NEW YORK — A pedestrian
was killed and three people were injured Friday when a huge construction crane
collapsed in lower Manhattan as workers were trying to lower and secure it
against rising winds, Mayor Bill de Blasio said. Pronounced dead at the scene
was 38-year-old David Wichs, of Manhattan's Upper West Side, the New York City
Police Department said. The injured, whose names were not immediately released,
were hit by falling debris, authorities said. Two were listed in serious
condition. The mayor initially said the person killed had been sitting in a
car, but the police later said he had been walking near a car.
The Daily News reported
that one of the injured, Thomas O'Brien, 73, was in the nearby car waiting for
his daughter when the heavy metal crushed much of the vehicle. O'Brien received
a head laceration. The crane, with a 565-foot boom that stretched roughly as
long as a city block, plummeted around 8:24 a.m. EST near 40 Worth Street in the
TriBeCa neighborhood, the New York City Fire Department said. Jesse Natale, a
26-year-old civil engineer from Westfield, N.J., told the Daily News he was waiting
at a traffic light at the site when the crane came down.
“If I caught that
light, I’d be dead probably,” he said. “It looked like an avalanche — or that
the roof was caving in from the snow.” Twisted red-colored metal from the
plunging boom smashed into parked cars and debris littered streets and
sidewalks. More than 100 firefighters and emergency personnel and more than 30
firetrucks and other equipment responded to the scene. City officials said
utility workers were taking gas readings in the area and making plans to
excavate and cap a low-pressure gas main in the wake of the collapse. De Blasio
said construction work was halted on the building Thursday after operators
decided to lower and secure the crane against winds, which at times gusted
between 20-25 mph.
“They were in the
process of securing the crane ... actually preparing to bring it down, to
secure it,” he said. De Blasio said there likely would have been more victims
if workmen hadn't already cleared the area of traffic and people to prepare for
lowering the crane. "Thank God we didn’t have more injuries and lose more
people,” de Blasio said. “It’s something of a miracle that there was not more
of an impact.” Glenn Zito, who was working on the upper floors of a building
across the street, captured the crane's collapse in a dramatic video. Zito and
two other workers were asked to come down from the upper floors because of the
wind and were making their way down when they stopped to watch the crane being
lowered. "At a certain point (as) it was coming down, it was probably at
90 degrees, the two halves, and then it just sped up," Zito said. "And
at that point we watched it fall and then the body of the cab of the crane
flipped over.”
Zito pans the camera
from left to right and follows the metal boom as it plummets to the ground and
lands in a heap in the middle of the road. "You always think it’s going to
be a possibility," said Chris Andrinopouls, another workman. "You
really don’t want that to happen." A few wind gusts of 20-25 mph were
reported between 8 and 9 a.m. Friday in Manhattan, according to data from
Weather Underground. The equipment that collapsed is known as a crawler crane,
which consists of an upper carriage, or boom, mounted on a crawler-type
undercarriage that can be moved from one location to another. The boom is
capable of hoisting 330 tons of weight, city officials said.
City Department of
Buildings inspectors checked the crane Thursday morning, when workers installed
an extension on the upper boom. The inspectors approved the operation, de
Blasio and other city officials said. The city issued orders for all crawler
cranes across the city to be secured as investigators tried to determine the
cause of Friday’s accident. It was the city’s first major crane collapse since
2008. De Blasio pushed back against media questions about previous construction
accidents, saying there had been no epidemic of such incidents. However, New
York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said municipal buildings officials had
failed to implement many recommendations in a 2014 audit on construction crane
safety.
