Fwd: SUBSTANDARD CONSTRUCTION AND THE DEATH OF LABORER YURIY VANCHYTSKYY
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Many Violations for Employer of Worker Who Died in a Fall
A contractor involved in Monday’s fatal construction accident in SoHo has a history of safety violations at projects in Manhattan and has been fined tens of thousands of dollars in penalties, according to federal records.
A worker for the contractor, DiFama Concrete, died on Monday when he fell 42 floors from the top of Trump SoHo, a condominium hotel under construction at Varick and Spring Streets.
In November 2004, another DiFama employee died when he fell 60 feet from a platform on the mast of a construction crane at what is now the Lumiere, a seven-story condominium on 53rd Street, west of Eighth Avenue.
After the 2004 accident, inspectors for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited DiFama for failing to provide sufficient safety devices designed to prevent falls from the crane and fined the company $3,500. The city’s Buildings Department, however, determined that the “accident was caused by human error.”
City building officials are reviewing the work history of the company as they investigate Monday’s accident, in which Yuriy Vanchytskyy plunged to his death, apparently after wood forms used to hold wet concrete collapsed. The Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, has also assigned investigators to monitor the city’s inquiry into the construction worker’s death, said Daniel J. Castleman, the chief of the office’s Investigation Division.
In the years since the 2004 death, DiFama, based in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has been repeatedly cited for serious safety violations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including several for work at sites like Trump SoHo and the Lumiere building. At both those sites, Bovis Lend Lease was the general contractor and DiFama was a subcontractor.
The 17 federal violations, including 11 described as serious by the safety agency, include seven for issues relating to fall protection. Since the fatal fall in 2004, the company has been fined $71,500 by federal authorities.
Jack Russo, the chief financial officer for DiFama, did not return calls requesting comment.
Until July 2005, DiFama was run by Joseph Fama, whom prosecutors have identified as an associate of the Luchese crime family. Mr. Fama, who served the company as its president, divested his interest in the firm because he was being imprisoned after pleading guilty to federal racketeering and extortion charges in 2003. He is currently in prison.
The company was originally charged in the case, but charges were later dropped as part of plea negotiations.
Frederick L. Sosinsky, Mr. Fama’s lawyer, did not respond to phone and e-mail messages left yesterday. Myron Beldock, a lawyer who represented DiFama Concrete until the charges were dismissed, said he was no longer retained by the company and thus could not comment.
At a press conference in SoHo on Tuesday, Patricia J. Lancaster, commissioner of the Department of Buildings, said that, although her investigation was continuing, the cause of the accident seemed to be related to the collapse of plywood forms used to hold wet concrete at the top of the building. She said that inspectors had issued 11 violations against contractors at the site before the accident on Monday.
A spokeswoman for Bovis said it hired DiFama Concrete because Bovis, like a variety of general contractors in the city, has not had any problems working with the company.
“Bovis selected DiFama based on the merits of its bid and its ability to deliver a quality product in accordance within the terms and conditions of the contract,” said the spokeswoman, Mary Costello.
The district attorney is already reviewing two deaths at another Bovis work site, the former Deutsche Bank building downtown, where two firefighters died in August while fighting a blaze in the building, which was being demolished.
Investigators are focusing not only on the deaths, and the safety precautions employed there, but also are reviewing how Bovis selected a troubled demolition subcontractor for the job.
In that instance, regulators refused to approve the original demolition contractor Bovis sought, Safeway Environmental. Later, the investigators learned that Safeway’s replacement, John Galt Corporation, was created by combining senior executives from Safeway with another company in a move city investigators felt was intended to mask their role.
In 2006, the general contractor’s hiring process for the demolition contract drew criticism from the city investigation’s commissioner, Rose Gill Hearn. In a letter on Jan. 17, 2006, she criticized the way Bovis was hiring at the Deutsche Bank job.
“D.O.I. should also interview the appropriate Bovis officials to ascertain why they are continually selecting Safeway in various reincarnations rather than other possible qualified demolition companies to perform the deconstruction work on this project,” she wrote in a letter to downtown rebuilding officials.
Bovis ultimately hired the John Galt Corporation, which was fired after the fire in August.
Asked about the hiring comment, Ms. Costello said, “We’re cooperating completely with the D.A.’s ongoing investigation and therefore cannot comment about the Deutsche Bank building.”
While overall construction safety across the city improved last year, accidents at high-rise work sites resulting in injuries or deaths rose by 83 percent in 2007, according to building department records. On Tuesday, Louis J. Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers Association, said he was pulling together a meeting of the city’s top contractors, concrete producers and construction managers next week to discuss safety measures for the construction of concrete buildings.
They will be assessing what is known as the “two-day cycle” in New York’s overheated market, in which contractors routinely pour a new concrete floor every two days at a building site, compared with every four or five days elsewhere.
