NYC’S CONSTRUCTION-DEATH CRISIS
MAYOR de Blasio has squandered his first two years in office on an insane quest to ban horses, because his donors wanted him to. Meanwhile, he’s coddled another special interest: the hugely powerful construction industry.
Obsequious pandering has a real price. Last Friday, a crane crushed 38yearold David Wichs on a lower Manhattan street. Yet the mayor spent his emergency press conference minimizing the risks that an outofcontrol building industry poses to the city he’s supposed to serve.
On Friday, construction workers were lowering the crane on Hudson Street when it crashed to the street dozens of stories below, smashing buildings, cars, gas pipes and water mains. Wichs was killed, two were hurt seriously and thousands had their lives disrupted by closed streets and evacuated buildings.
What did the mayor call this tragedy? “A miracle.”
Loping his way through a Fridaymorning press conference, he mused that “thank God the impact on people wasn’t worse . . . We didn’t have more injuries, and we didn’t lose more people.”
Sure. Five people could have died, or 50 or 100. A horse could have died, or 30.
If you’re basing success on how many people don’t die in gruesome blunt traumas, the mayor is doing really well. Why didn’t more people die? Because the construction industry is doing such an amazing job. “We just checked the history, this is the first crane collapse in the city since 2008,” he said.
As for the crane people on Friday? He praised them. They were “putting their crane into the secure position as we would have wanted them to,” he said, because of the (fairly low) winds. “Because the crane was being lowered . . . the danger to people on the street was less.”
The first part of de Blasio’s statement, just like his lies about horsecarriage safety, isn’t true. A crane operated by the same company fell last year, injuring 10 people. In 2012, a crane fell off Extell’s luxury 57th Street tower, forcing people from their homes after Hurricane Sandy.
The second part of the statement makes no sense. The danger on the street was not less — because the crane fell.
It may be that this crane collapsed because of something truly unpreventable — a terrorist attack or sabotage.
But that hasn’t been the case in other crane collapses. Hurricane Sandy wasn’t an unpredictable event. Just as skyscrapers don’t fall down in windstorms, cranes shouldn’t, and generally don’t. In 2008, a crane collapsed and killed two workers because of a shoddy repair job. Another crane fell that year, killing seven, because of bad construction work.
No, de Blasio shouldn’t demonize people before he knows what happened. But something went very wrong.
De Blasio added: “We’ve had some real serious issues on construction sites. But that is different from what we’ve seen here.”
Actually, the issues “we’ve seen” — 18 people dying in the past year on construction sites, a 50 percent increase — are similar to what caused past crane collapses: incompetence and negligence.
Hours before Friday’s collapse, worker Konstantinos Potamousis died in East Harlem in a perfectly preventable fall. Last year, unsecured wood killed a pedestrian.
Contractors are incompetent and negligent because they can get away with it. Even when people die, firms pay fivefigure fines — and go on their way. Crane owners kill, and they keep raising and lowering cranes.
You don’t have to have a tragedy to see what the construction industry gets away with. All over the city, children can’t sleep at night because of construction noise — but nothing happens. When inspectors find firms violating noise codes or lying on permits, they levy fines, and let them keep doing it.
Yet fixing this industry was about the only thing de Blasio didn’t mention in his hourlong State of the City speech on Thursday.
And even after the crane death, his spokesman was talking about . . . horses.
While de Blasio remains hellbent on a “path” to ban them, construction workers and pedestrians are dying.
Yes, it is a miracle. Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.