Atleast four people were killed and over a dozen people were killed when a crane towering over a high-rise construction site in the east side of Manhattan came crashing down. It came down slashing an apartment building, breaking into sections cutting away a tenement facade and crushing a town house.
The damage is supposed to run into millions of dollars and is one of the city’s worst accidents.
photo credit: mrgeneko
Christopher Bianchi, 40, of Manhattan, owner of Crave Ceviche Bar on Second Avenue, said he saw three bodies on stretchers in the street. “Their heads were covered,” he said. “One of the police was giving last rites.”
While the people were evacuated from a half-dozen buildings and rescue workers using dogs, listening devices and thermal imaging cameras searched the rubble for victims, taking care to cause no further collapses, the mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg said the four known dead were believed to be construction workers on or near the crane. The injured included at least three civilians taken to hospitals in critical condition.
photo credit: mrgeneko
One man was pulled from the debris nearly four hours after the collapse.
The mayor said that the collapse occurred when workers attempted raise the crane’s height to enable work to continue above the 19th floor of a planned 43-storey building. Builders had city permission to raise the crane, and the crane had been inspected on Friday, with no violations found.
photo credit: mrgeneko
The collapse occurred at 2:22 p.m. as the crane, about 22 stories tall and attached by girders to the apartment tower under construction at 303 East 51st Street, east of Second Avenue, broke away from its anchors and toppled south, across the block between 51st and 50th Streets. The swinging arm that lifts building materials — fell across 51st Street and onto a 19-storey apartment building at No. 300, demolishing a penthouse and shaking the building with the force of an earthquake.
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