Editorial

Construction safety for the kids . . . and everyone else

Downtown Little League players and parents luckily escaped death Saturday when a piece of metal fell off the Goldman Sachs building under construction and crashed onto the Battery Park City ballfields across the street.

It was yet another reminder of how unsafe building construction and demolitions are all over the city and in Lower Manhattan in particular.

After a tower crane accident killed seven people in Midtown in March, city inspections of cranes found problems with three in Lower Manhattan including at Goldman.

The chronically dysfunctional Buildings Dept. did not inspect the Deutsche Bank’s standpipe before last August’s fatal fire across from the World Trade Center site, nor did it step in and warn the public about the serious safety violations it was uncovering.

There were signs this week that the city Buildings Dept. may finally be getting the message that things must change. We were pleasantly shocked to learn that not only will Goldman and its contractor, Tishman Construction Corp., have to come up with a new and better safety plan, but the Buildings Dept. will not let the firms resume work in Battery Park City until they present the plan to Community Board 1 at a public meeting. This type of deference and respect to community review is long overdue.

But community review, better safety on one project, and the city’s recent announcement about hiring 63 new inspectors and other personnel is far from enough. There are clear problems with safety regulations and they need to be overhauled.

The dirty little secret about construction in the city is that deaths are not uncommon. Government leaders and developers have been looking the other way for decades.

Assemblymember Deborah Glick, in a recent op-ed we published, argued convincingly that the city has let the construction boom continue without slowing things down to fix the obvious safety problems.

In the wake of the Goldman accident, Councilmember Alan Gerson has proposed the city take a close look at the tighter construction regulations in London and the European Union. In London, materials being transported up and down on hoists are required to be secured — a regulation that probably would have prevented the Goldman accident.

Saturday’s high winds may have also contributed to the accident. It is clear that better, clearer and safer wind regulations and protections are also needed.

The ballfields are not only vulnerable to the Goldman project, but they are even closer to two residential towers that are being built by Milstein Properties. Better safety measures must be in place before these towers rise from the ground.

There is an understandable sensitivity to construction safety near the fields where children play, but safety must be improved everywhere. Pedestrians, drivers and of course construction workers are near large construction projects every day and need better protection.

Better safety almost undoubtedly will mean higher construction costs, but if a developer raises that issue, find out if he’s willing to tell a grieving parent how much money he saved by blocking a safety regulation.