The 70th Floor Phonecall to Mum

Tommy Florio (pictured left), of Queens, and Dan Sandler, of Massapequa, pose after rescue from broken scaffolding yesterday. Dan Sandler called his mother Thursday morning to wish her a happy birthday. Little did she know he was dangling more than 700 feet in the air waiting for firefighters to rescue him. Sandler, 32, of Massapequa, L.I., was installing a pane of glass on the 71st floor of a 78-story building at 145 W. 56th St. when the brakes failed on the platform holding the workers up. One end of the scaffold began to fall as Sandler and his co-worker, Tommy Florio, 42, of Queens, hit the emergency brakes to stop their descent. The scaffold dropped to the floor below, and they dangled for about 30 minutes until firefighters came and pulled them up. "I called my mother while we were waiting," Sandler told the Daily News. "I didn't tell her where I was, I just said 'Happy Birthday.'" The two veteran glass workers, who work for Philip Kaplan Glass Works in Manhattan, stayed calm until help arrived. "It was scary - I'm not going to lie," Florio said. "It definitely shook me up for a minute. But everything worked out." The two said they also were hooked up to personal safety harnesses and even took pictures of each other with a cell phone camera as they waited to be rescued while a crowd gathered below. Thursday's mishap follows the death of a worker in a scaffold fall at a Harlem building on Sept. 11. "They were lucky they weren't hurt," said Buildings Department spokeswoman Kate Lindquist.
Dorien Brown, an office manager at the glass company, said the scaffold was provided by the building owner, Manhattan Tower, but maintained by another company. Philip Kaplan has a contract with the building and has done jobs there before. "We never had any problems at the building before," Brown said. The Buildings Department issued violations to Philip Kaplan for failure to properly attach personal safety lines, failure to supervise rigging equipment and failure to have a daily maintenance log. Manhattan Tower was cited for those violations as well as failure to provide documentation that the workers had been properly trained and failure to provide a designated foreman. Both men said they'd be back at work today and had no intention of trying to find a safer job. "I love it up there," Sandler said. "The view is amazing. It's like being on top of the world."