NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
July 2, 2017
In recent months, it’s been risky walking, or even driving, by the construction site at 200 E. 59th St. where a 35-story luxury condo is rising into the sky.
Just ask Mohammad Razza.
The 50-year-old veteran cabbie was waiting at a red light on Third Ave. next to the site the morning of May 11 when out of nowhere came an explosion above his head.
“It felt like a missile came down,” he told the Daily News. “For 30 seconds I was totally shocked, traumatized, because I didn’t know what happened.”
What happened was a four-foot crowbar had fallen from the 32nd floor of the job site, crashing down upon his cab, landing squarely on the front of his roof and his windshield.
The roof caved in and the windshield shattered. The roof struck Razza’s head, the rear view mirror flew off and whacked his right arm. His left knee crashed into the driver’s side door. Glass from the windshield flew into his left eye.
“I’m still not working,” he said. “Right now, due to this, I still feel numbness in my head. Sometimes I ... feel dizzy. If you drive, you’re supposed to be perfect. I don’t want to take a chance on the road right now.”
What Razza did not know was that this was the third such incident in a two month span at the E. 59th St. site built by Gilbane Residential Construction, one of the biggest contractors in the country. Razza’s attorney, Neil Kalra, said he’s notified the contractor he intends to sue.
On March 22, a hoist that transports workers to the top of the site partially detached from the building and swung in the wind, in danger of collapse. The city shut down the site and cited the Gilbane because they couldn’t provide proof that the hoist had been inspected when it went up.
The job site reopened March 24, but five days later a concrete pour on an upper floor missed its mark and dropped three yards of concrete on to vehicles passing by on the street.
No one was hurt, but again the site was shut down. This time, Gilbane was cited for failing to protect the public. The job reopened after five days.
Then came the May 11 crowbar incident. When city inspectors arrived on scene once again, they learned a worker had improperly tied off the crowbar with a rope instead of a tether as required. Gilbane was again hit with violations.
This time, the city decided to go a step further.
The non-union Rhode Island-based Gilbane is currently building all over the city, including Hudson Yards on the far West Side and an expansion of New York-Presbyterian Hospital on the Upper East Side. After the crowbar incident, the Department of Buildings searched its internal system to locate every Gilbane site in the city.
They found 14 sites, and over the span of four weeks, inspectors were able to gain access to 12. There they uncovered 49 hazardous violations and issued 13 partial or full stop-work orders at four locations.
At one, a Gilbane site in Hell’s Kitchen, where luxury condos are under construction, inspectors were forced to issue partial stop-work orders three times within a month. They also learned a worker at the site had been hospitalized in April after injuring his head while delivering sheetrock.
The Gilbane sweep is part of a new tech-savvy approach Buildings Commissioner Rick Chandler is taking to find and shut down dangerous job sites citywide. Currently the public can check the safety of a site via the department’s public records system by entering the site address. Looking at a contractor’s safety record at multiple sites is impossible.
Eight months ago, the department's chief of enforcement, Tim Hogan, began mining inspection data to find contractors with patterns of unsafe conditions.
Officials say Gilbane got the message. During the first week of inspections, 12 Gilbane sites produced 19 hazardous violations and six stop-work orders. By week four, the sweeps produced nine violations at six sites and only one stop-work order.
A Gilbane spokesman noted the company is working with the city to address the issues raised by DOB, saying: “Gilbane is one of the nation's safest contractors and a four-time winner of the Construction Users Roundtable Safety Award. The reality is that 96 percent of Gilbane worksites had no lost-time injuries last year, and the overall injury rate on our projects was less than half the industry average cited by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
Brian Sampson, president of the Associated Builders and Contractors’s New York chapter, charged the city with targeting a firm that uses both union and non-union workers.
“This is nothing more than a politically motivated scheme to tip the scales in favor of union contractors,” Sampson said. “As long as merit shop firms are targeted while issues on union sites are ignored, you know the focus isn't on safety — it’s just about petty politics.”
The department has targeted several contractors, including JTD Builders, where the foundation wall of a building adjacent to a JTD job site on East Broadway in Chinatown, Manhattan, collapsed two weeks ago during demolition.
The data has also allowed the Buildings Department to see where in the city violations are piling up. They started by looking at gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where the number of building permits has skyrocketed in recent years.
Reviewing 428 job sites with major renovation or new construction from November through February, inspectors were able to get into 380 sites. When the sweep was over, they wrote over 300 violations and issued 80 stop-work orders.
Within that universe they found some contractors with problematic safety patterns and swept them separately.
“Data analytics has really just exploded in the last year," Hogan told The News. "Having that level of detail has been transformative.”
Hogan says DOB is now reviewing several other problem contractors. More stop-work orders are expected in the coming weeks.
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A high ranking official blamed the victims, he wrote ‘going through a construction site ..... You have an expectation to danger coming from any direction’ - what a dunce!
Maybe this official was getting favors from the construction company - for blaming the subordinates.
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