A STRING OF ACCIDENTS

Push for high-rise safety

Andrew Garib, The Washington Square News | Link | PDF | The number of high-rise accidents per site has grown almost 63 percent since last year, according to the city’s Department of Buildings.

In November 2006, 25-year-old Raymond Jara of Brooklyn died from a fall while working on a building near Union Square. His death prompted the city to create the Scaffold Worker Safety Task Force.

This year, two more skyscraper-related deaths have reinvigorated the Task Force’s efforts to create safer laws for construction workers. On Jan. 14, Yurly Vanchytsky, 53, fell 42 stories to his death from the half-built Trump SoHo tower a short distance from the NYU campus. Two weeks later, Jose Palacios, 42, fell 12 stories and died at a Clinton Hill construction project.

These deaths triggered an emergency meeting of City Council’s Housing and Buildings Committee Feb. 4. The SWSTF proposed a number of regulations for scaffolding workers that were passed into law in April 2007, but at the Feb. 4 emergency meeting, Department of Buildings Commissioner Patricia J. Lancaster recommended more legislation, requiring general and concrete contractors to be licensed through the city and safety managers to oversee concrete operations during high-rise construction.

"The construction industry in general, and concrete operations in particular, need more regulation," Lancaster said at the meeting.

"The impetus here is the absence of an accountability scheme among the contractors on a job site," DOB spokesperson Carly Sullivan said.

Other politicians say the recommendations are not enough. In an e-mail, 2nd District councilwoman Rosie Mendez, who represents large parts of NYU’s main campus, called the new regulations a good start, but "the proposals are too narrowly focused, and they need to be expanded to include preventative measures for a wide range of construction accidents we’ve seen across the city."

NYU has not yet reviewed the DOB’s new recommendations, university spokesman John Beckman said, but it takes "worker safety—and the safety of passersby—seriously."

However, the developer, not the university, is responsible for site safety at NYU’s current high-rise construction—a 26-story residence hall on E. 12th Street, he said.

New York City has a long history of building and construction safety, beginning famously with a site on NYU’s campus: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, now an NYU classroom building, burned down in 1911, killing 146 workers. But as with the recent deaths of Jara, Palacios and Vanchytsky, change in safety regulations came too late.

The 1911 fire "had an enormous effect on both labor policies and regulations over building in New York City and beyond," said GSAS alumnus Richard A. Greenwald, the author of a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and its effects on industrial democracy. After the fire, future New York governor Alfred Smith and Robert Wagner, namesake to the NYU graduate school of public service, helped bring about numerous new regulations including occupancy, fire safety and labor rules. •

Andrew Garib is a contributing writer. E-mail him at citystate@nyunews.com. End.