Crane Accidents

compiled
by
The Chinatown Core Block
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2019
Crane Accident Leaves At Least 10 Injured In
Midtown
CBS New York
May 31, 2015
A massive air conditioning unit being lifted by a crane in Midtown Manhattan fell about 28 stories Sunday
morning.

Ten people were hurt, but their injuries are not considered to be life-threatening, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

“It’s obviously a very serious incident. There’s going to be a full investigation,” the mayor vowed.

De Blasio said two of the injured are construction workers, the others include pedestrians and people who
were inside passing cars. All were hit by falling debris.

Police said the call came in around 10:45 a.m. Sunday. Officers who responded to 261 Madison Ave., a
high-rise building between East 38th and East 39th streets, found that a crane’s payload heading to the roof
of the building had broken free.

The 30,000 pound piece of equipment struck the building three times, CBS2’s Hazel Sanchez reported.

The falling equipment created a trail of damage along the building’s facade. A large opening can be seen at
the top of the building, WCBS 880’s Jim Smith reported.

Chunks of concrete, glass and steel rained down on the sidewalk, 1010 WINS’ Derricke Dennis reported.

The impact was so devastating the windows in the building across the street were smashed, CBS2’s Steve
Langford reported.

“There’s a number of setbacks in front of that building and we’re lucky that this piece of equipment didn’t
fall directly into one of those setback roofs and go through the building,” said FDNY Assistant Chief
Ronald Spadafora.

The air conditioner fell onto the rear of a passing car below, and the vehicle then crashed into a fire
hydrant, Smith reported.

It’s not clear why the load fell. The city’s Department of Buildings said there were proper permits for
construction at the site.

“We have no complaints at all about this device,” said NYC Buildings Department Commissioner Rick
Chandler. “We think this device, in this very preliminary stage, is in good shape.”

James McCarrick told Langford he snapped a photo of the equipment high above just a few minutes before
the accident because he thought it didn’t look safe.

“It was obviously a dangerous possibility that someone could get hurt,” he said. “I was curious about
whether the unit itself that they were lifting it was adequately secured.”

A security guard who works across the street told Smith he narrowly avoided being struck. He chased a
woman into a building to try to get proper identification from her.
“If I hadn’t entered the building, I would have just died immediately, literally,” he said.

Steve, who works at a nearby food market, told 1010 WINS’ Roger Stern he thought it was a building
explosion.

“I got a little scared, you know, living in the city now a days it’s a 50-50 percent chance that a building’s
gonna fall on you or some kind of an explosion or something, so it’s kind of scary,” he said.

Isaac Walker, a concierge at the nearby Andaz Hotel, said he was also worried when he heard the
commotion.

“I heard a lot of helicopters, there was a police cruiser that came down here just speeding with the lights
on, I heard fire ambulances; I mean at least five minutes of this,” he said.

Walker said he was relieved to hear it wasn’t a terror attack and even more relieved to know everyone was
expected to be OK.

Streets have been closed in the surrounding area as emergency responders work at the scene. The area has
been secured, officials said.
Crane Collapse in Lower Manhattan Kills One
Person
New York Times
By Rick Rojas and Emma G. Fitzsimmons
Feb. 5, 2016
The crew operating a crane in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning took note of the wind gusts
accompanying the falling snow.

The workers, officials said, decided they needed to lower the crane to a secure level, and so around 8 a.m.,
they began to bring down its boom, which stretched 565 feet toward the sky.

But instead of a steady, controlled descent, the crane began to topple over suddenly before plunging into a
free fall and crashing onto Worth Street in TriBeCa.

A man walking on the street was killed by the falling crane, and the surrounding blocks were littered with
debris and stricken by panic as people who had been headed to work fled from what some thought was a
bomb exploding.

“It shook the building,” said Robert Harold, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, who heard an enormous
crash from his office on Worth Street and then saw the crane on the street. “You could feel the vibration.”

