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The Crane

Yeah, Billy, you’re correct [1] in that this is nothing new. Such is normalcy, I suppose for working on such projects. Construction, as you know from first hand experience can be, and is, dangerous.

But you know… there’s something else, here too, that troubles me; The neighbors had been complaining since the plans were announced for the project. Before the first construction worker showed up. They didn’t want the building there. The early stories on this make that overtone quite clear.

A construction Crane, as it had fallen on a residential Building in NYC on Saturday, killing several.  Photo from Toronto's Globe and Mail [2] How much of the complaining I see going on about the construction project being not to code, is the neighbors doing what they can by way of the power of an over-intrusive government, to stop the project from ever being built? We keep hearing words from the neighbors which strike me as quite similar to the noises being made by Hugo Chavez… “Greed”, etc.

Oh, please. How seriously am I to take this nonsense?

As an example…Supposedly, the day before the thing fell over, someone called to complain that the crane itself wasn’t fastened down correctly. Yet the resulting inspection showed no problem.

Photo is from Toronto’s Globe and Mail, who reports: [3]

City officials said they had issued 13 violations to the site in the last 27 months, a normal amount for a project of that size. Inspectors examined the crane Friday and found nothing wrong with it.

Calls like that were happening all the time, and were pretty much always found to have no basis in fact.  We will doubtless see charges that the inspectors were paid off, which is how they passed the inspections. Sorry, but abesent proof, I don’t buy into that idea, particularly given we’re not seeing a number of incidents that would be consistent with such shoddy inspection work. It doesn’t mesh.