NYC crane was being secured due to wind

Three other people were injured, two seriously, in the accident in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca.

It was not immediately clear whether the strong winds played a role in the collapse.

Hundreds of firefighters and other emergency responders rushed to the scene after the crane fell just before 8:30 a.m. EST, landing on the street and crushing around half a dozen cars during the busy morning rush. “This was company who was putting their crane in to a secure position the way we would have wanted them to”, de Blasio said.

“So that crew – those construction workers who in the normal course of their work, as they were lowering the crane, were in fact keeping people away from the site, and keeping traffic from proceeding down West Broadway”, de Blasio said. “We lost a life, but if you go out there on the street and see what happened here, thank God it was not worse”. A Galasso representative could not be reached. The rig had been working for about a week to replace air conditioning equipment and generators on the roof of 60 Hudson Street, a 425-foot-tall, Jazz Age skyscraper that once housed Western Union and takes up an entire block, officials said.

Authorities now say the man killed when a crane collapsed in Lower Manhattan was walking on the sidewalk, not sitting in his auto.

A 38-year-old man was killed as a outcome of the collapse, also, three people were injured by falling debris from buildings.

He said the crane was being lowered as a precaution because of wind when the accident happened.

The construction crane involved in the accident was roughly 565 feet long, or about as long as a city block.

“It was right outside my window”, witness Robert Harold told the AP news agency.

“When the crane hit the ground, I heard a loud bang, it sounded like a bomb”, he said.

City officials said utility workers were taking gas readings in the area and making plans to excavate and cap a low-pressure gas main in the wake of the collapse.

Alfonso Quiroz of Con Edison said that there appeared to be a small gas leak related to the incident.

Ms Guttman said Mr Wichs worked at the New York-based computerised financial trading firm Tower Research Capital.

An employee at Bay Crane, whose company name is on the structure, said an investigation was under way.

A construction crane fell down in NYC, killing 1 man and leaving 3 injured.

In making his case, Stringer cited “at least four significant crane collapses” in the last 2-1/2 years.