Crane Turntable’s 2nd Life Is an Issue in Collapse

By WILLIAM NEUMAN and KEN BELSON

In the spring of 2007, a bolt of lightning struck a crane at 46th Street and Eighth Avenue, damaging a crucial part — the turntable at the top. Over the weeks that followed, the turntable’s bearings began to grind, and the stress apparently caused a crack in the surrounding steel that grew so wide that a worker noticed daylight glinting through it, according to an engineering report for the crane’s owner.

The discovery set off alarm bells in the city’s Buildings Department, where officials feared that the operator’s cab sitting atop the turntable might fall onto the street in the theater district, people familiar with the episode say. Bethany Klein, the head of the department’s crane division at the time, climbed the 18-story tower to examine the damage. On the weekend of May 19 last year, the cracked turntable was removed with the help of two other cranes.

Accident averted, city officials believed.

Or was it?

Investigators now believe that the rebuilt turntable wound up in a tower crane involved in a fatal accident at 91st Street and First Avenue on May 30, according to NationsBuilders Insurance Services, the insurer for the crane owner. In that accident, a weld in the rebuilt turntable apparently failed, causing the top of the crane to break away and fall on a 23-story building across 91st Street, killing two workers. It was the kind of disaster that city officials had feared might happen on 46th Street last year.

City investigators and prosecutors are asking whether Buildings Department officials properly monitored the journey of that turntable after it was damaged by lightning. Did the department tell the crane’s owner, New York Crane and Equipment, to scrap or repair the turntable, or did it give the company other instructions? And did the city inspect the repaired equipment and its welds before it was returned to service on 91st Street?

The Buildings Department would not answer those questions, citing inquiries by the city’s Department of Investigation and the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The department also refused to answer general questions about its responsibility to inspect damaged crane equipment.

But high turnover at the department’s Cranes and Derricks Unit suggests that it has been in turmoil for months, raising questions about the division’s ability to monitor the more than two dozen tower cranes at work across the city.

On Friday, James Delayo, the acting chief inspector for the unit, was arrested and charged with taking bribes to approve cranes under his review, and with taking money from a crane company that sought to ensure that its employees would pass the licensing exam, an official involved in the case said. Mr. Delayo could face up to seven years in prison if convicted. The charges against him do not involve tower cranes like those that collapsed last week and in March, the authorities have said.

On March 19, four days after a crane collapsed on East 51st Street, killing seven people, a crane inspector was arrested and charged with faking a report that he had visited a construction crane at that site on March 4. The inspector, the authorities said, never visited the crane.

The arrests have contributed to a significant staff upheaval at the division, which has also seen its director, its executive director and another chief inspector replaced in the past 15 months.

Even before the turnover, Buildings Department statistics have shown that the number of crane inspectors has barely changed since the 1980s, even as the city has experienced a historic building boom. Last year, the department issued 902 crane permits, 40 percent more than in 2003. Today, the cranes division has just four inspectors, although the agency recently hired a private firm to assist in inspections. The number of in-house inspectors has been as high as eight in the past 25 years.

Many construction experts and building industry officials say the city’s crane inspectors lag well behind private-sector inspectors in training and pay. Even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg suggested that New York may have to bolster its inspection process to better police the city’s tower cranes.

“It may be that the procedures are as comprehensive as they can be,” Mr. Bloomberg said last week at City Hall. “It may be that we don’t have all of the checks and balances that we should have, and that’s why we’re trying to gather information.”

Members of the Building Trades Employers’ Association echoed that sentiment last week when they discussed hiring third-party inspectors to police their construction sites.

“It gets back to the buildings inspectors’ technical competence,” said Louis J. Coletti, president of the association, which represents union contractors. “Welding is a very particular area. It’s not the kind of review that lends itself to a building inspector or even a professional engineer.”

The Buildings Department has said it plans to hire a consultant to review the way it monitors crane operations and other high-risk construction activities.

Certified third-party crane inspectors are required in other states. In Washington State, beginning in 2010, the roughly 10,000 cranes there will have to be certified by third-party inspectors who must pass two written examinations, including one that deals specifically with the cranes they inspect.

Prompted by a crane collapse in San Francisco in 1989, California, which has some of the toughest crane regulations, requires third-party inspectors to sign off on cranes after every 750 hours of operation, or every three months, in addition to an annual inspection, said Charles B. Scarrott, a state-certified inspector from Simi Valley, Calif.

“Outside inspectors is the right way to do it,” he said. “City and state people don’t have the experience.”

The requirements to be a New York City crane inspector have not changed in recent years. Candidates must have five years of full-time paid experience as a rigger handling gear and equipment in the hoisting and rigging business or as an inspector of hoisting and rigging; or three years of experience plus two years of college engineering courses.

Crane inspectors at the Buildings Department earn $47,882 to $74,224.

Still, industry experts say it is not certain that additional city inspectors, or third-party inspectors, would have prevented the 91st Street accident. The insurance company for New York Crane said that the welds on the repaired turntable were tested by two independent firms for imperfections and that they passed both times.

What is clearer is that the crane unit has been under considerable stress.

The close call on 46th Street led to months of discussions with members of the crane industry, according to an executive in the industry who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the current investigation. Last summer, Ms. Klein assembled key crane and construction executives to hear a presentation by the engineering firm Lucius Pitkin, which was hired by New York Crane to examine the damaged turntable. The firm concluded that damage from the lightning strike appeared to have led to the crack.

After the turntable was removed, the cab and boom from the original crane were set on top of a new turntable. The crane operated with that configuration for several months, and, according to city records, it was taken down in early September.

The damaged turntable was sent to Brady Marine, a welding company in Elizabeth, N.J. There, a new bearing assembly was welded onto the turntable’s base. Several calls to Brady Marine were not answered.

On March 15, a crane toppled at East 51st Street. The buildings commissioner, Patricia J. Lancaster, ordered the inspections of all cranes in use. Ms. Lancaster also increased the demands on crane inspectors. Less than a week later, the crane inspector was arrested for faking a report, leaving the already understaffed crane unit with five inspectors. Then, on April 22, Ms. Lancaster stepped down under pressure and was replaced by her first deputy, Robert LiMandri.

On April 17, the cranes division approved the installation of the crane at East 91st Street. Officials have said that it received a routine inspection and was cleared to be set up on April 20.

A former crane unit chief, Leo Y. Lee, said that type of inspection typically would have involved checking markings on each of the major parts, including the turntable, against a list provided by the owner, to make sure they all belonged to the same crane. The inspectors would also have looked for visible signs of damage. Experts say that kind of visual inspection probably would not have discovered a faulty weld.

Officials at the Buildings Department would not provide more information about the inspections done on the crane, which is identified in city permits as No. CD1895, or say whether the officials who approved the crane’s installation were aware of its history.

Ms. Klein was the one city employee who may have been most aware of the crane’s troubled past. But she left the crane unit last fall and quit the Buildings Department to work for a private construction firm shortly before the crane was erected on East 91st Street. She did not return calls for comment.