On a warm day last spring an ominous crack appeared in a steel beam holding up the second floor of a decaying Harlem warehouse workers were demolishing for Columbia University.
The crack, it was later noted, was “in plain view.” The floor was “visibly sagging, in danger of collapse.”
Nevertheless, the contractor, Breeze Demolition, made no effort to halt work, under pressure to bring down the building so Columbia could put up student housing there for the coming semester.
The city buildings department — which cited Breeze two weeks earlier because workers weren’t wearing safety gear — was not told of the crack.
At 7:51 a.m. the next morning, March 22, a 69-year-old laborer named Juan Vicente Ruiz was at work in the building’s basement. Working well into his Social Security years, Ruiz would awaken daily at 4:30 a.m. to do a bracing round of push-ups and sit-ups before heading to work.
He was chipping away at a brick wall with a sledgehammer when the floor over his head suddenly gave way.
Tons of concrete, bricks and steel collapsed upon him before he had a chance to call out.
The medical examiner declared the cause of death to be “massive head trauma.” His wife, Francisca, was overcome by grief for days. Months later she still bursts into tears thinking about his death – a death his family believes could have been avoided by basic oversight.
“I need to know how this happened to my husband,” Francisca said through a translator. “I do not understand this and whoever did this. There should be justice.”
The circumstances of Ruiz’s tragic death are hardly unique. A Daily News investigation has found construction accidents like this one have become alarmingly more common in New York City — at the same time enforcement of job safety has been cut back.
The number of jobsite accidents in New York City jumped 31% from 119 to 157 from fiscal 2011 to 2012, while the number of injuries rose 46% from 128 to 187, city records show.
In the New York metro area, including northern New Jersey and Long Island, construction fatalities jumped from 28 to 40 between 2010 and 2011, the latest available data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Workers fall from a height or are hit by falling materials, tools or equipment. Scaffolding collapses, walls collapse, entire buildings collapse. Just last week a 380-foot crane fell on seven workers in Queens, injuring three seriously.
At the same time the city has downsized oversight of construction drastically. Records show the buildings department cut the number of worksite inspections by 40% – from 244,000 in fiscal 2009 to just over 141,000 in fiscal 2012.
As a result there’s less punishment of wrongdoing: Notices of violations dropped by 6,600 from 2011 to 2012.
The city blames the cutback in inspections and citations on a dwindling number of inspectors and promises to hire more. Meanwhile, they quietly admit they’ve been relying more and more on contractors to police themselves and voluntarily report problems to the department.
Tony Sclafani, a spokesman for the Department of Buildings, said the city has “among the toughest construction regulations of any jurisdiction in the world,” and attributed the increase in accidents “to a rise in the number of workers who fell on construction sites” and incidents of construction material falling during construction operations.
He said the agency “has conducted significant industry outreach to encourage workers and their employers to take proper safety precautions at all times,” and had issued “nearly 5,400 Stop Work Orders when hazardous conditions were found on a construction site” in in fiscal 2012.
Barry Romm, the department’s chief of investigations, offered this candid view during a recent hearing to suspend a crane operator’s license, calling contractors “the eyes and ears of the Department of Buildings.”
“Like all city agencies, we are somewhat limited in the inspectorial force, so that licensees or registrants will report to the Department of Buildings what goes on,” Romm said.
But a News review found that often the “eyes and ears” are blind and deaf — and the end result is injury and even death.
Records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act paint a damning portrait of construction in New York City, with contractors who fail to inspect damaged equipment, pay no attention to unsafe worksites, neglect to train or supervise workers and deliberately hide accidents from regulators.
Jeffrey Shapiro, an attorney for Ruiz’s family who has handled numerous construction accident suits, said the city should not rely on contractors to turn themselves in.
“It’s as ridiculous as it sounds,” he said. “The whole incentive in these jobs is to keep the job moving along at all costs. Everybody is unhappy if the job slows down.”
