No Harness - No Safety Equipment

The victim, who sources said was not wearing a harness at the time of the fatal accident, fell from a building at Greenwich and Jay streets at 1:10 p.m. Tuesday and landed in front of the high-end rug store Carini Lang.

Window washer 'working without a harness' plummets to his death from fifth floor of Manhattan apartment building: A worker plummeted five stories to his death while washing windows without a safety harness in Manhattan Tuesday. The unnamed victim was reportedly leaning out of a fifth-floor unit at the Hanover River House at 335 Greenwich Street in Tribeca when fell just before 1.10pm. The window washer landed in front of a high-end rug store, with his head coming to rest in a pile of hardened snow and the rest of his body on the concrete sidewalk.

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Horrified witnesses said the victim was still breathing and conscious by the time first responders came on the scene. As they were awaiting the paramedics’ arrival, several Good Samaritans walked over and covered the man with their coats to keep him warm against the frigid temperatures, according to the New York Post. Responding EMTs performed chest compressions on the injured worker and then rushed him to New York Downtown Hospital, where he died a short time later.

The man was cleaning the window from the inside and was not wearing a harness. The window was unhinged and swung open, and he fell out  in front of a high-end rug store.

The window the man was washing was unhinged and swung open, causing him to fall out to his death. Witness Orie Cipollaro described the 38-year-old worker hanging out of the window backwards in the minutes before the deadly fall, while another bystander claimed he saw the man hold onto the window with one hand while washing it with the other, reported the New York Daily News. In an interview with the News, witness John Cataneo described a grisly scene on Greenwich Street this afternoon.‘His legs were twisted his arms were bent and he was bleeding from his hands, it was very gruesome,’ Cataneo recalled. The name of the victim has not been released as of 5pm, but he was said to be a 38-year-old man employed by Aerial Window Cleaning. 

“Any kind of contracting activity like that you have to take your safety equipment seriously and make sure you have got it and it’s in good working condition.”

A window washer fell from scaffolding and plummeted five floors to his death in Tribeca, authorities said. The victim, who sources said was not wearing a harness at the time of the fatal accident, fell from a building at Greenwich and Jay streets at 1:10 p.m. Tuesday and landed in front of the high-end rug store Carini Lang. “He was sitting outside the window, and just holding on with his left hand while cleaning the window with his right hand,” said Edin Arias, 39, a carpenter who was working in the area.

“When I saw him he wasn’t wearing no harness nothing to get him safe, nothing to keep them safe,” Arias said. “I was surprised he wasn’t wearing any safety equipment,” said John Cataneo, who works as a plumber and witnessed the fatal plunge. “Any kind of contracting activity like that you have to take your safety equipment seriously and make sure you have got it and it’s in good working condition.” The victim, who has not been identified, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

“There was a woman standing in front of me with a stroller and she started screaming, ‘A man fell, call 911!’ I didn’t get too close but I saw his head was on the snow,” the witness, who refused to be identified, explained.

From a reader: “The strange thing about that window washer story is that about 3 weeks ago a man fell from the top floor of the Puffy’s building and landed right at my feet as I was waiting for the bus! I believe he was a window washer as well. Did you hear anything about that story? I have been wondering if he survived that fall—I called 911 right away and stayed with him until they took him away in the ambulance. Later that day I called 311 to see if I could find out about his condition and they could only tell me that he arrived at Bellevue alive.”