After three men got killed on construction sites in the last week, City Council reacts by fast tracking new saftey bill.

Crain's New York

Following a week in which three construction workers died in separate workplace accidents, a city councilman is renewing a push for the implementation of a construction safety training law passed in 2017.

City officials put out a statement Saturday that Gregory Echevarria, 34, died around 3 a.m. after being crushed by part of a crane he was helping assemble at a construction site at 570 Broome Street, in SoHo, as reported in the Daily News.

Brooklyn Councilman Robert E. Cornegy Jr. later that day released a statement calling Echevarria's death a "reminder of the importance of implementing the construction site safety training mandates of Local Law 196 of 2017, which will be a vitally important way to prevent future fatalities like these."

Cornegy called the string of construction deaths in the past week a "chilling reminder of the danger the men and women who build our city are subjected to day in and day out." Before the SoHo accident, a window washer was killed by a falling piece of stone last Monday in Midtown, and a construction worker fell to his death on Wednesday while placing bricks on a work site in Brooklyn Heights.

The private construction industry was responsible for the largest number of workplace fatalities in the city in 2017, according to a January report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were 20 fatal injuries on private construction sites, representing about a quarter of the city's workplace deaths. There were 21 construction worker deaths in 2016. Construction-related injuries on job sites in the city have increased from 526 in 2016 to 744 in 2018, according to the 2019 mayor's management report.