DOB
March 20, 2008
BREAKING: Partial Building Collapse at 170 Smith Street
We've just gotten word that there has been a partial building collapse at 170 Smith Street. A reader forwarded us an alert from the MTA, since subway service underneath the building has been impacted by the accident. There are currently NYCTA emergency workers and at least one person from OEM on the scene. There has been no confirmation whether anyone has been injured or killed in the building. Hope to have more shortly.
Update: This just in from DOB:
Initial reports from the scene indicate the building at 170 Smith Street is in poor condition, but it has not collapsed. The building’s façade has suffered from neglect. On Tuesday, the Buildings Department issued an emergency declaration to allow the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to install a sidewalk shed. The sidewalk shed is in place, and served to catch pieces of the façade that reportedly fell from the building today. On Tuesday after the emergency declaration was issued, Buildings ordered the owner to allow the Department access to the building to make sure it’s structurally sound. The owner failed to do so, and Buildings called the Fire Department gain access to the building. Buildings inspectors and engineers remain on scene, and operations continue.
March 19, 2008
Will the DOB be Able to Man Up?
In a Times piece this morning Jim Dwyer takes a look at all the recent construction tragedies and concludes that "the city’s construction business, particularly outside of Manhattan, is becoming the modern version of the 19th-century coal mine." Most construction-related fatalities in recent years have been in the outer boroughs, and Dwyer notes that at many smaller, non-Manhattan development sites oversight only comes from the sorely overstretched DOB. Although Bloomberg and DOB chief Patricia Lancaster have tried to clean up the agency, hard questions remain about how the city is going to regulate its projected $45 billion in construction growth over the next decade. "It could be they are completely outgunned," Dwyer writes. "This era may serve as a prologue."
Building Roulette: The New Victorian Coal Mine [NY Times]
Photo by mkaggen.
March 5, 2008
Massive Building Code Overhaul on the Horizon
As noted by a poster on The Forum, the huge changes to the city's extremely out-of-date building code are going to take effect very soon. Well, some of them, anyway: As of this July, the revamped codes will become effective for new construction; they won't be mandated, however, until July 2009, though provisions relating to administration, enforcement, and construction safety apply across the board on July 1, 2008. (Everything else will be optional until next summer.) Among the many changes to the codes are requirements for sprinklers in more building types; smoke control systems in more buildings and occupancies; site safety managers or coordinators on more job sites; permits for more types of scaffolds; and fee rebates for green design. The Forum post also correctly reports that owners will no longer need to change their c-of-o's if they're adding bedrooms to a building and that "occupancy groups, building bulk, allowable construction type are not just changed but completely rethought." In short, the changes are a fairly seismic shift for builders, and there's a lot of info to digest. More details can be found on the DOB's website here and here.
New Code Coming Soon, FYI [Brownstoner Forum]
Newsflash: Mayor Signs New Building Code Into Law [Brownstoner]
New NYC Construction Codes [DOB]
Graphic from the DOB.