14
COURIER LIFE, APRIL 8-14, 2022
Safety hazard!
Bklyn topped city in construction
site violations in 2021: report
BY BEN BRACHFELD
Brooklyn has topped
the city’s other four boroughs
in construction site
safety violations two years
in a row, which coincided
with a large number of
workers’ deaths on the job,
according to a new report
from the city’s Department
of Buildings.
City inspectors issued
a whopping 26,255 safety
violations to construction
sites in Brooklyn in 2021,
over 7,000 more than were
issued in second-place
Manhattan last year, according
to the DOB’s second
annual Construction
Safety Report, which was
released March 28. Kings
County also saw the most
stop-work orders by far
with 4,061, substantially
higher than the 2,562 issued
in Manhattan and
2,460 in Queens.
Brooklyn also topped
both rankings in 2020,
with 23,916 violations and
4,787 stop-work orders issued
the year before last.
The number of safety
violations issued by inspectors
increased in all five
boroughs from 2020 to 2021,
while the number of stopwork
orders concurrently
decreased in each borough.
The number of violations in
Brooklyn increased by a little
under 10 percent, while
stop-work orders declined
by about 15 percent.
Nine construction
workers citywide lost their
lives on the job last year,
including three in Brooklyn,
tied with Manhattan
for the most of any borough,
though the number
of deaths in Kings County
is down from the five recorded
in 2020.
All three deaths in
Brooklyn resulted from
falls, the report notes. A
worker died on April 23,
2021 after falling 10 feet to
the ground from a walkway
made of wooden planks on
a job site repairing the facade
A construction worker fell to his death at a Brooklyn Heights Construction
site on Feb. 11. Google Maps
of an apartment building
at 1200 East 53rd Street
in Flatlands. A month later,
on May 27, a 49-year old construction
worker from the
Bronx fell 60 feet to his death
while working on the demolition
of the Flatbush Savings
Bank. Later, in November,
a worker performing
asbestos abatement at 289
Third Ave. in Gowanus fell
through a gap more than a
foot wide between the building
and support scaffolding.
On-site deaths and injuries
both ticked up last year
from the year prior citywide,
going up from eight to
nine deaths and 502 to 505
injuries, though both metrics
decreased in Brooklyn.
The metrics have nonetheless
been on a downward
trend in recent years across
the city, falling from 759
injuries in 2018 to 505 last
year, and from 13 deaths in
2018 to nine in 2021.
The report attributes
the year-over-year increase
in injuries and
deaths to the cessation of
construction work during
the COVID-19 lockdown in
2020, and the longer-term
decrease on updates to the
construction code and new
legislation strengthening
licensing requirements.
“Construction remains
a bedrock industry in our
growing City, and we owe
it to our fellow New Yorkers
to continue to push for safer
work sites for the benefit of
all New Yorkers,” said Acting
DOB Commissioner Gus
Sirakis in a statement. “For
the second year in a row, we
are publishing a comprehensive
report on building
construction safety, so we
can better track incidents
and understand why they
occur. Data analysis like
this is a critical part of our
strategy to help our industry
partners properly safeguard
their work sites.”
Early into this year,
on Feb. 11, a construction
worker fell to his death at a
Brooklyn Heights work site.
Community members rallied
behind victim Angel Pilataxi’s
family, raising more
than $10,000 for funeral
expenses on GoFundMe
in partnership with the
Worker Justice Project.
Hildalyn Colón Hernández,
director of policy and
strategic partnerships at
WJP, says that many incidents
and injuries go unreported,
as workers fear retaliation
for coming forward.
“WJP continues to see
a high amount of construction
workers that suffered
casualties at their job
sites,” Colón Hernández
told Brooklyn Paper. “For
fear of retaliation or just
losing their job & income,
they prefer to follow their
employers’ orders and not
report these accidents to
the authorities.”
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