“Despite this tragedy, high-rise contractors in New York are the safest and best in the world,” Mr. Coletti said. “However, if we have a problem in this area, we have a responsibility to address it.”
Mr. Coletti said he had no comment on DiFama Concrete.
The company’s founder, Mr. Fama, pleaded guilty to racketeering charges on Jan. 3, 2003, in federal court. He admitted that he, along with several Luchese crime family figures, committed a series of crimes, including extortion and embezzling funds from union benefit and welfare funds.
The government accused Mr. Fama of being an associate in the Luchese crime family and contended that one of his co-defendants, Joseph DiBenedetto, a soldier in the crime family and the son-in-law of the boss Vic Amuso, held a hidden interest in DiFama Concrete.
Before Mr. Fama was sentenced to 50 months in prison on June 18, 2004, his lawyer, Mr. Sosinsky, portrayed his client as a man who had worked long, hard hours since he was a teenager. Major contractors, he said, rely on Mr. Fama, not because of any underlying unlawful relationship, but because DiFama Concrete has proven itself extremely reliable.
Mr. Fama’s lawyer successfully delayed Mr. Fama’s surrender date until Anthony DeLuca, a co-defendant and manager at DiFama Concrete, had finished serving his seven-month prison term in the case. Mr. Sosinsky said the staggered sentence was critical to the continued viability of the company, which employed more than 400 union workers.
In the fatal accident at the Lumiere building in 2004, a DiFama worker, Glenn S. Gonnert, 60, was working on a crane owned by another company above the Lumiere site, when he fell backward through a hole in a platform, plunging 60 feet through the crane’s internal stairway. He died from head fractures. Mr. Gonnert’s family has sued the crane company, and the lawsuit is pending.
Federal safety inspectors have cited DiFama jobs at least twice a year since the fatal 2004 accident, issuing violations at eight construction projects around Manhattan in three years. At all but two of the jobs, Bovis was the construction manager, and it was cited for a serious violation involving falling hazards at one.
The projects included the William Beaver House, a luxury condominium high-rise going up at William and Beaver Streets in the financial district; 15 Central Park West, one of the most expensive new condominium developments in the city; and a large new housing complex on West 52nd Street called Archstone Clinton.
Seven of the citations concerned safety violations relating to falling hazards, according to federal safety records.
John Eligon and Robin Stein contributed reporting.
An Immigrant With a Tough Job and an Easy Smile
From the stylish streets of SoHo, where he labored on the rising frame of the newest condo hotel to bear the Trump name, to the modest three-story brick walk-up in Greenpoint where the sounds of his early departure for work served as a virtual alarm clock for his landlady, Yuriy Vanchytskyy was remembered on Tuesday as a reliable, hard-working and cheerful presence.
Mr. Vanchytskyy, who died in a construction accident on Monday when he plunged 42 stories from the concrete skeleton of the Trump SoHo building, immigrated from Ukraine about eight years ago, said his landlady, Zeeshan Tambra, 40, outside the house on Java Street as she took out the trash — a task, she said, that Mr. Vanchytskyy often helped with.
Though he spoke little English, he found ways to joke and to connect, speaking in staccato phrases of one or two words and filling in the gaps with a big smile, she said. And even though he left every day at 5 a.m. and would return home tired at 3 p.m., she said: “Even the job I’m doing now, he would do it. I have other nice tenants here, but no one else does that.”
At the construction site, Mr. Vanchytskyy, who neighbors and co-workers said was in his 50s, was a respected figure, one of the older and more experienced workers.
“Hard working brother; always smiling; he was happy to be working,” said Tony Morals, 41, who was cleaning up the site on Tuesday as city officials continued to investigate the accident. “Some people come to work grumpy and mad. He wasn’t one of them.”
Mr. Vanchytskyy and his wife, Natalia, who works at a home for the elderly and was recently studying to reactivate the engineering degree she earned in Ukraine, had three children, Mrs. Tambra said. A son named Yuriy and a daughter named Irena live in the New York area, she said, and another son, married with children, lives in Ukraine. Mr. Vanchytskyy had returned from a visit to him on Friday. Outside the house on Tuesday, the younger Yuriy said the family was not ready to speak to reporters; the blinds at the windows were closed.
But Mrs. Tambra and her husband, Muhammad, described how Mr. Vanchytskyy and his family had become close to them. The house reflected the changing neighborhood, with young hipsters, newly arrived with a wave of gentrification, on the top floor; the hard-working Ukrainians on the second; and the Pakistani immigrant owners on the first. The two older families barbecued together, and their children played together, the Tambras said.