Image

The crane, known as a crawler, collapsed on Friday as a crew tried to secure it amid wind gusts. It was
being used to install generators and air-conditioning units atop 60 Hudson Street.CreditStephanie Keith for
The New York Times

Three other people were injured. Two of them were hospitalized with serious injuries from debris tossed
off by the collapse, which left tangled wreckage stretched over roughly two full blocks.

More than 140 firefighters converged on the scene, along with scores of police officers and utility workers
dispatched to handle gas leaks and other damage caused by the impact.

For all the commotion that shook the neighborhood, not far from City Hall and the state and federal
courthouses, Mayor Bill de Blasio said it was remarkable that the human toll was not worse.

“You can see how powerful the damage was,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference near the scene, “but
you can also see, again, that it was something of a miracle that there wasn’t more impact.”

“And thank God,” he added, “we didn’t have more injuries and we didn’t lose more people.”
The authorities identified the man killed on Friday as David Wichs, 38, who lived on the Upper West Side
of Manhattan. Mr. Wichs was born in Prague and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, and later
received a mathematics degree from Harvard, his sister-in-law, Lisa Guttman, told The Associated Press.

A 45-year-old woman injured her leg and had a cut on her head, and a 73-year-old man sustained a head
wound, officials said. Both were in stable condition at Manhattan hospitals. A third person had minor
injuries.

The crane, known as a crawler, was being used to install generators and air-conditioning units atop 60
Hudson Street, the former Western Union building, and had been inspected by the Buildings Department
on Thursday to approve an extension to its present length, officials said.

With the capacity to carry as much as 330 tons, the crane was “very, very large,” said Rick Chandler, the
buildings commissioner. Mr. de Blasio said it was rated to withstand wind gusts of up to 25 miles per hour,
but as the wind neared 20 m.p.h. on Friday, the crew decided to secure it.

The crane was being operated by Galasso Trucking and Rigging, in Maspeth, Queens. The company’s
chief executive, Frank Galasso, did not immediately respond to a message for comment.

As a precaution, officials ordered that 376 other crawler cranes currently operating in the city, as well as
43 of the larger tower cranes, be secured, the mayor said.

The damage from the fall caused leaks in a water main and in multiple gas lines, though officials said
those leaks had not reached dangerous levels. Nonetheless, gas service in the immediate area was shut off.
Many streets were also closed, and subways lines skipped nearby stops. Officials said the disruptions were
expected to continue at least through the weekend.

The Police Department and the Buildings Department have opened investigations into the collapse.

The episode comes amid a construction surge in New York that has made the long booms of cranes
ubiquitous fixtures across the skyline.

There has also been a spike in construction fatalities in the city over the past two years. An investigation
by The New York Times in November found that the rise in deaths as well as injuries had far exceeded the
rate of new construction over the same period, that supervision at building sites was often lacking, and that
basic safety steps were not being taken to prevent workers from falling.

Many of the cases examined by The Times involved individual workers toiling on smaller projects in
rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. But the dangers posed by construction cranes have long been part of
the New York streetscape, as well.

With construction accidents a growing cause for concern in recent years, the city has responded by hiring
more building inspectors. The mayor said crane safety had improved significantly since 2008, when
several people were killed in crane accidents on Manhattan’s East Side.
“I want people to hear me loud and clear: We’ve had some construction site incidents that are very
troubling,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We have more and more inspectors who are going to get on top of that.
We’re going to be very tough on those companies.”

“This is a totally different matter,” he added. “This was a company that was putting their crane into the
secure position as we would have wanted them to.”

In 2012, one person was killed and four others were hurt when a 170-foot crane collapsed at a construction
site for the extension of the No. 7 train. Last year, a crane dropped an air-conditioning unit 28 stories to the
street in Midtown Manhattan. Seven people suffered minor injuries in that episode.

Roughly 300 large cranes are in operation in the city at any given time, said Scott M. Stringer, the city
comptroller. On Friday, Mr. Stringer cited two recent audits while repeating earlier criticisms of the
Buildings Department’s oversight of cranes.

