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| Juan Lizama, left, and Juan Lopez, the window washers who were rescued from the side of 1 World Trade Center, spoke at a news conference Friday. “Thank you everybody,” Lizama said Friday. “Thank you fire department.” “Honestly, I’m happy to have made it, got home to see my family another day,” said Lopez. “It was definitely terrifying.” |
Window Washers Defy Death But Can Start Off Making Just $12 Per Hour: Washing skyscraper windows remains a perilous profession, requiring workers to have the reflexes of a trapeze performer high above city streets. The dramatic rescue Wednesday of two New York City window cleaners — stranded nearly 70 stories off the World Trade Center tower — has put a fresh spotlight on a high-risk job that often begins with modest pay.
And the practice of putting men and women aloft to scrub windows isn’t expected to change any time soon, as the use of labor-saving robots to replace workers has yet to gain a foothold across the industry, experts say. “I guess with our modern technology, we can put people on the moon, but we can’t develop the equipment that can work across the board,” Mark Reinhart, the president of the International Window Cleaning Association, said Thursday.
One product on the market for homeowners operates like a robotic vacuum cleaner, moving up and down the surface of the windowpane. There are other unmanned machines that scrub larger buildings, typically around 10 stories or lower — but they’re only useful on a handful of structures, said Stefan Bright, the International Window Cleaning Association’s safety director. “They have to be all glass because brick and windows can really mess things up,” Bright said.
Despite the inherent dangers involved in the industry, it can take a while before a window washer sees a soaring salary. A window cleaner washing storefronts or homes might only earn $12 to $15 per hour, Reinhart said. But someone doing larger commercial properties, including skyscrapers, could earn $15 to $25 per hour. In New York, where the risks are presumably higher because of the dizzying heights, it’s not unheard of for veterans with all the know-how to reach $29 to $35 per hour. Getting paid top dollar, however, requires months and years of experience with equipment and certification.
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| Lizama said he panicked a little when the scaffold started tilting 68 stories up the nation's tallest skyscraper, but "we were always in control of the situation." Lizama said he used his cellphone to call his wife and tell her he was fine. |
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| Juan Lizama delivered his statement in Spanish, but added in English, "God bless America. I'm very happy to be here." A translator said Lizama called his wife from the scaffolding to tell her he was OK and would be home soon. Lizama and Lopez spoke in both English and Spanish at the news conference at the offices of their union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union. They stressed the importance of their safety training. "I know, this job, safety No. 1," the El Salvador-born Lizama said. "One mistake, no estoy here." |
With an emphasis on safety training a top priority, there is a silver lining: Deaths remain rare in the industry. There has been one high-rise fatality per year in the last four years in the U.S., according to the International Window Cleaning Association. That’s with an estimated 1.5 million “exposures” — when workers are on the sides of buildings — a year.
Window washers who spoke with NBC News said they’re in no rush to see their jobs taken over by new technology. This work is demanding but steady, said Brent Weingard, who’s washed skyscrapers in Manhattan as tall as 60 stories. “Some of us think there’s an art to what we do,” he said. “I’ve seen the machines, but I still believe a man on the glass washing windows does it best.”
Window Washer Talks About Experience In 1 WTC Scaffold Mishap: One of the window washers who was aboard a scaffold that collapsed at One World Trade Center said he overcame his fear by putting his training into action. As investigators continued to probe the Wednesday incident that left two window washers dangling 68 stories above the street, window washer Juan Lopez told his story exclusively to CBS2’s Sonia Rincon.
The workers were trapped when a cable suddenly developed slack around 12:45 p.m. Wednesday.
The window washers, Juan Lizama, 41, of West New York, New Jersey; and Juan Lopez, 43, of the Bronx, were working on the south side of the building when one of the platform’s four cables abruptly gave way, Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said. Before a cable came loose and the scaffold slumped to one side, Lopez said everything was fine – and exactly as it should have been.
We made sure the scaffold was intact before we jumped in, as we do every day,” Lopez said. “At the moment when it happened, it was just reaction.” So when the accident happened — and Lopez and his partner, Juan Lizama, found themselves dangling precariously – he said there were a few minutes where they were truly scared. But their training kicked in. “My first reaction is, of course, to hit all the emergency brakes — which is what we were trained for,” Lopez said. “It’s just instinct, you know — survival.”
Lopez said once the scaffold stopped moving, he and Lizama knew it was just a matter of time before they would be rescued. Either another scaffold would be lowered, or the window would be cut.
“It calms you down after a while,” Lopez said. “Once you realize you’re steady, you know, you take a breath and realize — you know, you put everything together, all the safety that you learned. You realize that, you know, everything is good.” And everything was good, Lopez said, when he saw his bosses from contractor Upgrade Services and the first responders. “I can’t explain the relief that I felt – you know, just seeing their face. It was amazing,” he said. “Like I said, I can’t thank them enough — the FDNY, the police, everyone that came in and helped us out.”
