Billionaire row tower crane spins like a music box ballerina and drops 8 ft. blades on 57th St.

 

 NY Post

A crane on top of a high-rise apartment building in Manhattan went spinning in the wind Thursday evening, sending debris from the under-construction building falling to the street below. 

The crane, atop a Midtown building under construction on West 57th Street near Sixth Avenue, spun wildly in the wind and rain, video taken at the scene shows. 

Fire officials said the FDNY was responding to building debris at 111 West 57th St. It was not clear if there were any injuries in the incident. The NYPD also warned pedestrians to avoid the area because of falling debris.

“Please avoid the area of West 57th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues due to an unstable crane and falling debris. 

Expect emergency vehicles and traffic in the area,” the department said in a tweet.

The Department of Buildings said the crane was safely secure, but “weathervaning” in the wind, a normal crane function which allows them to swing 360 degrees when not in use. 

The agency was investigating what caused the debris to come crashing down from the building.

Cloudy with a chance of 20 pound chunks of metal from the Liberty Avenue el train tracks

 NY Post

A giant piece of iron fell from the elevated A train tracks in Queens and smashed through the roof of a black cab Tuesday afternoon — narrowly missing the terrified driver inside.

Driver Ana Leonardo was waiting to pick up a passenger on Liberty Avenue at 100th Street in Ozone Park when she heard a loud crash through her Camry’s rear window.

 “I was stopped here because I had to pick up a customer,” she told The Post, adding in Spanish that she was “asuste mucho” — very scared.

“If something like that comes through the head of people, they’re going to die right away,” said her husband, Manuel Mendoza.

Mendoza told The Post that the two of them share the vehicle, lugging passengers around the city for fares.

“Thank god my wife is fine, but the car is crazy,” he said. “We use it 10 hours a day, so we have no job right now.”

Leonardo is just the latest near-victim of falling subway parts, after multiple similar incidents in Queens in the spring.

Update:

This is from the comments section and I hope Governor Cuomo, NYC Transit, The MTA and Andy Byford reads it, because what this man says has validity and something this catastrophic will happen at the pace these chunks are flying off the rails.

Especially to Byford, you should have quit when I told you to last year and when you had the chance a few weeks ago.


Ceramic track tie bushing, the snap on spring clamp came off and that's likely been launched atop some rooftop perhaps a block away.
 
They need to go back to the wooden ties and spikes
 
That MTA jackass from England & Canada thinks he's running trains on the ground with ballast rocks.
--Not so in New York City.
 
Trains running faster, vibration, excessive torque from harder braking is causing all European style new hardware to break loose like bullets going right threw the netting baskets or flying elsewise.
Its also causing life & death damage to the 100 year old steel structures.

These "IMPROVEMENTS" are for the worse here.
Last week a bolt went flying, the nut had cleanly snapped of at the thread from the excessive force and torque from the vibration and swaying.

Send Byford, his suits and computer apps back to England and hire somebody actually qualified with NYC's train hardware before a section of elevated & 10 car train of people ends up down in the street or a city block of homes !!
 
Go below any station on the 7 train, the noise & vibration being transferred down the structures is horrifying. It was and never so intense, like a Saturn 5 rocket shaking street, rattling storefront windows.

-Gino

More heavy metal thunder raining from the Roosevelt Ave. elevated tracks

NY Daily News



It’s raining rusty metal in Queens.

A woman walking beneath the No. 7 subway tracks Monday was nearly struck by a falling hunk of rusty metal, the fifth reported incident of flying debris along the 104-year-old elevated structure this year.

Erin Koster, 37, was crossing Roosevelt Ave. at 53rd St. at around 4:30 p.m. when she said the piece of metal fell in front of her. Kostner said the debris weighed about a pound, enough to cause serious injury.

The Woodside resident said she’s been aware of the ongoing issue on the line.

“We don’t drive under the train anymore at all in the car, because why would you,” said Koster. “But if you live in this neighborhood, you have to walk under the train tracks.”

The issues along the No. 7 line became well known in February when a falling beam nearly impaled an Uber driver on Roosevelt Ave. near 65th St. Two weeks later, a hunk of rusty metal cracked the windshield of a car parked beneath the tracks near 62nd St.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials have repeatedly assured residents that it’s perfectly safe beneath the tracks, and on Tuesday said they were looking into putting up netting to catch any falling debris.

Agency spokesman Shams Tarek said Tuesday’s falling debris appears to have “broken clean” without any sign of slow deterioration or stress to the structure.

 Broken clean. Looks like the MTA is becoming more adept at propaganda than at maintenance.

Lookie here, an update from THE CITY:

 The MTA said Tuesday it will install protective netting beneath “limited” sections of elevated train tracks throughout the city — including along the No. 7 line, where debris has repeatedly plunged onto Queens’ Roosevelt Avenue.

The agency’s move follows the latest spills — both near the 52nd Street stop in Woodside on Monday and Tuesday.

“It’s otherworldly that we have so many people in Woodside, Queens, when they walk along Roosevelt Avenue are looking up and saying, ‘Am I next? Is something going to happen to me here?’” said Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer. “They’ve got to fix this.”

Van Bramer has been pressing the MTA to install netting beneath the 7 tracks in the wake of several heavy items plummeting from the elevated structures.

 The problems underneath the line started in February, when a piece of wood spiked the windshield of a passing for-hire vehicle. That scare prompted the MTA to pledge an inspection of “every inch of elevated tracks in the city.”

 But until this week, the MTA had been noncommittal about installing netting.

THE CITY last month reported that New York City Transit President Andy Byford objected to  Van Bramer’s proposal, warning in a letter to the Council member that netting would “impede access, close-up inspection and assessment of corrosion or defects on the structure and cause extensive street-level traffic disruption to install and secure.”

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Byford said the No. 7’s elevated structure “has the attention of the highest levels of MTA leadership,” and that the authority is taking the netting on a test run.