Broadway Legend Joined: 3/20/04
This one on the Upper East Side...91st and 1st Ave. 100 fire fighters on the scene & a large number of other emergency personnel.
Took off the balconies of the building next to it.
Good lord.
Two dead so far.
This is an outrage! After the last one, something was supposed to be done about these crane collapses. I'm furious. And horrified. Those poor people.
What's causing them to collapse? Faulty equipment? Human error? Unstable ground?
Or are the cranes just too damn big and hard to control anymore?
I'm wondering if there's a significant contributing factor.
I heard the sound of helicopters just as the story came on the radio - I looked out the window and counted 8 hovering over the scene.
Eastsiders, can you report in, please?
I'm not as forgiving as you are, Besty. I'm guessing failure and/or careless about doing one's job. All around.
Unbelievable. Here's hoping the death toll is low.
Best12bars, I'm guessing one contributing factor is hubris.


Broadway Legend Joined: 12/28/04
Worth a thousand words.
Glad you're OK, Iflit.
Broadway Legend Joined: 12/31/69
My God.
Did you take those, iflit?


Broadway Legend Joined: 12/28/04
That last photo is very poignant.
There is SO much construction going on in this city, and it's not like you can even avoid walking past a site where you see a crane. If one collapses, the damage can be blocks around.
Oh, how awful! How many of these crane collapses have there been recently?
The last one was March 15, andd before that, there were several but not so close together. I'm guessing there have been about 6 recently. Just a guess.
I'm listening to the reporters discuss this. They are mentioning how an examination will be done to determine how sound the crane was, which parts may have been defective, etc.
Question- how can they determine this when the crane is now a pile of rubble in the street, and that the parts are now all unsound?
Yeah, I'm guessing none of those parts work very well now.
Broadway Legend Joined: 12/28/04
The same way they can find stress and wear in the metal wreckage of a plane. They'll reconstruct the entire crane from the piece and see where the intial breaking point was.
Heads are going to continue to roll over this.
After the March crane collapse (which was 2 blocks from my apartment), they supposedly inspected all the cranes in the city, but I think the building inspectors have been taking massive payoffs for decades.
The real problem is that there is too much high-rise development in the city, and as the real-estate market has been tightening, they builders are cutting corners and doing things on the cheap.
NO high-rise is worth human life.
The crane was apparently "jumping" on Friday and was inspected and found to be safe. Guess they were wrong.
Broadway Legend Joined: 11/2/05
Why is it I'm only hearing about these types of things happening in NYC? There's high-rise construction going on all over the place - I was just in Seattle, and there're many visible cranes. But I only hear about accidents in NYC. Is it happening, and just not considered national news? I can't imagine that.
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