“This report, and every major crane accident afterward, should be a wake-up call,” he said. But, he added,
the Buildings Department “keeps sleeping on the job.”

Joe Soldevere, a spokesman for the Buildings Department, said the city had already adopted many of Mr.
Stringer’s recommendations. “We need to all focus on responding to this emergency, not clouding the
facts,” he said. “There is more oversight of cranes in place than ever before.”

Mr. Soldevere said the city had six crane inspectors and no inspection backlog. He also said the
department would be hiring additional crane inspectors — and 100 additional inspectors over all — to
bolster the de Blasio administration’s efforts to improve construction safety.

In TriBeCa, some in the neighborhood said they had noticed the arrival of the crane that came crashing
down on Friday. It was installed on Jan. 30.

Wajid Hayat, who works at a sandwich shop near the site of the collapse, said the crane caught his
attention as he left work on Thursday evening. People were taking photographs of it because of its height,
he said.

“When I saw the crane, it was looking very scary, like it was shaking,” Mr. Hayat said. “I thought, ‘The
snow is coming, maybe something could happen.’”

Those who were nearby when the equipment fell said the collapse was terrifying. Veronica Keegan, 57,
was walking on Duane Street when she heard one clang after another; she feared a building was
collapsing. “I heard what sounded like bending metal and it got louder,” she said.

“I was petrified,” she added. “I was going to run for shelter.”

Julia Cheiffetz, 37, was leaving a doctor’s office at 40 Worth Street around 8:20 a.m. when she heard a
creaking noise and a grumble. At that point, debris began to fall from the sky. Thinking a bomb might have
gone off, she covered her head and sprinted toward Church Street as the crane tumbled down not far away.
Her leg was injured when it was hit by some of the falling debris.
Ms. Cheiffetz, an executive editor at HarperCollins, said she did not see any construction workers clearing
the street.

“It was like something out of a ‘Transformers’ movie,” she said, “where some giant thing comes out of the
sky.”

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, David W. Chen, Sandra E. Garcia, James C. McKinley Jr.,
William K. Rashbaum and Noah Remnick, and research by Susan C. Beachy.
Seven Injured After Crane Collapses in Queens

City Room
BY RAVI SOMAIYA AND MARC SANTORA
JANUARY 9, 2013
A 300-foot crane collapsed on Wednesday, toppling onto a building under construction in Long Island
City, Queens, trapping three workers in twisted metal and injuring seven.

The collapse occurred around 2:30 p.m. as the crane was lifting a load, the authorities said. None of the
injuries were life-threatening, said Deputy Chief Mark Ferran of the Fire Department. The authorities
declined to immediately identify those involved.

There was no immediate explanation for why the crane, at 46-10 Center Boulevard, just behind the famous
Pepsi-Cola sign on the East River, collapsed. Chief Ferran said that an investigation was under way.

Preston White, 48, a carpenter working at the site, said a cable attached to the crane had snapped. “I turned
around, and I could see it recoiling,” Mr. White said. “People were running.”

Another carpenter, Marco McFarlane, 34, said he had been working in the area where the crane collapsed.
When he heard the crash, he ran back and found his partner pinned under the crane.

“When I got to him, all he could say was, ‘We couldn’t move fast enough,’//” Mr. McFarlane said. “He
had tears in his eyes.”

The mangled red crane smashed onto plywood and concrete, and wreckage could be seen stretching for
hundreds of feet on Wednesday afternoon.

The construction site is a planned 26-story residential tower, part of a development project by TF
Cornerstone. Several neighboring buildings that are part of the project, known as EastCoast, are completed
and filled with residents. None of those appeared damaged.

The concrete subcontractor, Cross Country Construction of Elmsford, N.Y., was responsible for the work
currently under way, said Frank Marino, a spokesman for TF Cornerstone. The owner of Cross Country,
Lawrence Lane, said the company was cooperating with city officials in the investigation.

