The crane collapse accident attorneys at Denena Points, PC note several recent crane and construction accidents that have happened in NYC. Some have been deadly, others have resulted in severe injuries and paralysis, and a few have miraculously avoided injuring anyone.

On Saturday, November 2, 2013, a 19-story crane collapsed across more than half a city block in midtown Manhattan, killing 4 people, and injuring more than a dozen people, at least 3 of them critically. A restaurant owner thought one of his employees might still be trapped in the rubble later that day.

At One57, a 90-story luxury high-rise under construction in Manhattan, a tower crane hoisting a 13,000-pound load got stuck on Monday October 7, 2013. The heavy concrete counterweight was left dangling dangerously in the air at the end of the crane above the street 40 stories below like a cosmic threat. Our crane collapse accident attorneys mention that City authorities closed West 57th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues until the load was safely lowered to the ground around 3:30 in the afternoon.

The same high-rise on 57th Street had become notorious a year before in October 2012 when high winds from Hurricane Sandy collapsed a construction crane atop the building. The crane arm hung precariously over the street below, swinging in the wind like a pendulum. The danger from the multi-ton crane, poised to drop, forced the evacuations of a nearby hotel and other buildings in the area. As the hurricane bore down upon the city, engineers and inspectors had to go to the top of the windy high-rise to evaluate the problem. The crane was finally secured to the building, disassembled, and reconstructed later with no major injuries.

Also at the time of Hurricane Sandy, our crane collapse accident attorneys recall a construction crane in Long Island City, Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan, that collapsed and seriously injured 7 workers while also smashing down into several buildings.

In January, a worker pouring concrete for the construction of the new Trump Hotel in SoHo suffered a fatal 40-story fall when the plank he had been standing on gave way underneath him. Our crane collapse accident attorneys report that two other construction workers suffered serious injuries from the tragic accident.

In December 2012, another crane accident in Manhattan paralyzed a man. The crane, at the construction site for the Goldman Sachs building in Lower Manhattan, dropped 14,000 pounds of steel onto a trailer below, paralyzing an architect for the project.

And you might remember the 2007 blaze that erupted at the demolition site for the old Deutsche Bank building on the World Trade Center site at the tip of Manhattan. Two firefighters lost their lives in that fire.

These tragic accidents demonstrate the need for ample safety measures at construction and demolition sites. Federal and local regulations set safety standards for things like the plank decking used during high-rise construction, measures for the safe handling of materials in steel construction, and safety harnesses and other equipment. Yet the crane collapse accident attorneys at Denena Points, PC emphasize that building and demolition sites regularly receive numerous citations for various infractions. As Mayor Bloomberg mentioned after the deadly crane collapse on 51st Street on Saturday, the 13 previous violations received for that high-rise construction site are not unusual in a project of such size.

In heavily built-up areas like Manhattan and downtown Philadelphia, where buildings and traffic are always in close proximity to each other, stringent safety measures are particularly vital. In fact, the Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, alarmed at the spate of deadly and near-deadly construction and demolition accidents in the city, announced a new Borough Watch Construction Working Group to oversee construction site safety. He says the number of safety violations at the city’s many high-rise construction projects more than doubled within the last year.

Browse our website to learn more about structural collapse, building safety standards, and what to do in the event of a serious injury.