Endgame: Construction Fatalities Soar Nationwide

ByTony Illia, with Debra Wood, Craig Barner, Eileen Schwartz

Construction is a dangerous business that attracts a brazen bunch of blue-collar workers willing to log long hours outdoors around heavy, bone-crushing equipment.

Jobsites are kinetic, constantly changing environments that demand full attention to do the job and then make it home.

Nowhere in the country is there more construction concentrated into a single area than the Las Vegas Strip, where $32.7 billion worth of casino and hotel projects are ongoing, says the Las Vegas Convention Visitors Authority. This area also has seen 12 constrution-related deaths since the end of 2006, and the fatalities have stirred a volatile mix of emotions, finger-pointing and debate between unions, contractors and elected officials.

Tensions reached a feverish pitch after Dustin Tarter, 39, was crushed to death by a crane counterweight system May 31 at the CityCenter jobsite. It marked the project’s eighth project fatality in 19 months.

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Outraged craft trades walked off the job two days later in protest of unsafe working conditions. The $9.2-billion, 18.67-million-sq-ft Las Vegas Strip megaresort is the country’s largest privately funded project, officials claim.

Perini Building Co., a unit of Framingham, Mass.-based Perini Corp., is the general contractor, with Tishman Construction Corp. of New York as executive construction manager. Developed by MGM Mirage Inc., Las Vegas, the 76-acre complex will see 7,000 workers onsite during peak construction with triple shifts, six to seven days a week. Payroll exceeds well over $1 million a day.

Perini is additionally building the adjacent $3.9-billion, 6.96-million-sq-ft. Cosmopolitan Resort & Casino that is being developed by New York-based Ian Bruce Eichner and other investors. The dual 600-ft tower, 2,998-unit, hotel-condo complex has seen two worker fatalities since breaking ground Oct. 25, 2005. Cosmopolitan carries $50,000 a day in late penalties and will employ up to 3,000 workers.

On June 2, workers picketed both jobsites carrying signs reading: “On Strike/Unsafe Jobsite,” while chanting “City Cemetery” and “No More Death.” The 24-hour strike ended after Perini and the Southern Nevada Council Building and Construction Trades Council reached an agreement calling for 10-hour Occupational Safety and Health Administration training, additional safety meetings and full jobsite access by union officials and safety directors.

Both projects are still expected to finish by late 2009.

Doug Mure, Perini’s vice president of human resources and risk management, says in a written statement, “We are committed to collaboration with the building trades, subcontractors and suppliers to continuously improve our safety efforts for all of our operations.”

The well-publicized event made national headlines, prompting political intervention. Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons subsequently asked the federal OSHA to assist state officials in conducting a thorough CityCenter inspection so “that work can be simply done that much quicker.”

Nevada OSHA, which has been publicly criticized by local media for repeatedly reducing fines and withdrawing citations related to worker fatalities, had begun a comprehensive jobsite review on May 12. At the same time, FedOSHA isn’t able to cite anyone who falls under a state jurisdiction.

The Ironworkers District Council of California, meanwhile, representing 3,000 Nevada members, has pressured FedOSHA to rescind compliance directive CPL 02-01-034 for decked flooring that allows builders to forgo flooring and/or netting every 30 ft if workers wear safety harnesses. The ironworkers claim that both forms of protection would have saved at least two lives on the Las Vegas Strip by helping break falls.

“Nevada OSHA has formally denounced items contained in the directive,” says Joe Standley, president of the Ironworkers California Council. “It sends a strong message that [it] puts worker safety first.”

On June 24, a U.S. House committee hearing harshly questioned Edwin G. Foulke Jr., OSHA’s assistant secretary of labor, on the agency’s enforcement of safety regulations after the high-profile deaths in Las Vegas as well as a rash of crane-related fatalities throughout the country.

For example, in Dallas, two crane accidents in June killed one worker and injured three others. Texas, which does not require crane personnel to be certified, led the country in crane-related worker fatalities in 2005-06, with a combined 26 deaths out of 157, reports the U.S. Department of Labor. Texas has already recorded five crane-related deaths in 2008.

In New York, workers lost control of a six-ton bracing collar at the 18th floor of a 205-ft-tall tower crane on March 15, resulting in seven deaths and 24 people being injured, several critically. The tower was being erected when it tilted away from the structure under construction, slammed into the 15th-story parapet of a building across the street and sent crane components crashing through smaller buildings on the next street. Preliminary findings point to a failure of temporary nylon webbing supports.

OSHA, in response, will release a proposed revision of its crane-and-derrick standard this summer. Industry groups have criticized the federal agency for studying the issue for over three years without acting.

Florida has moved at a similar pace, introducing a state tower-crane safety bill in the Legislature for two years running that has yet to make it out of committee.

Two people died at Miami’s Paramount Bay condominium project March 25 when tower crane segments crashed through the roof of a home being used by contractor Bovis Lend Lease as a jobsite office.

Miami-Dade County had passed a crane safety ordinance a week before but it hadn’t gone into effect. In May, a coalition of Florida construction organizations filed suit in federal court and obtained an injunction prohibiting Miami-Dade County from enforcing the ordinance, expressing fear that the requirements could shut down projects.

“Fifteen years ago, someone got killed on a jobsite and no one knew about it, other than the immediate people, but now a crane falls down in New York and the rest of the country knows about it in 15 minutes,” says John Murphy, safety director for Suffolk Construction Co.’s Florida Division in West Palm Beach. His company requires every crane assembled on a Suffolk jobsite to undergo a third-party inspection to ensure it meets the manufacturer’s specification limitations.

The Midwest, by contrast, has been spared from the raft of recent crane incidents due to a July 1999 wakeup call when a crane dubbed “big blue” collapsed at the then-under-construction Miller Park in Milwaukee, killing three workers.

“That catastrophe did focus the construction industry, crane manufacturers and suppliers and [OSHA] on the horrible potential that the loss of crane stability can have in terms of lives lost and damage and destruction to anything in its path,” says Thomas Broderick, executive director of the Construction Safety Council, a Hillside, Ill.-based national trade organization.

He adds that OSHA Region 5, which covers the Midwest, has a “strong contingency” of construction background personnel with “about half of the agency’s resources dedicated to enforcement of construction-safety standards.”