The New York Crane and Equipment Corporation, which owns the crane, was involved in a 2008 accident
in Manhattan that left two people dead.

The company’s owner, James F. Lomma, was tried and acquitted on charges of manslaughter. During the
two-month trial, prosecutors said Mr. Lomma had relied on an unqualified Chinese company to make
repairs to the crane.

The defense argued that the accident occurred after the crane operator tried to lift an excessively heavy
load, causing the line to snap.

New York Crane and Equipment did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on
Wednesday evening.
Cable in deadly crane accident couldn’t support steel
beam
New York Post
By Georgett Roberts and Natalie Musumeci
November 23, 2016
The crane cable that snapped and sent a 6,500-pound steel beam falling from four stories — killing two
workers — was not strong enough to support the load, a source at the Queens worksite told The Post
Wednesday.

“The beam was too heavy for the cable. They should have used stronger cable to carry that amount of
weight,” the source said.

Crane operator George Smith, 47, and worker Elizandro Ramos, 43, were killed when the I-beam
plummeted onto the top of the cab in Briarwood Tuesday.

Winds were gusting at close to 40 mph at the time – above the legal city limit of 30 mph to operate – but
“wind played no role in the accident,” the source declared.

The city is still investigating whether winds were a factor, but officials said that it is not likely and that the
rigging rope may have failed.

Ramos’ devastated partner Santos Morales who was helping guide the beam, said that Ramos was having
problems on his end.

“He was trying to put his in. He couldn’t put it in. I don’t know why,” said Morales. “The beam hit him in
the head and he fell. He fell on his back.”

“I’m feeling weak. He was my friend. He had three babies [aged 16, 10, and 5], all girls,” Morales said.

Workers at the jobsite at 82nd Avenue and 134th Street Wednesday were securing already in-place beams
on the project, but were unable to do any more since the city Buildings Department – which is
investigating the incident – issued a stop-work order.

The killer beam was taken away on a flatbed truck to a police facility for further investigation, a source
said. The crane was also slated to be taken away.

City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in a statement, “The Council is deeply concerned by the
recent spate of crane and construction related accidents which have taken the lives of far too many New
Yorkers.

“Two more workers died yesterday and our hearts go out to their families. The City can, and must do a
better job at preventing these needless and devastating deaths, which too often, may be prevented by
stronger enforcement and regulations,” the statement read.

An “oversight hearing” will be convened in the “near future to “examine best practices to ensure these
avoidable tragedies never happen again,” according to the statement.
Crane collapses on Tappan Zee Bridge outside New
York City, at least 5 hurt

FOX News U.S

July 19, 2016
NEW YORK – A huge crane toppled off the new Tappan Zee Bridge under construction and collapsed
across the busy span it is replacing, bringing cars to a halt midday Tuesday on the key Hudson River
crossing north of New York City.

"Miraculously, there were no serious injuries," said Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who briefed
reporters at the scene. "If you said to me that a boom could fall across the Tappan Zee Bridge at noon, not
hit a car... I would not believe it."

Cuomo said the crane was performing routine work on the new bridge, driving pilings into the river
bottom, and it was unclear what caused the crane's boom to fall across the entire 90-foot, seven-lane width
of the old bridge. Cars swerved to avoid the machinery, and at least one person was loaded into an
ambulance, but no one was seriously hurt.

Cuomo said he would not allow traffic back on the bridge until inspectors determine it is safe. It wasn't
clear when that inspection would be complete, but Cuomo said it would take at least several hours.

"As you know it's an old bridge," he said. "That's why we're replacing it in the first place."

Nicholas D'Emealio, 21, of Irvington, was in a vehicle about three football fields away from the crane,
toward the center of the bridge, when he heard a bang and his driver slammed on the brakes.

"It shook the whole bridge," he said. "At first I thought the bridge was collapsing because this is not a
good bridge."

Everybody was OK, but they were stranded. He and his friends got out of their vehicle and threw around a
football to pass the time.

