Today’s Construction Accident
At roughly 9:30 this morning a construction worker fell 48 stories on the west side of Manhattan and was pronounced dead at the scene. The death is just another in a long string of construction accidents that have been occurring in New York City, which has been working on construction law reform in their wake. The worker, Anthony Esposito, fell while working on a 1,350 unit residential building on the corner of West 41st and 11th Avenue while walking across a movable walkway. There were two contractors responsible for the site, but it is not yet known who the man worked for. One of the contractors has a history with accidents on the job site.
A worker for DiFama died in January when he fell 42 stories from the top of Trump SoHo, a condominium hotel under construction at Varick and Spring Streets in Manhattan. DiFama has a history of safety violations at projects in Manhattan and has been fined tens of thousands of dollars in penalties, according to federal records.
In November 2004, another DiFama employee died when he fell 60 feet from a platform on the mast of a construction crane at what is now the Lumiere, a seven-story condominium on 53rd Street, west of Eighth Avenue.
With the outbreak of construction accidents over the past year, the city has been under fire to make changes to outdated laws to better protect the construction workers in the city. Just this week Mayor Bloomberg announced a new buildings commissioner, and with so much focus on construction sites, many departments of government showed up at this morning’s accident site.
The city’s Police, Fire and Buildings Departments raced to the scene of today’s accident, as did representatives of the city’s Office of Emergency Management. Today’s accident would appear to be the latest in a series of construction accidents that have cast a cloud over the Bloomberg administration and prompted numerous calls for reform. Within the last seven months, two construction cranes collapsed in Manhattan, killing nine people. Since then, the city’s buildings commissioner was ousted and replaced, and numerous safety reforms were passed into law.
