bingo.

__________________
"You down wit OPM?"
Fumo: "Yeah, you know me!"

Yeah Boston!

The scaffold accident on Boylston Street took the lives of two construction workers and a Boston physician. (David L. Ryan/ Globe Staff) Death came crashing down

Scaffold's fall kills 3; hunt is on for answers

By Suzanne Smalley and Raja Mishra, Globe Staff | April 4, 2006

A three-ton construction scaffold plunged yesterday from a building onto busy downtown Boylston Street, killing two construction workers and a young doctor who was driving by.
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The scaffold had been affixed near the top of a 14-story Emerson College dormitory under construction and was being dismantled when it came loose, hit an adjacent building, then crashed seven stories to the street. State and federal investigators and Boston police are still investigating the cause, authorities said.
The scaffold and building debris thundered to the ground just after 1:20 p.m. Screams came from the dust cloud that enveloped the block as passersby rushed to a crushed gray Honda sedan. Soon, there were three bodies under white tarps lying on the street amid twisted steel and scattered piles of debris and glass, witnesses said. The lone horn from a demolished car droned as rescue workers rushed to the scene.
''I saw it crash to the ground, and all of a sudden it was like 9/11, and I saw people run to the car, at least 10 men, and try to pull the crane off," said ironworker Mark Elliot. ''I saw a body next to the crane. And I saw that the . . . car was crushed with people inside."
The accident, without precedent in recent Boston history, took the lives of three people and shut down part of a city teeming with construction sites and hulking equipment.
Boston police identified the dead motorist as Michael Tsan Ty, 28, of Roslindale, and the two construction workers as Robert E. Beane, 41, of Baldwinville and Romildo Silva, 27, of Somerville.
Two other victims were transported to the Boston Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital, where they are being treated for injuries that are not life-threatening.
''A guy goes off to work, and something like this happens," Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said as he visited the accident site yesterday. ''It's very difficult."
Others narrowly escaped the same fate.
''The platform came within 6 inches of my head," said John Hynes, 48, who sat in his BMW as debris rained on it. ''It's my lucky day. I'm still standing." Hynes, a real estate developer, is a grandson of a former Boston mayor, John B. Hynes.
The owner of Macomber Builders, which ran the Emerson project, said the two dead workers were employed by a subcontractor, Bostonian Masonry of East Walpole. The accident's cause had not been determined, said John Macomber, the firm's owner and chief executive officer.









Or we just close the street for a lil.

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http://www.wrongfuldeath-law.com/Pra...fold-Falls.asp




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The wrongful death attorneys at Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger represent the families of wrongful death victims in California and Nevada including the cities of San Jose, Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Fresno, San Mateo, Walnut Creek, Concord, San Rafael, Napa, Redwood City, Stockton, Modesto, Los Angeles, San Diego, Reno, Las Vegas, Elko, Carson City, and Tahoe.

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What is your point? Do you just like to be argumentative?

As several people have said, while the heavy exterior work is going on, you close the sidewalk. Once you have moved on to the interior stuff and exterior touch-ups there is no reason to close sidewalks and block lanes of traffic.

Weak comparison. Are 1 lane alleys, 2 lane and 4 lane roads all the same? Is a building with no setback the same as a building with a 50 foot setback? The fact is they are all different. Builders do a pretty good job of working with the neighbors. I could care less if 21st street is shut down. Tell the morons in the neighborhood to drive up a block or two.

Where the Murano is you could not have a walkway anyway. There is very little setback on 21st st and they have a loading dock set up for the crane. I think the person that said the majority of construction is complete is clueless. It looks to me like the shell is up and the exterior is complete. Gee, I guess that leaves the interior finishes. We are talking about thousands of TONS of material that still has to go in.

The topic is the pedestrian environment.

I'm not sure how the width of a street makes a difference. You either leave room for people to walk or you don't.

Narrow streets usually have narrow sidewalks. Someone walking down Quince St. doesn't have to worry about walking in traffic if they step off the sidewalk so it doesn't really matter. That's why we're talking about shutting down sidewalks on Market St, Broad St, Washington Ave, etc.

I take it that you do not have much of a construction background, so it is important to understand that the work at 5th and Market is very different than what is pictured in your post above.

New York has very strict repointing and masonry maintenance regulations, due to a few very unfortunate accidents, which is why you see scaffolding all over the place. But this repointing is relatively light construction that uses a minimum of materials, deliveries, and such.

In New York's heavy construction projects--the new water tunnel, buildings around ground zero, Time Warner Center, West Side Highway--not only do they shut down sidewalks, they shut down blocks of city streets.

While I agree that many contractors and developers take too many liberties with the sidewalk permits, the closure at 5th and Market is not at all analagous to the situation in your picture.

The project at 5th and Market included a pretty significant demolition in an area with a lot of pedestrians. Now there is major excavation which will be followed with big steel delivery trucks or concrete mixers in the relatively near future.

I think maybe the line should be drawn at new construction. In other words, renovation projects should not get the closure. New construction should.

Yeah, when is the point should they reopen a sidewalk? When the construction is finished or when they reach a hight from the sidewalk?

__________________
I Rather Talk About HurricanesThen Pregnant Teens

was that your attempt at condescension?



edit: after reading your post again it doesn't appear that you've actually walked past the 5th & Market site.
They didn't just close the sidewalk and put up a sign in the middle of the block telling people to cross the street.
They've taken over the curb lane for pedestrians so they can get around the construction and put up a jersey barrier to separate them from traffic.
That's all people are asking.

and in case you don't have much of a construction background the picture i posted above is new construction in Chicago. You can see
the crane on the left hand side. You can also clearly see the pedestrian walkways that ring it complete with poured concrete barriers.

This is just one more example of that old can't-do attitude. And with another stroke of the pen the good old boys will be dragged, once again, kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

I think it would all depend on the project. If it was a highrise, I would say that the building exterior would have to be fully enclosed. Something falling from a great height would just go through any scaffolding platform. And you would probably need some section of the sidewalk closed for deliveries and hoists. But you should certainly not need to close all four sidewalks on a block and take traffic lanes like the Comcast Tower.

But going back to my earlier idea about renovations not getting the closure, I would rephrase that. Interior renovations should not get the closure.

Take for example the Aria (15th & Locust). They were doing major exterior masonry repairs. But those were done several months into the project. Those barriers should have been down a long time ago.

But as I think about this, if there are landscape or sidewalk repairs those would come at the end of the project.

So, I guess for some projects there would be a situation where you would close the sidewalk, open it, and then close it again.

But then again, that might confuse the hell out of people who get used to walking a certain route on their daily routine.