A Long Island man has suffered two severed nerves and three severed veins after falling from part of a construction work site that lacked a secure and safe exit point. According to DNAinfo.com, Michael Hickey was injured while working in 2015 on the new water tunnel that will soon connect Staten Island and Brooklyn. “The suit claims the city failed to provide a “scaffold, ladder and/or other safety device” to help workers climb out of the tunnel during construction. Workers instead had to climb a patch of land that had “slick, slippery rocks hidden beneath muck and unlevel, hole-laden, raised depressed and obscured surface,” as quoted from DNAinfo.com. The suit was filed against the city for $2 million. Due to the severity of his injuries, Hickey was unable to continue his work at the construction site. The article notes that Hickey’s lawsuit was transferred on February 25th, 2017 to a Staten Island court after it was initially filed in Brooklyn.
Work site safety in the construction industry has been a topic of severity for the past few years. It recently came to a head in January when 21 new bills were introduced to bolster work site safety. To further reflect the importance of this, an article posted on NYDailynews.com states “Incidents involving either fatalities or injuries jumped from 128 in 2011 to 435 in 2015 in the state as a whole. Meanwhile, the number of safety inspections by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the state fell each year, from 2,722 in 2011 to 1,966 in 2015, the study found. That’s a drop of about 27%, and the study said that’s mostly because of a reduction in the number of OSHA inspectors in New York State — from 82 in 2012 to 66 in 2015.”
This is all came prior to a bill recently submitted by Housing and Building Committee Chair Jumaane Williams and Councilmember Carlos Menchaca, along with the support of other City officials, to help mandate better safety training and skills for workers.
Please see the links below for more information.
City Forced Workers to Scale Muddy Bank to Exit Water Tunnel, Lawsuit Says
City Council can protect NYC workers from construction accidents by mandating better training
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