By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
The collapse of a crane at an Upper East Side construction site on Friday morning killed two workers and severely damaged several high-rise apartments. And it left many New Yorkers pondering an unsettling question: This again? It was the second time in two months that a familiar urban fear came to stunning fruition: a similar incident in March killed seven people and prompted officials to enact more stringent safety regulations and assure the public that they should not be afraid of construction sites around the city.
But Friday’s deadly accident has turned up the debate among citizens and politicians about whether the city acted forcefully enough to address those concerns and whether New Yorkers still felt unsafe. "I always look up at that crane,” said Linda Taylor, 49, a traffic officer who worked in the neighborhood near the site of Friday’s collapse. She said she had developed a habit of checking the crane, especially after the incident in March. “I’m afraid to drive under it,” she said. The city could not immediately account for the cause of the collapse, which occurred moments after 8 a.m. at a construction site at the corner of 91st Street and First Avenue. Witnesses said the horizontal, unloaded arm of the crane began to circle and then snapped off, propelling the cab and the upper portion of the arm onto a white-brick residential building across the street.
The cab demolished part of a top-floor penthouse and then plunged down the north facade, shearing off balconies and leaving a trail of pockmarks in the brick. The operator of the crane, Donald Leo, 30, of Staten Island, was sitting in the cab as the structure fell. He was pulled from the wreckage by rescue workers and pronounced dead at the scene. A second man, Ramadan Kurtaj, 27, of the Bronx, was also killed. No one in the building was injured, and one pedestrian was treated for a minor injury and released, according to the mayor.
The collapse occurred just two days after the city relaxed some of the rules it had put in place after the March accident. Instead of requiring inspectors to be on hand at construction sites when a crane is erected or made taller, the Buildings Department said on Wednesday that it would switch to a system of spot checks and “safety meetings” where workers would be briefed on proper procedures. On Friday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended the actions taken by the Buildings Department, noting that the crane had not been built or made taller before Friday’s collapse.
He said that city officials had inspected the crane on Thursday and found no violations. “Construction is a dangerous business, and you will always have fatalities,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Two cranes collapsed in a short period of time — it looks like a pattern but there’s no reason to think there’s any real connection.” But Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate and a prominent critic of the mayor, said the city needed to step up. “We thought the March accident was a wake-up call for the Department of Buildings,” Ms. Gotbaum said in a statement. “Now it appears that instead of waking up, the Department of Buildings hit the snooze button.” Others were more ambivalent. Louis Coletti, who heads the Building Trades Employers’ Association, a group that represents unionized contractors, acknowledged in an interview that “every regulatory process in place and inspection required was fulfilled by the Buildings Department.” But he said he hoped the city would consider a system that would allow for third-party engineers to inspect cranes. “With all due respect to the building inspectors,” Mr. Coletti said, “they don’t all have the technical qualifications.” Residents of the building that was struck in Friday’s collapse said they had eyed the crane with some wariness since it was first put up at the site.
Tara Hamilton, whose one-bedroom apartment was badly damaged in the collapse, said she immediately recognized the source of the “sonic boom” that rocked her apartment just moments after she returned from walking her two dogs. “As soon as I heard it I knew,” she said. “It was that crane.” When the crane fell, frightened tenants inside the building that was struck, the Electra at 354 East 91st Street, scrambled to reach the street as walls collapsed and burst pipes began to spew water.
Caitlin Reeves, 25, who lives in a corner apartment on the 10th floor of the damaged building, said she was in her bathroom brushing her teeth when she felt and heard an enormous rumble through her apartment — the effects of the broken crane shearing off her balcony. “I turned around and ran into my room and there were pieces of the wall and debris everywhere,” she said. As remnants of the crane continued to rain down on the street, Ms. Reeves and her roommates fled their apartment and bounded down 10 flights of stairs to their dust-filled lobby, where dozens of residents were shouting and sobbing as they streamed out onto 91st Street. Ms. Reeves said the building was mostly occupied by families with small children.
Like other residents interviewed on the street, she said the sight of the crane towering over her building each day gave her an uneasy feeling. “Every morning I woke up and I could see the top of that crane pivoting and I kept thinking we’d be lucky to make it out of that apartment without it careening into us,” she said. The crane was being used to construct the Azure, a high-rise condominium tower; about 10 of the 34 planned stories had been completed. According to city records, the company that is building the Azure is the Leon D. DeMatteis Construction Corporation of Elmont, on Long Island.
Al Baker, Carla Baranauckas, Sewell Chan, Corey Kilgannon, Jennifer Mascia, Michael S. Schmidt and Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting.