The base and treads of the large, movable crane sat on the unfinished new bridge, which crosses the river
between Westchester and Rockland counties. After the crash, several boats carrying emergency workers
maneuvered in the river around the collapsed crane arm, while other workers appeared to be scanning the
water around the wreck.

Rockland County had a helicopter and marine unit at the scene, according to Rockland County Executive
Ed Day. The county executive tweeted that the crane operator was shaken but not hurt.

The new Tappan Zee Bridge has been under construction for three years and is expected to be completed
by 2018 at a cost of $3.9 billion. It is being built alongside the original Tappan Zee span, which dates to
1955.

In March, a 90-foot tugboat sank after it hit a construction barge near the bridge site, killing three crew
members.

In 2013, a powerboat plowed into a construction barge at the bridge, killing a bride-to-be and her fiance's
best man. The boat's driver, who had nearly twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system, pleaded guilty to
vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to two years behind bars. The victims' families, however,
attributed the crash mainly to bad lighting on the barge.
The Investigators: High-tech crane at center of
Tappan Zee collapse investigation
ABC7 New York
By Jim Hoffer
July 20, 2016
As the investigation continues into the Tappan Zee Bridge crane collapse, the Eyewitness News
Investigators have learned that the crane is the newest high-tech crane now being used on construction
projects.

There are more cranes operating at this bridge site than anywhere in the nation and until Tuesday the huge
construction project had just three minor safety violations.

Now it's the site of a major accident investigation and at the center of it, a cutting-edge, highly
computerized crane.

Of the 28 cranes building the massive 3-mile long bridge, one model really stands out: the MLC-300, a
new, ground-breaking, high-tech crane, known for its automated computerized counterweight system that
allows for quick set-up and heavy-lifts.

Its revolutionary qualities were touted in a recent promotional video, with a crane worker saying
"Assembly was very easy with the MLC300, put it up and within a day had crane fully assembled."

Now this state-of-the-art crane is at the center of an investigation after suddenly collapsing while
hammering in bridge pilings.

"They're the leaders of the industry," said crane accident consultant James Pritchett.

Pritchett says Manitowoc of Wisconsin manufacturers the new MLC-300. He says they are the best in the
crane business.

"They go through so much quality control dealing with these cranes. I couldn't ask for a better crane," he
said.

We've learned the crane had been in operation at the bridge for a few months. Pictures from the website
Earthcam shows the crane doing piling work just minutes before it collapsed.

There appears to be no problem. The question is how did this brand new crane with the latest safety
technology end up in broken bits of metal.

"You have to analyze all aspects," said Pritchett.

Including looking at whether vibrations from hammering in the pilings possibly damaged the crane or was
it a manufacturer defect, experts tell us however, brand new cranes rarely come crashing down on their
own.

"Cranes today lift tremendous loads, high-tech, so dependent on individual operating the crane
programming it correctly and run it in accordance with manufacturer specs, the likelihood of an accident is
very minimal," said Pritchett.

We've learned investigators are looking closely at what role, if any, the hydraulic hammering of the bridge
piles played in the collapse, specifically whether any weight-overload caused sudden stress on the crane.

Too early to tell, we're told that a team of federal safety investigators could take months to determine an
exact cause.
2 Workers Killed in Crane Accident in Queens:
NYPD
NBC New York
By Gus Rosendale and Ida Siegal
November 22, 2016
An investigation is underway after a beam fell on a crane at a construction site in Queens, killing two
workers, the NYC Department of Buildings said.

The crane was lifting a 6,500-pound beam when the beam came loose, crushing the operator in the crane
cab, DOB officials say. The 47-year-old crane operator, identified by police as George Smith of Brooklyn,
and a flag man on the ground, identified as 43-year-old Alessandro Ramos of Jamaica, Queens, were
killed.

"This was a tragic accident - two people will not be going home to see their families tonight," NYC
Department of Buildings Commissioner Rick Chandler said.

