http://tribecatrib.com/news/2009/apr...man-tower.html
With New Nets and Rules, Work Resumes at Goldman Tower
New netting was installed at the base of both external hoists after a carpenter dropped his hammer from the 17th story of the Goldman Sachs tower on April 1.
By Matt Dunning
Apr. 08
The city allowed construction on the 43-story Goldman Sachs headquarters in Battery Park City to resume Wednesday morning, April 8, following a week-long shut down of the site.
Crews had been barred from working on the site since April 1, when a carpenter’s hammer plummeted 17 stories from the unfinished tower, smashing the rear window of a passing taxi on Murray Street. No one was injured, but the accident occurred as parents were walking their children to nearby P.S. 89. Before work was allowed to begin again, a 10-foot-wide horizontal "catch-all" net was installed at the base of the tower's two external hoist elevators.
According to Tishman Construction executives, the hammer dislodged from a carpenter’s tool belt when the worker shut the vertical doors of the hoist elevator he was using the morning of April 1, and it passed through a three-inch opening between the elevator car and the building. As it fell, they surmised, the hammer bounced off of either the side of the building or the elevator's vertical track, and struck the passing cab.
During meetings with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, held April 3, and Community Board 1's Battery Park City Committee on April 7, construction officials promised to implement new safety measures designed to prevent the accident from recurring. The April 1 accident was the third incident of debris falling from the Goldman Sachs site, at Vesey and West Streets, in less than three years.
"The single most important thing to us is the safe conduct of the work," Goldman Sachs managing director Timor Galen told the Battery Park City Committee. "It is a big, complicated site, and it takes enormous diligence and focus to deliver against that objective, but that's our commitment."
Following the accident, the city's Department of Buildings issued Tishman Construction, the lead contractor for the tower, a violation for failing to secure the site against falling debris, and stopped all work pending an inspection.
"Safety is the highest priority for [us]," Tishman Construction president John Livingston told the committee. "Unfortunately, sometimes things happen, and we learn these lessons."
The DOB lifted its stop-work order late Tuesday afternoon, after inspectors were satisfied the company had fulfilled its promise to add more safeguards.
Tishman has said it now requires workers’ tools to be tethered or placed in buckets or tool bags while working in the building. Loose tools are forbidden in exterior construction work but are not usually regulated in the sort of interior work going on at the Goldman tower.
Workers also are required to remove their tool belts and put them in a covered basket while they are riding in the elevators, and workers riding the elevator now must stand outside a brightly painted zone to prevent them from being close to the closing doors.
Additionally, contractors on the site will be fined $5,000 when passengers are caught trying to shut the hoist door. Hoist operators are employed to run the elevators, but tradesmen often shut the doors themselves as a courtesy to the operators who sit several feet away at their controls.
"You can rest assured that if a contractor gets a $5,000 fine because one of their guys shut the hoist door, that worker will no longer be employed," Tishman executive Roger Cettina said.
No one from Goldman Sachs, Tishman or Structure Tone, the main contractor doing interior work, could say if the new netting would catch an object dropped from the tower’s upper floors if that object took a similar bounce off the side of the building. Livingston said the new measures, combined with the freakish nature of the April 1 accident, made it unlikely—but not impossible—for a similar incident to occur.
"If you take a hammer and try to drop it through these three inches, nine times out of 10 you wouldn't be able to do it," Livingston said. The hammer's bounce into the roadway was even less likely to be repeated, he said. "Bouncing the hammer off the side of the building or wherever it hit, you couldn't do that again if you tried, but it doesn't matter because it did happen."
The hammer was the third incident of falling debris from the construction site. Work was suspended for more than a month after a 30-inch steel panel flew off the tower last May, landing in the outfield of the nearby Battery Park City ball fields during a Little League game. In December 2007, an architect was paralyzed after a crane operator accidentally dropped several tons of steel onto the office trailer where he was working.
Even with its latest set of additional safety measures in place, committee members at the April 7 meeting seemed to agree that there was no sure safeguard against every conceivable mishap.
“I recognize that you can’t foresee every possible accident, but I do appreciate the steps that they’ve taken to try to remedy this one,” committee member Bill Love said.
Tom Goodkind, another member of the committee, said he believed the community board should have started warning residents and others months ago about the dangers of passing near the Goldman Sachs site.
“No matter what you do at that site, you cannot really prevent an accident,” Goodkind said. “We’re all shocked when one happens. I’ll tell you; I’m not that shocked. It’s more than likely that there will be one or two accidents with every major building going up.”
Asked what advice he could give parents worried for their children’s safety, as well as their own, as they pass by the site, Livingston said there was only one sure way pedestrians could safeguard themselves from falling debris.
“The safest thing you could ever do,” he said, “is avoid the site entirely.”
Prev
Linear Mode
