building regulations are set to make deconstruction safer.

UPDATE:
As I was leaving the PATH station at Ground Zero, there was an awful stench that reminded me of scorched metal and instantly brought back memories of the smell that hung over Lower Manhattan for months following the 9/11 attacks. As I reached street level, I arrived just in time to see emergency personnel carrying out what appeared to be a worker on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance, which may have been heading to St. Vincent's hospital for treatment. I haven't seen any reports on the incident, but I suspect that accident and the smell were related.

UPDATE:
Effective May 18, 2008 and running for the next 18 months, PATH service between Hoboken and World Trade Center will see service disruptions as construction of the permanent terminal ramps up. One of the two tracks servicing Hoboken will be out of service in addition to the 5th track that was taken out of service several weeks ago.

UPDATE:
About time. We're finally learning that Fiterman Hall will be demolished by late fall. The demolition will mean that the PATH entrance and access to 7WTC will be impaired by the construction work done at the adjacent Fiterman Hall.

It's still years away from being rebuilt, but the Dormitory Authority is finally moving ahead.

UPDATE:
It turns out that I wasn't seeing things this morning. A construction worker was injured at Ground Zero; an ironworker fell 20 feet while on a break from erecting steel for the 9/11 Memorial. His injuries weren't life threatening.

His injuries are not thought to be life-threatening, according to a spokesman for the Port Authority, which oversees construction of the underground museum and street-level memorial plaza.

Around 8:15 a.m. Guido Castro, of Cornell Crane and Steel, fell about 20 feet, from the third to the second floor. The worker was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital for treatment, but by the afternoon the hospital had yet to determine his condition.

“He was on his break, and it looks like he just slipped off the edge of the deck,” said the spokesman, Steve Coleman. According to Coleman, Castro was wearing a safety harness at the time, but it was not tethered to the structure.

Whistleblower Warned of Crane Danger While NYC Buildings Department Did Nothing

As lawsuits press forward on behalf of those killed in a series of unfortunate crane accidents, it now appears that the Buildings Department knew, or should have known that there was something amiss with one of the cranes involved, and yet the Department did nothing. The head of the Department's crane and derricks unit warned of problems with the crane that eventually collapsed on May 30, 2008.

Whistleblower Bethany Klein, then head of the department's cranes & derricks unit, warned in an e-mail nine months before the May 30 disaster the tower crane was at risk of "catastrophic failure."

Last year, in a series of e-mails over several months with department experts and outside consultants, Klein expressed concerns over the nature and causes of damage to the crane at a midtown building site, documents show.

By the time the crane arrived at 333 E. 91st St. this year, it had been repaired by a New Jersey welding company. But a weld apparently failed, causing it to collapse.

The May accident resulted from a failed weld to fix problems associated with earlier discovered issues. Klein wrote of concerns months before the two deadly crane accidents:

"In a short period of time, NYC has experienced two tower cranes that had potential for catastrophic failure," she wrote to outside experts seeking advice. "Is it lightning [thus every crane]? Is it the make and model? Is it the age of the crane? Is it a maintenance issue?"

The City is going to have a difficult time trying to explain this away. In particular, it makes former Buildings Commissioner Lancaster look particularly bad, along with the enforcement division at the Department.

No one at the Department thought to give any more attention to the issues with this make and model of crane, or the cranes used throughout the city on skyscraper projects.

The series of crane accidents and other construction accidents around New York City put additional focus on how the Buildings Department failed in its basic obligation to the safety of the workers constructing these structures and relying on the cranes and the general public who has to live, work, and commute around these towering behemoths. The May 30 accident killed two people, and an earlier crane accident killed seven people. Commissioner Lancaster was "departed" from her role.

The entire sorry episode showed that there were corrupt inspections officials who didn't bother to properly inspect the cranes and other buildings undergoing construction and major renovations, a failure of oversight, and changes to crane operations have since been instituted. That includes requiring more vigorous inspections of cranes, especially when they are being jacked (raised/lowered into a new position).

