Articles Posted in Construction Accident

A New York City construction worker was crushed to death by a concrete slab that fell off a building adjacent to a construction site in Midtown Manhattan. 27 year old Rodalfo Vasquez-Galian was working on securing the foundations of a future hotel located at 326 West 37th street when the piece of concrete weighing thousands of pounds came loose. According to Rick Chandler, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Buildings the excavation digging “compromised the foundation of the neighboring building”. In May a complaint that the construction was causing dangerous vibrations in neighboring properties was dismissed after a city inspection. The construction site was also closed in August for one day because of safety violations. Tritel, the construction company owned by hotel developer Sam Chang, has received more than 200 building violations since 2006.
Read more in the New York Times

In April, we wrote about a controversial study related to the New York Scaffold Law that steered debate between the Construction Industry and Construction workers advocates. The study was published by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York and funded by the Lawsuits Reform Alliance of New York, an organization lobbying against laws protectingworkers in favor of the construction industry and other corporate interests.

The study drew so much controversy that Freedom of Information Law requests were filed to find out if the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute was pressured by the lobby during its research or after the release of the report.

Last week the Institute produced the draft report that researchers submitted to Tom Stebbins, the leader of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance as well as as email correspondence between them.

Nine workers died so far in 2014 while working on the construction or the maintenance and repair of communication towers. Last year there were 13 fatalities, double the two previous years together according to OSHA’s most recent statistics. In order to better protect tower climbers, OSHA recently updated its Communication Tower Directive regarding the use use of hoist systems used to move workers to and from workstations on communication towers. (see OSHA press release).

Tower climbing is one one of the most dangerous job in the US. A Daily Kos article from 2012 estimated that the death rate for tower climbers was about 10 times that of construction workers. Tower climbers are hired through hundreds of subcontractors and are employed mostly by communication wireless carriers to build, maintain and repair communication towers. An investigation by ProPublica and PBS Frontline shows that by outsourcing the jobs to subcontractors cell phone carriers’ have kept their connection to tower climbing invisible.

The most common causes of deaths and injuries are:

US Demco of Brooklyn exposed construction workers to potential fatal falls by failing to provide and ensure the use of lifesaving fall protection on a demolition site located at 50-54 Clarkson Ave in Brooklyn, NYC, according to OSHA inspectors.

Inspectors also found that the guardrails for planking used by workers to access sections of the second and third floors were missing increasing the risk of a fall.

Additionally workers were not supervised by a competent person with the knowledge and the authority to identify and correct fall hazards. Inspectors also noticed that falling debris exposed workers to dangers of lacerations and broken bones and ungrounded power tools could have lead to electrocution and burns.

Falls are the number one cause of death in the construction industry and construction companies are required by law to provide adequate fall protection to their workers. After OSHA received a complaint of imminent danger on a construction site, the agency started to investigate Kay Waterproofing Corp. a masonry and waterproofing contractor located in the Bronx, NYC. OSHA discovered that the contractor was exposing its workers to serious fall hazards and cited Kay Waterproofing Corp. for 13 serious safety violations that included fall and scaffolding hazards. Other violations included failure to provide eye protection for employees chipping and cutting masonry; failure to provide hard hats where overhead hazards existed; failure to ensure equipment had an electrical grounding pin and was properly guarded and protected; and failure to ensure ladders were used for the designed purpose and were not defective.

Read more in the OSHA news release

Falls are the leading cause of death in the construction industry in New York and in the US. Many of those deaths are preventable. To raise awareness of preventing fall hazards, OSHA asked employers in New York and all over the nation to organize during this week a voluntary event to talk to their employees about fall prevention safety.

In New York State, several events already occurred at the beginning of this week. On Monday June 2nd Turner Construction Company suspended work across the company to deliver a message focused on “Proper Pre-Task Planning for Safety” to 45,000 employees. The same day, in Malta, NY, Turner hosted a falls in construction stand down for 700 employees.

On Tuesday, in Manhattan, Related Hudson Yards hosted two falls in construction stand down events along with the sites general contractor, Tutor-Perrini (Buildings) for about 800 employees.