The New York Times-20080125-Safety Nets In City-s Skies Protect Workers And Passers-by- But Not Always-
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Safety Nets In City's Skies Protect Workers And Passers-by. But Not Always.
In the city of skyscrapers, the skyline is more colorful than ever.
That is the most eye-grabbing result of a safety feature that has become ubiquitous in New York City high-rise construction: the safety net. Required under a 1987 city law, the nets have festooned construction sites from Riverdale to Brighton Beach for more than a decade, and now, amid a record-setting pace of high-rise construction, they are popping up all over.
The netting proved a lifesaver last week, when a construction worker fell from the 42nd floor of the Trump SoHo, a condominium hotel being built at Varick and Spring Streets, and was snared by a net that protruded 10 feet from the side of the building about two floors below where he was working. He was then lowered to the ground safely.
But for another worker, who also fell from the 42nd floor, a similar net proved useless. For reasons that remain under investigation, he fell to the ground and was killed.
For developers, contractors and construction workers, the accident in SoHo on Jan. 15 has raised questions about whether the city's requirement for safety netting, which has generally been applauded, goes far enough.
The current law is good, but has to be policed and enforced, said Michael Gianatasio, an engineer and site-safety consultant who monitors construction-safety procedures for large developers. You have more buildings going up than ever before, a decreased labor force that is sometimes not trained properly, he said.
Everybody wants their jobs done fast and under budget, and sometimes safety gets sacrificed.
Two types of construction netting are required on projects rising at least six stories or 75 feet. Both are intended primarily to prevent tools, planks, pieces of concrete and other debris from falling to the street and threatening lives.
The most visible nets are vertical mesh, usually bright orange, that the city requires builders to wrap around floors that are framed but not yet enclosed by exterior walls. At many construction sites, the netting has created giant towers that appear to be shrink-wrapped against the sky.
The other type of net is the one that saved the worker's life in SoHo. The law requires horizontal nets that protrude 10 feet around the perimeter of construction sites no more than two floors beneath a floor where concrete is being poured into forms, generally at the top floors. The netting must be raised as the building rises.
Nets provide vastly more protection to workers and the public than builders provided during the early days of skyscraper construction, when workers riveting steel girders together high above Manhattan often balanced like tightrope walkers, buffeted by the wind, without nets to stop their tools, lunchboxes or even themselves from falling to the street.
Historical photos show that the city's most famous skyscraper, the Empire State Building, used an early version of safety nets during its construction. Even so, the project proved deadly. Six construction workers died, as did a woman who was struck by a falling plank, said Carol Willis, the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan.
Workers at construction sites in Manhattan said the fatal accident in SoHo was a reminder of the important role of netting.
We wouldn't work here if there weren't safety nets, said Sam Rosstein, 35, a concrete worker at the Lucida, a 22-story residential building going up at 151 East 85th Street.
The risks have increased because of a boom in construction. The city's Department of Buildings said it issued 6,689 permits for new buildings of all types in 2005, the highest number ever.
Although new permits declined in 2006 and 2007, experts said high-rise construction activity peaked after 2005 because there is always a lag between the issuance of permits and the start of work on large projects.
And the number of injuries at high-rise sites has nearly doubled, according to the department's latest report on construction safety, in November, to 42 in the 12 months ended on Nov. 20, 2007, from 23 in the same period a year earlier.
Building code violations involving safety nets also soared, to 58 in 2007 from 38 in 2006, the department said. In October, a steel bucket tumbled 53 stories off the Bank of America tower being built near Bryant Park, sending shards of glass and twisted metal to the sidewalk. In 2006, a three-foot-long pipe fell from The New York Times Building, which was then under construction on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets, and landed on a vehicle. A family of three narrowly escaped injury.
In general, horizontal nets are designed to catch objects weighing 300 pounds or more. The role of the nets in the SoHo accident remains a focus of scrutiny by industry executives and the city.
The nets clearly made a contribution at the Trump site by saving a life, said Louis J. Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers Association. The question on a lot of people's minds is why it didn't stop the fellow who died. It's perplexing.
Construction at the SoHo site was halted immediately after the accident and has not resumed. The project's general contractor, Bovis Lend Lease, and a subcontractor, DiFama Concrete of Brooklyn, had received previous notices of several building code violations at the site, and Bovis was cited for four more violations, including failure to safeguard public safety and property.
Buildings officials have said that the man who died, Yuriy Vanchytskyy, was working with wet concrete at the top of the construction site when plywood forms used to mold the concrete into columns and slabs collapsed. But they said the cause of his death remained unclear.
People in the construction industry have speculated that Mr. Vanchytskyy may have been caught in a blowout, in which a huge volume of wet concrete becomes unstable and rolls off the top of an unfinished high-rise like a river of fast-moving lava, carrying people and debris with it. Mr. Vanchytskyy and the worker who was caught in the safety net fell from different sections of the building.
Robert LiMandri, the first deputy commissioner of the Department of Buildings, said that several questions remain unresolved, but that a huge amount of wet concrete was propelled off the top floors of the site. The safety nets, he said, performed as well as anyone could hope.
No safety net could have stopped it, he said.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: Safety nets festoon apartment towers under construction in Manhattan. A similar net saved one of two workers involved in a construction accident in SoHo last week.(PHOTOGRAPH BY LIBRADO ROMERO/THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. B1); Safety nets, unusual for the time, were used during construction of the Empire State Building. (PHOTOGRAPH BY COLLECTION OF THE SKYSCRAPER MUSEUM)(pg. B4)