Shocker: NYC Buildings Department Crane Inspector Took Bribes

Here's a shocker. Yet another New York City Buildings Department inspector has been indicted for taking bribes to look the other way instead of actually doing his job. In fact, this is the top crane inspector in the City, and while the reports indicate that his alleged criminal acts had no bearing on either of the recent crane accidents, it should make one question who exactly is inspecting buildings and cranes to ensure their safe operation and to keep New Yorkers safe from the kinds of accidents we've seen recently.

The man, James Delayo, 60, the acting chief inspector for the Cranes and Derricks Unit at the city’s Department of Buildings, oversaw the issuing of city licenses for crane operators. The case against him, announced by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the city’s Department of Investigation, was filed just a week after the city’s second fatal crane collapse in less than three months.

Officials said the accusations against Mr. Delayo bore no direct relation to the accident last week at 91st Street and First Avenue, where two workers died, or the crane accident on East 51st Street that left seven dead in March.

But the case was another blemish on a Buildings Department that has been reeling from construction deaths and inspection lapses this year, and for which deadly crane accidents are part of a lingering series of problems.

The agency’s commissioner resigned last month and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been struggling to find a replacement to run a department that has long been plagued by corruption and where critics say an underpaid, shorthanded staff of inspectors has been hard-pressed to deal with the city’s building boom.

In fact, Patricia Lancaster has turned up in the private sector, advising the Durst Organization on how to navigate the labyrinth of red tape relating to the new Building Code which went into effect this year:

"She was hired to help us understand the new city building code," said Durst spokesman Jordan Barowitz.

Lancaster, a licensed architect, drafted the new code, the first overhaul in 40 years of the document that governs every aspect of construction in the city.

Her tumultuous six-year tenure was marked by a massive building boom and escalating construction deaths. She resigned in April, a month after seven people were killed in a crane collapse on E. 51st St.

Lancaster, who received an award Tuesday from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, would not respond to questions about the job.

She is prohibited by the City Charter from communicating with the Buildings Department for a year.

Wayne Hawley, general counsel to the city Conflicts of Interest Board, said Lancaster did not receive a waiver, meaning she either did not seek a ruling or that the board approved the job.

Confidentiality rules prohibit the board from revealing whether city employees seek a ruling.

Breaking: Yet Another Crane Collapse in NYC

The Fire Department said it has pulled people out of the wreckage at 354 East 91st Street near First Avenue. Their conditions were not immediately known.

The top floor of a nearby high-rise apartment building was damaged. Firefighters and rescue workers were continuing to search through the wreckage.

The accident happened 2½ months after a crane collapsed, killing seven people about two miles south.

It's not known how or why this particular crane collapsed, but will continue monitoring the situation.

UPDATE:
At least two people were pulled from the wreckage. And here's a possible reason for the collapse:

According to city records, the company building the Azure is the Leon D. DeMatteis Construction Corporation of Elmont, on Long Island. A call to the sales office of 1765 First Associates L.L.C., a subsidiary of DeMatteis, was not immediately returned.

Joe Quinn, 25, a member of a lathers union, had started work at 7 a.m. as part of a crew of about 25 workers on the roof of the building when the accident occurred. The turntable, which was attaching the crane to the tower, “came right off,” Mr. Quinn said in an interview “Boom. There was no weight on it. It boomed up, then just boom! There was no load on it. It wasn’t hooked up to anything. The disk came off where it attaches to the tower.”

After the crane fell, “I ran like hell,” Mr. Quinn said. He used ladders and stairs to get down from the roof.

Bolivar Quiroz, 56, a construction worker who was standing and 92nd Street and First Avenue, said it sounded “like a bomb was crashing.” “We were standing outside working, and we ran outside because we heard the noise,” he said. He and his colleagues looked toward where the crash occurred. “I saw, at the fourth or fifth floor, a support, but they’re supposed to have another support just above that and they didn’t. We looked and the crane was wavering back and forth.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a previously scheduled on-air interview on WOR-AM, said, “We’re not going to tolerate any rate of accidents any higher than it has to be.” He did not appear to have been fully briefed on the details of this morning’s accident.

UPDATE:
The Post is reporting two dead in this latest crane collapse and another person is critically injured.

