The latest news of a New York construction accident is what no one wants to hear: a worker has been killed. The accident was about 200 miles north of Manhattan, in Warren County.
It was there that a 62-year-old New York State Department of Bridge Maintenance worker was killed when his head struck the steel support structure of the Warrensburg bridge he was working on.
The man was inside a boom truck basket beneath the bridge when the accident happened. He suffered severe head trauma and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Investigators say they’ve determined that both he and another worker in the basket were wearing safety harnesses and hardhats, but there is no word yet on why the worker’s head was struck so violently against the bridge.
Could it have been operator error? Equipment malfunction? Lack of operator training? Those are some of the questions investigators will try to find answers to as they probe the causes of this tragedy.
The news was better farther north where a construction worker in Maine was hurt while working on a sewer project earlier this week. A portion of the pavement he as standing on collapsed, according to reports.
The collapse sent him hurtling into a 7-foot-deep trench below street level. A piece of pavement one witness estimated to be the size of a pick-up truck then hit the trapped worker.
Crews had been blasting and digging out the trench as part of a construction project the length of a street in Rockland, about 400 miles up the coast from New York City.
The worker was alert as he was taken to a nearby hospital.
Source: ABC: “DOT worker dies on the job in Warren County,” Oct. 21, 2011