The death toll today seems to be much lower than for the first collapse I’ve mentioned here. So far I’ve only seen reports of three fatalities. Mayor Bloomberg is calling this unacceptable, and I imagine that the revisions to code that were started after the first collapse are going to be fast-tracked like crazy. (Of course, what that means could be anything: rebuilding at Ground Zero was promised to be fast-tracked, too.)
Just a sad state of affairs. I hope that more can be learned from these than “falsifying safety inspections is bad, mmmmkay?” (Which seems to have been at least a part of the first collapse…)
i couldn’t believe i was reading about this again. good heavens! with construction going on in nearly every block the mayor is correct. a real fix to this needs to be done. not just a feel good we will do x because it shows we are doing something.
I can’t believe it happened again. Every time something like this happens in NYC I am bombarded with calls from my family to make sure I am not one of the fatalities mentioned in the accident. I really don’t like my grandma being worried that I have been crushed by a crane (though with my fear of birds that would be somewhat ironic.)
I read about this on the news yesterday morning and then immediately got a call from my sister – my NYPD brother-in-law just happened to be on CRV yesterday and was sent to the scene. He spent the day in the building, as a precaution against looters.
I kinda preferred the tone of his first comments, at the site, as opposed to his remarks on the radio later. The gist of his comments on-site seemed to be: ‘We’ll look into what happened and see if any procedures need to be changed, but construction is inherently dangerous, and just because there were two closely spaced crane collapses doesn’t necessarily mean there was malfeasance, negligence, or insufficient oversight.’
Which is absolutely true. His later comments seem to lean more toward typical mayoral rhetoric: ‘This is unacceptable, we will make big changes, not just cosmetic ones, etc.’).
When I began working in the insurance business, I was surprised to learn that my company had a “crane program”–that is, a line of insurance dedicated entirely to construction cranes and the damage they cause. It had never occurred to me that they were so risky as to require their own specialized insurance but obviously, they are.