According to an article on construction accidents in New York, fatal accidents loomed over the city’s ‘Safety Week’.
With New Yorkers talking not about “the big construction accident,” but “the latest big construction accident,” Construction Safety Week never felt timelier.
Perhaps the person most aware of the city’s growing concern about construction safety is acting Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri. He stepped into the job when former Commissioner Patricia Lancaster resigned three weeks ago — after she disclosed that the Department of Buildings mistakenly approved the Upper East Side building where a crane collapse killed seven people.
Construction Safety Week has gotten more attention than usual this year, because it echoes the Buildings Department’s increasing focus on safety amid the disasters, LiMandri said.
“Development cannot take place at the expense of workers,” he told Downtown Express last week. “Every worker has the right to go home to their family at night. Everyone says construction is dangerous, but you can’t stop there — you have to say, ‘Yes, it’s dangerous, but you have to do it safely.”
To that end, the Buildings Department held a series of workshops throughout the city last week. On Wednesday, a seminar called “Safety First: Urban Demolitions” drew 50 construction workers, contractors, engineers and project managers. The location couldn’t have been more appropriate for discussing demolitions: a conference room in the new 7 World Trade Center, overlooking Fiterman Hall and the former Deutsche Bank building -- two towers damaged on 9/11 and still awaiting demolition.
LiMandri opened the presentation by acknowledging that demolitions are dangerous. Last year, New York City saw seven major demolition accidents, which injured seven workers and killed three people — including the two firefighters who died in a fire at the Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty St. last August.
Demolitions also net more violations than other construction work, added Richard Mendelson, area director for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Manhattan office.
Last year, OSHA did 45 site inspections of demolition work in the city. At 38 of those sites, inspectors saw enough problems to issue a total of 175 violations, including some at Deutsche. That’s an average of 3.9 violations per inspected demolition site, higher than OSHA’s average of 3.2 violations per general construction site.
A new city construction code goes into effect July 1, and all demolition projects will automatically be subject to the new regulations. Some of the biggest changes in the new code relate to demolition, said Dan Eschenasy, who works in engineering and emergency operations for the D.O.B.
The new code creates stricter standards for what counts as a major demolition operation, requiring more regulatory approval. A major building, for example, will now be defined as 10 stories and up, rather than 15. In another change, contractors will soon have to list all equipment that is not handheld, which will give the Buildings Department a better idea of the scope of the project and how to regulate it.
