Dive Brief:
- A New York City building under demolition partially collapsed Friday, killing one worker, 26-year-old Pedro Bacilio, and trapping another beneath the debris for three hours. A total of 17 other workers escaped unharmed, and officials have issued a stop-work order on the project.
- The collapse, according to ABC7, was inside an eight-story building undergoing a gut demolition and was triggered when an adjacent five-story brick townhouse crumbled. The interior debris settled into a precarious V shape, and the injured worker was trapped at the bottom of the V, requiring a prolonged rescue.
- Workers have been demolishing two adjoining buildings at the site — the future home of a 27-story luxury hotel — for several months, one floor at a time. A previous demolition contractor told ABC7 the buildings were structurally sound at the start of the project.
Dive Insight:
Building officials told ABC7 that the owner, Fortuna, LLC, had all required demolition permits, although an engineer related to the project requested a work-stop the day before the collapse so that the building could be fully shored. It unknown whether the employees were performing that shoring work when the building collapsed.
"We're committed to a full investigation of all the other facts related to this," said Rich Chandler, commissioner of the Department of Buildings.
New York City has been experiencing a building boom, and the city’s Department of Buildings said construction-related fatalities in Manhattan nearly doubled between June 2014 and June 2015. Injuries also increased by 34% during that time.
This collapse comes in the wake of two other high-profile collapses in the last several weeks. A parking garage collapsed in Dallas as the contractor carried on pool renovations on the top deck over the garage, leaving more than 200 vehicles trapped. And, in Houston, a massive scaffold collapse at the site of a luxury apartment building injured six workers.