The construction site is in Briarwood near where the Van Wyck Expressway meets the Grand Central and
Jackie Robinson parkways.

NYC Community Alliance for Workers Justice crane operators advocate Eddie Jorge said, while he did not
know the details of the accident, it was not safe to operate cranes while winds were gusting at more than
40 mph - as they were on Tuesday.

"These workers go into work everyday not knowing of they're going to come back home. That shouldn't be
a price that you pay with your life," he said.

Last winter high winds contributed to a deadly crane collapse in Tribeca, prompting the city to enact new
regulations for crane operations on windy days.

However, Chandler said it was unlikely wind played a role in Tuesday's incident.

"At this time, it appears that there was likely a rigging failure that resulted in the beam coming loose and
falling to the ground.

"However, we have not made any final determinations," he said.

Neither the company the crane operators worked for, CRV Precast Construction, nor the crane supplier,
Cranes Express, had any comment on the incident.

The Buildings Department said the work site had no open violations and the crane operator had no
discipline history. The crane had passed its annual inspection in June 2016.

The men's remains were trapped for much of the day by tons of steel. The medical examiner arrived late
Tuesday afternoon.

Neighbors say the construction is an extension of an apartment complex.

Operator Is at Fault for Fatal Crane Accident, City
Finds
New York Times
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons
December 9, 2016
The operator of a crane that collapsed and killed one person in Lower Manhattan in February failed to
properly lower the boom and was responsible for the accident, New York City officials said on Friday.

After an investigation by the city’s Buildings Department, officials suspended the license of the crane’s
operator, Kevin Reilly, and moved to revoke it permanently.

The giant crane collapsed on a gusty morning, leading the city to tighten rules for cranes operating in high
winds. A man walking on the street, David Wichs, was killed, and three other people were injured.

Mr. Reilly had failed to secure the crane the night before the crash and lowered the boom of the crane at an
improper angle, causing the crane to become unstable, officials said. The department said it would work
with the City Council on rules to improve safety, including tougher licensing requirements for crane
operators.

“The crane operator involved in this incident acted recklessly, with tragic results,” Rick D. Chandler, the
city’s buildings commissioner, said in a statement. “The actions we’re taking should send the message to
everyone in the construction industry that safety must come first.”

A lawyer for Mr. Reilly, Stacey Richman, declined to comment on the findings, and said she had not
finished reviewing the city’s report.

Last month, a crane operator and a construction worker were killed in Queens when a steel beam fell from
a crane on a windy day. Officials are investigating the accident and said it appeared there was a problem
with the crane’s rigging, unrelated to the wind.

In the February accident, a video captured the red crane falling and crashing on to the street below. The
crane’s boom was 565 feet long, leaving debris scattered across roughly two blocks of Worth Street in
TriBeCa. The city’s investigation found that the crane did not have any structural or mechanical failures,
officials said.

Mr. Wichs, 38, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia when he was a teenager, was heading to his job at a
trading firm in Lower Manhattan when he was killed. He was married and had a degree in mathematics
from Harvard.
Construction workers seriously injured, trapped in
crane accident
New York Post
By Tina Moore and Bruce Golding
June 20, 2017
Three hardhats were injured — two critically — when a load of building materials smashed through the
roof of the Queens home they were working in Tuesday afternoon, fire officials said.

The workers were in the basement of 31-25 28th Road in Long Island City when the mishap occurred
around 3:40 p.m.

Two of the men were quickly pulled out of the rubble and rushed to Elmhurst Hospital, but it took
firefighters about two hours to rescue the third.

“[Firefighters] crawled in there, they administered IV drugs for crushing injuries, pain relief and kept this
person stable as our members dug through these few thousand pounds of material to get this gentleman
out,” FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.

FDNY Lt. Frederick Ill, who oversaw the rescue, said the worker “was pinned from his face all the way to
his ankles, horizontally.”

“We used spreaders, cutters, saws — every tool we have on our rig, we used today,” he said.

