by Patrice O' Shaughnessy
They were hardworking fathers who got up each morning, put on a hardhat and shaped the skyline.
Aaron Stephens, a resident of Briggs Ave., was one of the five construction workers killed in the crane disaster in Midtown.
Another of the dead was Wayne Bleidner, who grew up on City Island and followed his dad's footsteps as a crane operator.
It's an increasingly dangerous profession. More hardhats than firefighters die on the job each year in the city.
Twenty-nine laborers died in work-related accidents from Sept. 2006 to Sept. 2007. Authorities point to the city's unprecedented building boom as a reason for the rise in construction deaths; about 78,000 permits are issued per year.
There's a great rush to throw up buildings, to appease developers who don't want to wait or be obstructed with rules and codes. It's become a city that worships real-estate developers. Mayor Bloomberg will leave a legacy of high-rise hotels, malls and mammoth parking garages and sports arenas that steamrolled the real neighborhoods in each borough.
Scaffolding wraps thousands of buildings. Towering apartment buildings and high-rise condos are rising everywhere. About 250 cranes operate in the city on any given day.
The model that collapsed on March 16, known as a tower crane, had a 200-foot mast, composed of 13 sections that each weighed 11,000 pounds. The cab and deck at the top of the mast weighed about 50,000 pounds; the boom weighed about 20,000 pounds; and the counterweights added up to about 80,000 pounds, city officials said.
Neighbors had complained to the Buildings Department that the crane looked wobbly. The site had racked up a dozen violations. But the building went on.
After the crane accident, Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster said the city "will rely upon the findings of our forensic investigation to explore ways in which tragedies like this can be prevented."
Prevention is something that only seems to be addressed after a tragedy, and until just before the next tragedy.
Two past cases of needless deaths that happened in the Bronx illustrate the city's failure to ensure contractors and building owners adhere to regulations.
In these incidents, firefighters, not hardhats, were killed.
Ten firefighters fell into a pit inside the Mega 99 store on Walton Ave. in August 2006, when the floor collapsed. Eight escaped, but Firefighter Michael Reilly and Lt. Howard Carpluk Jr. were buried under the debris, the air crushed out of them.
The reason for the collapse, according to the FDNY and the Buildings Dept.: Deterioration at the base of numerous columns in the cellar. Failure of the contractor to perform construction in accordance with the New York City building code. Substandard construction techniques. The columns were rotted wood, not steel or concrete.
The work was approved by an engineer, Jose Vargas, without conducting a final inspection of the work, as required, officials said. He was indicted earlier this month by a Bronx grand jury for lying about the building's condition.
"There was not an ounce of steel in the building," said the prosecutor.
Vargas is a private engineer, not a city inspector. The city began to allow professionals to certify construction projects in 1995, at the start of the construction boom. Private architects and engineers hired by the builders, instead of city inspectors, certify about half of all building projects each year.
Why would the city risk obvious conflicts? Because, according to Lancaster, eliminating self-certification would add to the costs of construction in the city, because the Buildings Dept. would not be able to process as many applications for permits.
In Jan. 2005, Lt. Curtis Meyran and Firefighter John Bellew were forced to jump to their deaths from an E. 178th St. building because an illegal partition had concealed the fire and blocked the only possible escape from the subdivided apartment. There were numerous building code and safety violations.
Inspecting tenements and worksites in the Bronx was just not a priority, with all the gleaming towers rising downtown for the rich.
Even there, though, guys like Bleidner and Stephens become sacrifices in the city's great building boom, their flesh and blood as much a part of the skyscrapers as concrete and steel.
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