“The city is always responding to accidents and does very little to prevent them,” he noted.
That was true this fall when developer Michael Rubinstein was designated as the eyes and ears of his own project, tasked with policing site safety at a condo he was building at 227 Carlton Ave., Brooklyn.
The city allows licensed construction superintendents like Rubinstein to monitor their own developments, and by September he was overseeing 14 such projects around the city — four more than the city normally allows.
The morning of Sept. 10, a 67-year-old laborer named Winston Gillett was working the third-floor when a crane deposited a pallet of cement blocks on that floor.
The entire floor suddenly gave way, sending Gillett into a 40-foot free fall. Bricks and steel rained down upon him, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration and the city are now investigating whether the site was properly supervised at the time of the accident.
Diana Blake, Gillett’s stepdaughter, said Gillett had only been working at Carlton Ave. for a short period, collecting only one paycheck.
“You could tell he was tired when he got home,” she said. “Accidents do happen, but if they were more cautious on that job, this wouldn’t have happened.”
The family’s lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, filed suit and said the question of whether construction superintendents should be allowed to oversee 10 sites “needs to be addressed by the City Council. Certainly 14 is too many.”
Even when city and federal governments intervene, problems persist. Government repeatedly cited contractors for a series of accidents at a John Jay College building under rehabilitation at 860 Eleventh Ave. in Manhattan — but the unsafe environment persisted.
First in September 2008, inspectors found a crane on site was “defective,” with a warped boom tip, a main lift cylinder leaking and damaged nylon slings.
A year later on Dec. 28, 2009, the connection at a crane boom point pulled through while the crane was lifting a load, allowing the crane’s mast to crash to the roof deck. A wire struck a worker.
The feds found the crane had only three of the required four clamps to keep this from occurring, and fined its owner, Cornell & Co., $10,000. The firm settled for $7,000.
A year later at the same site in November 2010, OSHA found a crane operator swung a pallet of 3,000-pound bags of dirt while a worker was adjusting the sling.
The worker had three fingers ripped off his hand. OSHA fined contractor Plant Fantasies $14,000 for exposing a worker to what it termed an “amputation hazard.” The company settled for $5,292 – about $1,700 per finger.
At times the response to many of these serious accidents — even those that result in maiming and even death — is anemic.
In the March 22 death of laborer Ruiz, for example, the city buildings department has yet to issue a single violation.
A rep for DOB declined comment on the case.
OSHA cited the contractor, Breeze, for failing to safeguard workers by ignoring glaring evidence that disaster was just around the corner.
But the maximum penalty allowed for that offense is a paltry $9,800 — pathetic compensation for a man’s life that outrages Ruiz’s family, who have filed suit against Columbia U.
“It’s laughable. It’s ridiculous,” said Shapiro, the family’s lawyer. “There’s no add-on cost if somebody gets seriously hurt or even killed.”
gsmith@nydailynews.com
Ground can also be risky
Passersby are subject to construction accidents, too:
March 9, 2011 — At Four World Trade Center, complainant calls the city to say a “large amount” of concrete fell from the building on to Liberty St. sidewalk “and just missed hitting caller and his wife.”
May 5, 2011 — 230 Riverside Drive, upper Manhattan, child hit in hand by falling hammer.
June 28, 2011 — At 655 W. 34th St., Manhattan, pedestrian sitting on bench hit in head by bolt from site.
June 30, 2011 — At 55 Liberty St., pedestrian hit in head by unspecified “debris” from site.
July 5, 2011 — At 151 W. 34th St., pedestrian hit by “screw jack” when outrigger on a crane comes loose.
Oct. 20, 2011 — At unspecified location, pedestrian hit in head by rubber butt of hammer dropped by worker.
June 27, 2012 — At Four World Trade Center, crane lifting material strikes the building at the 45th floor, sending glass cascading to the street.
SOURCE: Department of Buildings records