UPDATE:
Photos from the scene of the collapse, via the NY Post.

Live coverage is at MyFoxNY. The building under construction, known as Azure, has been subject to 26 violations by the Buildings Department. It's not clear how many of those violations are related to the crane that collapsed. Nearby residents had complained about the crane though.

There are multiple street closures through the area: 1st Ave between E 86th St and E 94th ST; 91st St is closed from York Ave to 2d Ave. Diversions for the M15, M31, and M86 buses. No subways are affected.

UPDATE:
Some conflicting reports over the number killed, but at least one person is definitely dead as a result of this collapse - the crane operator. The crane was jumped over the weekend, and a DOB inspector was on hand to watch the process. Meanwhile, Curbed notes that for the DOB, their day got only a little worse. Curbed also notes that some of the DOB violations were directly related to the crane.

Mrs. Lawhawk had pointed this out - the DOB had only recently decided to lift some of its more rigorous inspections resulting from the March collapse - two days ago:

On Wednesday, the department issued a report saying its inspectors attended 51 crane jumps between March 25 and May 16. It described 49 of the jumps as successful and said its inspectors found serious safety violations at two others.

Kate Lindquist, a spokeswoman for the Buildings Department, said that in the context of the new regulations the spot inspections “will best direct the department’s crane inspectors toward cracking down on the bad actors that do not follow the rules.”

In the future, the department said, inspectors will “conduct random, unannounced site visits to verify that required safety precautions and requirements are followed.”

Revisions to the new regulations were announced on Wednesday. Modifications included a new section on training, requiring jumping crews to “have practical experience” with the type of crane on which they will be working. The new section also called for the crews to have “relevant training,” but it did not specify how many hours of training or what type.

It should be noted that the jump over the weekend was done with the inspector present.

UPDATE:
Here's more information about one of the two people killed in today's accident. He's a Staten Island resident and was two weeks away from being married.

It appears that the investigation will likely focus on the turntable bolts and welds in that area. The turntable is the portion of the crane that allows it to pivot around on its axis. The crane model is no longer in production and is only one of four being used in the city.

The Departed

As I noted back when a series of unfortunate construction accidents occurred, with a crane collapse killing seven people last month, Buildings Department Chief Patricia Lancaster was not long for her job.

Well, she's out. Fired or resigned, it doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is that the Department gets shaken up in a big way.

A day after the mayor said he wasn't happy with the Department of Buildings in the wake of the uptick in construction accidents in the city, the agency's commissioner Patricia Lancaster resigned today.

"This morning, I met with Patricia Lancaster at Gracie Mansion and accepted her resignation as New York City's Buildings Commissioner," the mayor said.

Lancaster has been facing heat from newspapers and bloggers, especially since the March crane accident in Turtle Bay that killed seven people. It turned out construction of that building should never have been allowed under zoning laws. Thirteen people have died in construction accidents in 2008.

The Buildings Department has been an unmitigated mess for years, and Lancaster's performance has been underwhelming.

Hopefully, her replacement will clean house - completely and utterly - revamping the entire process so that not only is safety put first, but the process is streamlined and more efficient than the current labyrinth of red tape.

NYC Building Where Crane Collapsed Should Never Have Been Approved

In a tense city council hearing occurring now, buildings commissioner Patricia Lancaster just admitted under withering questioning from councilwoman Jessica Lappin (D-Manhattan) that the building on E.51st street where the crane collapse last month killed 7 did not meet zoning requirements and should not have been approved.

Apparently, members of the community and the local community board tried several times to address DOB about this.

"That is beyond shocking," Lappin said. "What does it take?"

I'm somewhat surprised by this because the building was approved despite layers of oversight from the local community board, the City Planning Commission, and the Department of Buildings. How none of these groups could find anything wrong with the zoning suggests that none bothered to look to see whether the building was properly zoned or that it was out of variance with the zoning for the location.

It's no wonder that local community members and the community board are pissed by this, but where was the local community board when the plan was approved by them? If the zoning was out of whack at the time the plans were in front of the community board, they could have killed the plan then.

Something is definitely fishy here.