Sunday, July 2, 2017

Hi-tech building enforcement happening

From the Daily News:

The non-union Rhode Island-based Gilbane is currently building all over the city, including Hudson Yards on the far West Side and an expansion of New York-Presbyterian Hospital on the Upper East Side. After the crowbar incident, the Department of Buildings searched its internal system to locate every Gilbane site in the city.

They found 14 sites, and over the span of four weeks, inspectors were able to gain access to 12. There they uncovered 49 hazardous violations and issued 13 partial or full stop-work orders at four locations.

At one, a Gilbane site in Hell’s Kitchen, where luxury condos are under construction, inspectors were forced to issue partial stop-work orders three times within a month. They also learned a worker at the site had been hospitalized in April after injuring his head while delivering sheetrock.

The Gilbane sweep is part of a new tech-savvy approach Buildings Commissioner Rick Chandler is taking to find and shut down dangerous job sites citywide. Currently the public can check the safety of a site via the department’s public records system by entering the site address. Looking at a contractor’s safety record at multiple sites is impossible.

Eight months ago, the department's chief of enforcement, Tim Hogan, began mining inspection data to find contractors with patterns of unsafe conditions.

Officials say Gilbane got the message. During the first week of inspections, 12 Gilbane sites produced 19 hazardous violations and six stop-work orders. By week four, the sweeps produced nine violations at six sites and only one stop-work order.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, I database search is hi-tech.

Anonymous said...

Glad to see them finally doing their job, even if their job is just a SQL search.

Anonymous said...

They used SPARQL because the data is stored as an ontology. LOL

>> even if their job is just a SQL search.