Saturday, February 27, 2016
Contractors pretend to inspect
From the Daily News:
In 2011, 54-year-old Ukrainian laborer Ivan Lendel died and four others were injured when several floors of a 14-unit condo building under construction in Brighton Beach collapsed on them.
The Buildings Department quickly concluded that concrete was poured improperly and the steel structure was unstable. Schneider was hired by the contractor there as a “special inspector” to make sure everything was done safely.
On Friday, the Buildings Department announced it had yanked his license, declaring that he couldn’t demonstrate that he’d performed crucial safety inspections at the site of the fatal collapse and at other jobs citywide.
Schneider, for instance, wasn’t present for the installation and testing of the pile foundation at the site and “never received or reviewed any testing reports for the installation,” the department found.
Schneider also couldn’t document inspections at “numerous sites over the past few years,” officials said.
11 comments:
And it took 5 years to find out???? Guess what people? Our taxes fund the DOB. Is anyone else sick of reading stories about inspectors getting arrested and taking bribes? Go to your Councilman and demand that they do their job, they are supposed to monitor the operation and performance of city agencies, make land use decisions and have the sole responsibility of approving the city's budget.
Go to their offices and demand that they do their job! Don't elect councilmen who do nothing about the failure of the DOB to protect the people.
Every citizen in this city should protest in front of DOB headquarters.
all of our queens counselmen/women do absolutely nothing -- all they care about is their pockets being lined - bottom line
BRING IN THE FEDS!!!
I just can't help but wonder about all that assembled and constructed steel and glass in about the one thousand luxury towers and condos that have risen in the past 3 years after reading yet another article about some morally corrupt and willfully negligent waste of sperm at the motherfucking D.O.B..
Really, all these shady vulture hedge funders, billionaires and millionaires have to find somewhere else to put their tax evading money before someone else gets crippled or killed
WHERE'S OUR LOVELY PUBLIC ADVOCATE WHO NOW MAKES $170k A YEAR? MIA again!
A little correction here for anon #1. The DOB is not funded by your taxes, it is the other way around. For decades now the DOB has raised,through permit fees, about twice what it costs to operate. The extra TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS per year goes to the general city budget. So the really really fucked up part is that the DOB is helping the City budget but is being starved of the funds it needs to hire qualified inspectors and to pay them enough to keep them reasonably honest. For most of this construction there is no City inspector checking the quality of the work. The City abdicated this responsibility years ago because they could not hire enough inspectors, especilally after they did sting operations and had to arrest sometimes dozens of inspectors at a time. The "solution" to the inspector shortage was to allow and sometimes mandate self certification of many work types. For instance, private architects or engineers sign off much of the construction work that they theoretically inspected. Licensed plumbers are allowed to self certify all of their work. They can call for a City plumbing inspector but may have to wait for weeks to get an appointment so most work gets self inspected. Some of the rules now require the property owner to hire a "special inspector" for certain work types such as fire sprinklers, crains, welding, etc.
When the wolves are allowed to watch the hen house like this it kind of surprising that there aren't more building collapses or gas explosions.
Special inspectors are hired by the owner and have to be approved by their engineer. Sooner or later the city will start going after the engineers of record for being willingly oblivious to the special inspection programs of their buildings. It's a rampid issue because owners do not want to pay the designers to audit a program they don't realize is done for their protection.
-somethingstructural
all of our queens counselmen/women do absolutely nothing -- all they care about is their pockets being lined - bottom line
which sounds like the ticket to me to have some fun with them. now, where is the legislation to ban pretend inspections? I mean, they go nuts if their challenger files paperwork with the wrong color pen so .....
The city should check all the buildings that this engineer did the special inspections to insure their structural integrety. I heard this engineer spend most of his time in Florida and sign off jobs without any physically inspections.
Anon 2/29:
I agree with you. The DOB has required that in the past. In many cases (such as labs that forged concrete tests for foundations) it's particularly disastrous.
-somethingstructural
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