“He was a very funny, very joyous person,” Mrs. Tambra said, recalling how a few months ago, when her brother came to stay with her, he teased her that he would report it to her husband: “Other man, other man, no good, no good! I tell your husband you have a boyfriend.”
Mr. Tambra is a taxi driver who has to wake up early, his wife said — but not as early as Mr. Vanchytskyy.
“We’d hear him get up and leave for work,” Mrs. Tambra recalled. “We’d say, ‘Oh, Mr. Yuriy is up, so it’s time for us to get up.’ I can’t even imagine working like that,” Mr. Tambra said.
It was a break in that clockwork schedule that signaled to Mrs. Tambra on Monday that something was not right.
“Yesterday I didn’t hear the door. I wondered why he wasn’t home yet,” she said. Then the police came to the door and left a message for Mr. Vanchytskyy’s wife to call them.
Soon, the woman the Tambras knew as Miss Natalia came to Mrs. Tambra looking pale, and said there had been an accident at her husband’s job.
“We all started crying,” Mrs. Tambra said. “We always worried something like that would happen with his work.”
At the construction scene, too, the accident bore out a nagging fear. “We never want to see one of our own go,” Mr. Morals said.
from the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS:
Substandard construction at Trump Soho led to fatal collapse - city sources
By KERRY BURKE, EDGAR SANDOVAL and TINA MOORE
DAILY NEWS
STAFF WRITERS
Wednesday, January 16th 2008, 9:57 AM
Workers stand near a section of Trump SoHo condo tower that collapsed Monday, sending a hardhat hurtling to his death 42 stories below.
A crew smooths out fresh cement shortly before supports gave way.
Wooden supports bracing the top floors of Donald Trump's SoHo condo tower failed to meet standards and broke while concrete was being poured - leading to Monday's fatal collapse, city sources said Tuesday.
Forensic engineers for the city Buildings Department determined the wooden forms, built to hold concrete until it hardens, did not meet "industry standards," the sources said.
The city halted all work at the Spring St. tower as the probe moves forward. The sources said other problems at the building also may have contributed to the partial collapse.
The findings emerged Tuesday as the Daily News obtained photos of the work site snapped just before the top two floors collapsed about 2 p.m. Monday.
High above Manhattan, construction worker Yurly Vanchytsky is seen pausing to relax and take a swig of water. All around him his fellow hardhats are smoothing out freshly poured cement on the top floor.
Within minutes, the floor collapses - sending Vanchytsky plunging 42 stories to his death.
Another worker, Francesco Palizzotto - photographed operating a cement mixer with the blue sky behind him - tumbled into a safety net. Pictures taken after the collapse show him tangled in the net with thousands of pounds of concrete on top of him.
"You would never think anything like that was about to happen," the photographer said, asking that he not be identified.
City data show high-rise accidents have skyrocketed over the past two years, shooting from 23 to 42 incidents. Concrete firms causing material to fall from high-rises under construction were responsible for 68% of the accidents last year, also an increase from the previous year, a city source said.
Inspectors working for the city and officials from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration were examining the tower at 246 Spring St. yesterday as laborers wrapped sections of the building in protective netting.
Investigators were interviewing workers with Bovis Lend Lease, the main contractor, and subcontractor Difama Concrete. The companies and Trump could not be reached for comment.
"They will not be allowed to go back to work until they demonstrate to us what they will do to keep this site safe," Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster said.
Vanchytsky, 53, and Palizzotto, 46, worked for Difama, which had been linked to the Luchese crime family through a company official.
The official, Joseph Fama, was sentenced to 50 months in prison for racketeering and extortion in 2004, records show. In 2005, Fama's lawyer asked the judge who sentenced him to postpone the imprisonment because of his role as a "key employee/manager" of Difama Concrete.
Two years passed before construction at the Trump project began last May. Since then, Difama and Bovis amassed 11 safety violations from the city.
Four buildings adjacent to the tower remained partially evacuated yesterday.
Palizzotto's relatives were holding vigil at his bedside in St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan yesterday. His best friend, Vito Valsamo, said the two had grown up together in Palermo, Italy, where they were painters.
"I don't know why he moved to construction," Valsamo said. "I guess he wanted a better job with insurance. He was always a hard worker."
At Vanchytsky's home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, relatives dressed all in black declined to comment.
"They're in shock, we're all in shock," said Vanchytsky's landlord, Zeeshan Tambra, 40. "He was a hard worker and a good man. He left home every morning at 5."
She said Vanchytsky immigrated to New York from Ukraine with his wife, Natalia, and a son and daughter about eight years ago. Tambra said she was with Vanchytsky's wife when she learned her husband had been killed.
"Natalia said, 'My daughter called. The building where he worked collapsed,'" Tambra recalled. "And then the police came and told her. She closed the door and started crying."
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