The incident was blamed on a bundle of laminated beams, concrete blocks and bags of cement that a crane
operator hoisted onto the brick building’s roof for use in constructing its third-floor addition.

But load was too heavy, sending the materials “right through the roof into the cellar,” Nigro said.

A city Buildings Department official, Timothy Hogan, said the agency was investigating whether an
engineer had approved delivering the material to the roof instead of at ground level, as required by law.

The third injured man was in serious condition.

Crane driver busted for drunken rampage on highway
New York Post
By Lia Eustachewich
July 11, 2018
A brave cop thwarted a crane driver’s drunken wrecking spree on the Long Island Expressway — by
jumping into the passenger side of the vehicle to get him to stop, police said.

Brian Sinclair, 47, was allegedly tipsy when he hopped into his 2000 Liebherr crane and embarked on a
nearly nine-mile journey eastbound on the LIE on Tuesday, according to Suffolk County Police.

The Riverhead resident entered the highway at Ronkonkoma — and first crashed into a 1999 Nissan
Altima around 6:20 p.m. just west of Exit 57. He then barreled into a 2015 Jeep Cherokee, 2008 Honda
Civic and 2018 Toyota RAV4.

All of the cars were also traveling eastbound.

But Sinclair didn’t stop there, police said.

The defiant hardhat allegedly bolted from the scene in the crane and was spotted by Highway Patrol
Officer Joseph Goss driving erratically near Exit 60.

The crane slowed down — but only stopped when Goss made a daredevil jump into the passenger
compartment of the crane.

The cop said he knew he had to act fast to get the crane to stop because “that thing is a tank going down
the road.”

“I thought he was going to crash and kill somebody. We’ve had a lot of bad accidents on the Long Island
Expressway in the last couple weeks with the heavy summer traffic, so I was absolutely concerned,” Goss
said at a press conference, according to ABC 7.

“My primary goal was getting that car stopped and just keeping other motorists away from him because if
he made a slight contact, it would just shred their car apart.”

Sinclair finally stopped near Exit 63 and was arrested.

“The only thing he said to me the entire was, ‘What’s up?’ Fortunately, there wasn’t much contact inside
the cabin of the vehicle,” Goss said, adding that there were other police officers surrounding the crane.

On Wednesday, he was escorted out of the Sixth Precinct in Selden cuffed behind his back — and wearing
a black t-shirt bearing the company name “Bay Crane.”

The driver of the Nissan, a 26-year-old man, was taken to Stony Brook University Hospital with minor
injuries.

The drivers of the Honda and Toyota, a 22-year-old female and 53-year-old male, also had minor injuries
and were taken to Southside Hospital in Bay Shore.

The 61-year-old operator of the Jeep refused medical attention.

One of the cars was struck so hard, it was left on the side of the road looking like a crumpled heap of
twisted metal.

Sinclair was charged with driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident. His crane was
impounded, cops said.

He was expected to be arraigned in Central Islip court Wednesday. It wasn’t immediately clear who his
attorney is.

It’s not the first time Goss has jumped into a moving car. In 2016, he wriggled his way through the open
window of a car traveling 5 mph after spotting a woman who was allegedly driving while drunk, ABC
reported.

Goss sprang into action — and managed to shift the slow-moving car into park — after noticing the
woman’s 22-month-old daughter in the backseat.
Beams plunge from crane at Javits Center, no
injuries, West Side Highway shut down

New York Daily News

By ROCCO PARASCANDOLA
SEPTEMBER 11, 2018
Two beams fell from a crane at the Jacob Javits Center Tuesday morning, landing on scaffolding,

authorities said.

Nobody was injured but traffic on the West Side Highway was shut down in both directions near

W. 34th St.

The incident happened about 9:40 a.m. near 11th Ave.

Investigators were probing how the beams fell.

The FDNY said it appears one of the beams was hanging from the scaffolding in the aftermath.

The Department of Buildings said it is investigating the incident.