A
construction crane owner who was acquitted of manslaughter in a
Manhattan collapse that killed two workers has been ordered to pay $47.8
million in damages in a civil wrongful death trial. Sheldon Dutes has
more. (Published Thursday, July 30, 2015)
Updated at 10:55 PM EDT on Thursday, Jul 30, 2015
A construction crane owner who was acquitted of manslaughter
in a Manhattan collapse that killed two workers has been ordered to pay
$47.8 million in damages in a civil wrongful death trial, along with
his companies.
James
Lomma, the crane owner, his company and others involved in the Upper
East Side high-rise construction site accident in May 2008 have been
ordered to pay $32 million to the family of Ramadan Kurtaj, the
27-year-old construction worker working directly below the crane during
the collapse, and $15.8 million to Donald Leo, the 39-year-old crane
operator.
The accident at 91st Street and First Avenue helped spur new safety measures.
The
civil trial marked the longest sitting jury in the history of New York
City, according to the families' attorneys. The jury will reconvene next
week to hear testimony on the financial wealth of Lomma and his
companies.
"Cranes
are not supposed to fall from the sky," said Bernadette Panzella, who
represents crane operator Donald C. Leo's family, during opening
statements in May 2014. "James F. Lomma didn't do what he was supposed
to do."
Lomma's
lawyers suggested that Leo's handling of the crane contributed to the
collapse, echoing his defense at his criminal trial.
The
families' lawyers said that Lomma allowed a cheap, shoddy repair to a
critical crane part and that the fix failed and sparked the collapse.
Top portions of the 200-foot-tall rig snapped off and plummeted to the
ground, killing Leo, 30, and crushing to death sewer company worker
Ramadan Kurtaj, 27.
Prosecutors
made — and jurors rejected — a similar argument at Lomma's 2012
criminal trial. There, Lomma's lawyers said he got the repair done and
inspected responsibly. They also argued that Leo made mistakes that
destabilized the crane, a theory his family called offensive.
The
legal bar for proving a criminal case is higher than for holding
someone liable in civil court. Civil courts also can apportion blame
among different parties, including the plaintiff.
Before
Lomma was acquitted, mechanic Tibor Varganyi, who had arranged the
repair, pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide. Varganyi was
sentenced to a year of community service.
Lomma's attorney did not immediately respond to a call and email from The Associated Press on Thursday seeking comment.
Lomma was acquitted of manslaughter and other criminal charges in 2012.
Mechanic
Tibor Varganyi, who had arranged the crane repair, pleaded guilty to
criminally negligent homicide. Varganyi was sentenced to a year of
community service.
The
trial got underway in October. It had initially started in May 2014,
but was postponed after Lomma was seriously hurt in a car crash,
suffering multiple fractures.
The
crane collapsed two months after another crane fell apart in midtown
and killed seven people. Together, the accidents stirred concern about
crane safety and led to a roster of new regulations.
The
collapse happened two months after another crane toppled elsewhere in
Manhattan and killed seven people. The accidents prompted scrutiny of
crane safety and a host of new crane rules.
///-------------------///
Crane Collapse Kills Two and Unsettles New Yorkers
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
A rescue dog was used to search for victims of the crane collapse at 91st Street and First Avenue.
More Photos »
Multimedia
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times
The wreckage from the crane lay in the intersection.
More Photos >
The New York Times
But Friday’s deadly accident has turned up the debate among citizens and politicians about whether the city acted forcefully enough to address those concerns — and whether New Yorkers still felt unsafe.
"I always look up at that crane,” said Linda Taylor, 49, a traffic officer who worked in the neighborhood near the site of Friday’s collapse. She said she had developed a habit of checking the crane, especially after the incident in March. “I’m afraid to drive under it,” she said.
The city could not immediately account for the cause of the collapse, which occurred moments after 8 a.m. at a construction site at the corner of 91st Street and First Avenue.
Witnesses said the horizontal, unloaded arm of the crane began to circle and then snapped off, propelling the cab and the upper portion of the arm onto a white-brick residential building across the street. The cab demolished part of a top-floor penthouse and then plunged down the north facade, shearing off balconies and leaving a trail of pockmarks in the brick.
The operator of the crane, Donald Leo, 30, of Staten Island, was sitting in the cab as the structure fell. He was pulled from the wreckage by rescue workers and pronounced dead at the scene. A second man, Ramadan Kurtaj, 27, of the Bronx, was also killed.
No one in the building was injured, and one pedestrian was treated for a minor injury and released, according to the mayor.
The collapse occurred just two days after the city relaxed some of the rules it had put in place after the March accident. Instead of requiring inspectors to be on hand at construction sites when a crane is erected or made taller, the Buildings Department said on Wednesday that it would switch to a system of spot checks and “safety meetings” where workers would be briefed on proper procedures.
On Friday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended the actions taken by the Buildings Department, noting that the crane had not been built or made taller before Friday’s collapse. He said that city officials had inspected the crane on Thursday and found no violations.
“Construction is a dangerous business, and you will always have fatalities,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Two cranes collapsed in a short period of time — it looks like a pattern but there’s no reason to think there’s any real connection.”
But Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate and a prominent critic of the mayor, said the city needed to step up. “We thought the March accident was a wake-up call for the Department of Buildings,” Ms. Gotbaum said in a statement. “Now it appears that instead of waking up, the Department of Buildings hit the snooze button.”
Others were more ambivalent. Louis Coletti, who heads the Building Trades Employers’ Association, a group that represents unionized contractors, acknowledged in an interview that “every regulatory process in place and inspection required was fulfilled by the Buildings Department.”
But he said he hoped the city would consider a system that would allow for third-party engineers to inspect cranes. “With all due respect to the building inspectors,” Mr. Coletti said, “they don’t all have the technical qualifications.”
Residents of the building that was struck in Friday’s collapse said they had eyed the crane with some wariness since it was first put up at the site. Tara Hamilton, whose one-bedroom apartment was badly damaged in the collapse, said she immediately recognized the source of the “sonic boom” that rocked her apartment just moments after she returned from walking her two dogs. “As soon as I heard it I knew,” she said. “It was that crane.”
When the crane fell, frightened tenants inside the building that was struck, the Electra at 354 East 91st Street, scrambled to reach the street as walls collapsed and burst pipes began to spew water.
Caitlin Reeves, 25, who lives in a corner apartment on the 10th floor of the damaged building, said she was in her bathroom brushing her teeth when she felt and heard an enormous rumble through her apartment — the effects of the broken crane shearing off her balcony.
“I turned around and ran into my room and there were pieces of the wall and debris everywhere,” she said.
As remnants of the crane continued to rain down on the street, Ms. Reeves and her roommates fled their apartment and bounded down 10 flights of stairs to their dust-filled lobby, where dozens of residents were shouting and sobbing as they streamed out onto 91st Street. Ms. Reeves said the building was mostly occupied by families with small children. Like other residents interviewed on the street, she said the sight of the crane towering over her building each day gave her an uneasy feeling.
“Every morning I woke up and I could see the top of that crane pivoting and I kept thinking we’d be lucky to make it out of that apartment without it careening into us,” she said.
The crane was being used to construct the Azure, a high-rise condominium tower; about 10 of the 34 planned stories had been completed. According to city records, the company that is building the Azure is the Leon D. DeMatteis Construction Corporation of Elmont, on Long Island.