Two days after a worker’s hammer plummeted 17 stories from the construction site of the Goldman Sachs tower, smashing the rear window of a passing taxi, contrite construction officials presented concerned residents with a list of safety measures intended to prevent further life-threatening accidents. It was the third incident of debris falling from the construction site, at Vesey and West Streets in Battery Park City, in less than three years.

 

No one was injured in the incident, which occurred Wednesday morning, April 1, on Murray Street as children walked to nearby P.S. 89.  The meeting, held at Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s district office Friday, April 3, drew several members of Community Board 1, P.S. 89 administrators, and parents who walk and drive past the site to pick up and drop off their children at the school.

Silver, who chaired the meeting, said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein telephoned him the day after the incident to apologize and Goldman and Tishman executives at the meeting pledged their commitment to safety, unveiling a list of measures designed to prevent the sort of accident that happened on Wednesday.

“We want every safety issue to be addressed, we want to be perfect as best we can—it’s just difficult to do that," said Tishman Construction president John Livingston. "We are terribly sorry, we try as hard as we can and we continue to.”

The DOB issued Tishman Construction, the lead contractor for the tower, a violation for failing to secure the site against falling debris, and stopped all work on the site pending its inspection.

Structure Tone CEO Robert Mullen, whose company is constructing the building’s interiors, demonstrated to Silver and others at the meeting how the hammer was dislodged from a carpenter’s tool belt when the worker shut the vertical doors of the hoist elevator he was using on Wednesday morning.

The worker, Mullen said, was standing close to the door in order to shut it and as he did, the door caught the bottom handle of the hammer, pushing it up and out of the toolbelt. The hammer then fell through the three-inch gap between the hoist elevator and the building, he said.

Hoist operators are employed to run the elevators but in the past tradesmen have often shut the doors themselves as a courtesy to the operators who sit several feet away at their controls, Tishman executive vice president Rob Blackman said.

“It’s something that’s been traditional in our industry for years and years,” he said. “Is it the safest way to do it? No.”

In response to the incident, Tishman issued a directive to create a brightly painted no-standing zone in the hoist elevators to ensure that workers don’t get too close to the closing doors. The company has instituted a $5,000 fine to anyone who is caught trying to shut the hoist doors other than anyone authorized to operate the hoists. As an added measure, Tishman now requires workers’ tools to be tethered or placed in buckets or toolbags while transported from floor to floor. Loose tools are forbidden in exterior construction work but are not usually regulated in the sort of interior work going on at the Goldman tower.

 

The Department of Buildings issued Tishman Construction violation for failing to secure the site against falling debris, and stopped all work on the site pending its inspection, leaving the building’s construction workers unpaid until work can resume. Tishman officials said they hope to fulfill the DOB’s requirements and get employees back to work early next week.

“For the department to issue a stop work order that puts 1,700 employees out of work is a significant decision,” said DOB Assistant Commissioner Christopher Santulli. “When something falls off a building and jeopardizes the public, that’s why we do that.”

 

Tishman officials said they hope to resume work at the site next week, pending DOB approval.

The hammer was the third incident of falling debris from the construction site. Work was suspended for more than a month after a 30-inch steel panel flew off the tower last May, landing in the outfield of the nearby Battery Park City ball fields during a Little League game. In December 2007, an architect was paralyzed after a crane operator accidentally dropped several tons of steel onto the office trailer where he was working.

Mark Costello, a member of Community Board 1 and a former president of the Downtown Little League, was concerned that netting put in place according to an agreement after last May’s incident didn’t catch the hammer.

 

“In construction you can have cataclysmic events, and then there are the little stupid things that fall, bundles of wire and wrenches, but when they fall 230 feet, it becomes pretty serious business,” Costello said. “The whole point of the netting was to keep little objects in, a low cost way to bring that to zero.”

 

Blackman said that the netting was properly erected and maintained but explained that it can’t be placed in the gap between the moving lift and building because it would risk getting caught in the machinery. A sidewalk shed at the ground-level should have shielded pedestrians from any falling debris but Tishman officials think the rubber-handled hammer bounced–either off of the building or the hoist's vertical track–somewhere along its downward path, sending out into the street.

“It’s such a series of random events, you could never do it yourself,” Livingston said. “You couldn’t drop it and say I’m going to make sure it bounces here, here, here and here and lands over there. There’s no excuse for it but that’s what happened. It was a freak accident.”

Several parents remained skeptical of the safety measures. Costello, who is concerned about the start of Little League practices at the ball fields on April 11, said he was not convinced that, without netting, objects other objects could fall through the between the elevators and the building.   

“It’s very hard for me to believe that there’s no way to engineer a solution to random things falling off buildings,” Costello said.

And Carol Coleman, the mother of two P.S. 89 students, wondered if the measures provided for every possible contingency.

“If a child had died that day, would they be implementing things differently than they’re proposing?” she asked.

P.S. 89 PTA President Carolyn Happy and fellow parents Anne Albright and Nellie Lillie said they were satisfied with the new safety measures but would continue avoiding the construction site when they take their children to school.