Yesterday, Department of Buildings acting commissioner Robert LiMandri testified before the House Education and Labor Committee and announced new ways the city would increase crane safety, including inspecting cranes when they change ownership. LiMandri also asked for more OSHA inspectors--who should also be given the power to issue stop-worker orders--noting he was "deeply troubled" by the recent crane collapse deaths, "It is simply impossible for our inspectors to be at every site at all times."......

Yesterday, the city announced a number of measures to crack down on unsafe contractors and prevent any more horrific accidents. So far this year, fifteen construction workers have died on the job--twelve died in all of 2007. The measures, which you can read here, include having a concrete site safety manager present, meeting prior to erecting cranes, and assigning a safety monitor to "jobs with multiple immediately hazardous safety violations, or otherwise poor safety records."......

On a day when construction workers who died on the job were being remembered and on the start of the Department of Buildings' Construction Safety Week, a construction worker was crushed under a front-end loader at site in Staten Island. According to the Staten Island Advance, the victim had been guiding the loader's operator as it was being backed out of Martha Street and Clove Road at 9:30 p.m. last night. And when the front-end......