Posted on 03/15/2008 10:05:48 PM PDT by neverdem
A crane towering over a high-rise construction site on the East Side of Manhattan collapsed in a roar of rending steel Saturday afternoon, raining death and destruction across a city block as it slashed down on an apartment building, broke into sections, crushed a town house and cut away a tenement facade.
At least four people were killed and more than a dozen others were injured, and damage was expected to run into the millions of dollars in what the authorities called one of the city’s worst accidents — a calamity that turned a neighborhood near the United Nations into a zone of panic, pulverized buildings, wailing sirens, evacuations, searches in the rubble and covered bodies in the streets.
Many residents of the neighborhood around the site of the collapse — 51st Street between Second and First Avenues — said they had been worried for months about the possibility of a collapse, calling the crane, looming higher each week, a menace, particularly because so many residential buildings were being put up in the area with remarkable speed: several floors a week at times.
Christopher Bianchi, 40, of Manhattan, owner of Crave Ceviche Bar on Second Avenue, said he saw three bodies on stretchers in the street. “Their heads were covered,” he said. “One of the police was giving last rites.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg arrived at the scene hours later, surrounded by an army of police officers, firefighters, city officials and reporters. “It’s a sad day,” he said, as the lights of scores of emergency vehicles revolved and flashed. “Our thoughts go out to those who were killed, and we pray that those who were injured will recover.”
As people were evacuated from a half-dozen buildings and rescue workers using dogs, listening devices and thermal imaging cameras searched the rubble...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Dang. There but for the Grace of God...
hard to believe how far it reached.
The situation isn’t funny, but the bar that was destroyed was called FUBAR.
Bush’s fault.
My guess is that the crane was shock loaded while on the jacks and it pulled away from the primary tie in to the building because some error was made in the rigging.
We lost three people in Dallas, many years ago. Two iron workers and the operator. I'm surprised that there were not more in this one. It's a dangerous field of work, but rewarding. Not many do it.
My father-in-law is a crane operator. He loves his work.
They’re rushing to get those buildings up. I suspect developers are worried about the economy.
The Investigators: What led to collapse?
Crane accidents in the city are up by nearly 60 percent, and it now appears that more people died in Saturday's collapse than in all crane accidents in recent memory.
Up since when I'm not sure, but the trend's still not good.
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