Hearing on Construction Site Safety Set for April
Special to the Sun
The City Council next month will examine safety for workers and bystanders at high-rise construction sites after a crane accident in Midtown on Saturday left seven dead.
"We don't yet know all the facts that led to the East Side crane collapse, but we do know that we must take whatever actions in our power to make sure it doesn't happen again," the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, said in a statement. "Construction is a crucial component of our economy, but we cannot sacrifice safety in the name of development."
The weekend crane collapse follows a number of high-profile accidents at construction sites in recent months, including the death of a construction worker at the Trump SoHo building in January, which also prompted a City Council hearing. According to city statistics, the number of safety violations at high-rise construction sites nearly doubled between November 2006 and November 2007.
Several elected officials have expressed concerns about building safety standards in recent days, and Ms. Quinn said on Sunday that the city's legislature would respond "aggressively" on the issue, possibly passing new laws regulating crane safety.
The council hearing will take place on April 29.
4 comments:
A good start would be to hold owners criminally responsible and not let them get away with shifting responsibility to general contractors, and further down the chain. A fish stinks from the head.
The council may go through the motions
of holding a hearing.....
but will they actually be listening ?
Not as long as the likes of Melinda Katz
is getting fatter off the money she gets
from her perps in the building industry.
No....it will be business as usual
after the DOB gets its obligatory slap
on the wrist. They might even recommend
replacing Lancaster if things get ugly.
There's too much money to be made
under our status quo system of roughshod,
slipshod, building practices.
To put safety requirements into effect
will only slow down the cash flow
from developer to the politico!
Now we can't have any of that can we ?
Come on people. Irresponsible owners shirking responsibility =
NY construction accidents.
It's been that way forever.
Sounds to me like the council is just going through the motions that will ultimately lead to nothing significant being changed...
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