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NYC to track contractor safety records

Feb 6, 2008 | AMY WESTFELDT | Business Week Online

City buildings officials want to register contractors to track their safety records and say concrete firms should have safety managers on the job after a spate of accidents at high-rise construction projects.

The Department of Buildings' proposals Monday to make construction sites safer focused on the concrete industry, which Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster said contributed to more than 60 percent of construction accidents last year. A partial concrete collapse was blamed for the death last month of a construction worker who fell more than 40 stories off a Donald Trump tower.

"The construction industry in general, and concrete operations in particular, need more regulation," Lancaster testified at a City Council hearing.

The city will propose legislation requiring general contractors and concrete makers to register for any kind of construction job, so the department could better track its compliance with codes, issue fines or deny permits to unregistered contractors.

High-rise construction accidents more than doubled last year compared with the year before, from 24 to 51, city officials said. U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration area director Richard Mendelson said that most accidents that happen in the city are preventable and are on nonunion sites.

Besides the death at the Trump building in downtown Manhattan, a construction worker was killed last week when a scaffold collapsed on a condominium project in Brooklyn. A window washer was killed and his brother was critically injured falling off a Manhattan scaffold in December.

Construction officials issued some separate safety proposals -- including doubling training time for site safety managers -- and said that accidents at more high-profile projects have received unwarranted attention. Most of the accidents occur at low-rise buildings and nonunion jobs, said Louis Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers' Association.

"There is nothing magical about safety when building a high-rise project," he said. "Safety hazards to the public and the workers don't disappear on low-rise projects."

Coletti said the industry would support registering contractors if it applied to all work that required city buildings permits, depending on what the requirements were.

Lancaster did not propose a change in the two-day cycle the city's construction industry has long used to build and set concrete floors; elsewhere, the standard is closer to four days.

At Monday's hearing, Lancaster was asked whether site safety managers who don't report directly to the contractors would do a better job. City Councilman Alan Gerson suggested inspectors from the fire department. Lancaster said she'd consider it but said the point was to spur contractors to value safety.

"People tend to behave the way the boss tells them to," she said.