Lopez said when the accident happened, the first thing he thought of was his family. “My wife, my kids, my mother, my father — and that gives you nothing but strength, you know, to hold on, and make sure the impossible will be possible,” he said. He has four little girls — including 6-month-old twins – who are too young to understand what happened. But his wife knew. “I’m just glad I wasn’t there to see their reaction with them when I was in there, because what I heard was everyone crying – something I can’t bear with,” Lopez said. “Just the thought of them gets me emotional.”
Upgrade president and chief executive officer John McDermott was a high-rise window washer once himself. He said Lopez and Lizama did everything right. “As you saw, the scaffold was virtually vertical, and nothing fell from the scaffold,” McDermott said. “So they not only protected themselves, they protected the pedestrians below by taking the proper procedures.” McDermott said it was Lopez and Lizama’s bravery, and their training, that kept them calm. “It takes a special breed to be a window cleaner,” McDermott said. “But if you understand the technology, you know that even though they had a slack rope situation because of the equipment malfunction on one side, any one of the four cables on that system can hold four times the weight of the rig.”
Lopez said he is not sure if his partner made a phone call. But he didn’t dare take his phone out for fear he might drop it. “My phone kept ringing and ringing, and I just decided to listen to my ringtone, as it rang. It calmed me down as well, you know?” he said. Lopez said his phone was ringing because people were well aware of what was happening. “Oh yeah — family, everyone,” he said. In fact, Lopez’s family was worried sick that he could be one of the men that had captivated the city’s attention.
CBS2 also tried to speak with Lizama. He was not home. Lopez said he is grateful to have Lizama as a partner, and he can’t remember much about what they said when they were there. “From time to time: ‘Are you ok? How’s everything?,’ you know, make sure,” Lopez said. “Once the fire lines and everything come in… we had to, one thing, not panic.” Lizama has 14 years on the job. Lopez has five. “Oh I love it. I definitely do. It’s a wonderful line of business,” he said. “As scary as it — I would recommend it for anybody, as crazy as it sounds.”
Lizama and Lopez were examined at a hospital and were released. Lopez said he is mentally preparing himself to get back to work after a few days off. “I’m definitely looking forward to going back to work — just a matter of time,” he said. The firm for which they work, Upgrade Services, is also contracted to other prominent New York skyscrapers including the nearby 4 World Trade Center.
Window cleaners earn a starting wage of about $26 an hour.
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro: “It suddenly went from horizontal to nearly vertical,” Nigro said.
Images from the scene showed the scaffolding dangling at a precarious angle as emergency responders tried to rescue the workers and secure the dangling scaffold platform. Additional safety lines were lowered to the workers along with a radio so they could communicate with the rescue team. “At no time were the people in the scaffold unsecured. They were secured both by their own belts and the ropes by the roof,” Nigro said. A rescue basket with one officer each from the NYPD and the Port Authority was deployed in an effort to get to the trapped workers, but the FDNY managed to cut through a window and pull them to safety around 2:15 p.m.
Window Washing Skills Beyond a Robot’s Reach: As a pair of window washers clung to a scaffold dangling outside the 68th floor of 1 World Trade Center on Wednesday, the captivating drama left some below wondering: Why were they up there at all? In an age when a few clicks on a cellphone can solve myriad problems, it seems fair to ask why people are still descending from the roofs of skyscrapers to rub soapy water on glass and wipe it off with a squeegee. Can’t robots take on this simple, repetitive task and relieve humans of the risk of injury, or death, from a plunge to the sidewalk?
The simple answer, several experts said, is that washing windows is something that machines still cannot do as well as people can. The more complicated answer is that high-rise buildings are more complicated than they used to be. “Building are starting to look like huge sculptures in the sky,” said Craig S. Caulkins, who consults with building owners on how to maintain their exteriors. “A robot can’t maneuver to get around those curves to get into the facets of the building,” he said.
Mr. Caulkins, the president of C. S. Caulkins Co. in Irvine, Calif., said “the robots have problems.” Most notably, he said, robotic cleaning systems tend to leave dirt in the corners of the glass walls that are designed to provide panoramic views from high floors. “If you are a fastidious owner wanting clean, clean windows so you can take advantage of that very expensive view that you bought, the last thing you want to see is that gray area around the rim of the window,” Mr. Caulkins said.
Indeed, prime examples of that particular shortcoming are the towers of the original World Trade Center; the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey equipped those buildings with a mechanical apparatus for cleaning their windows, but it worked so poorly that human window washers had to follow behind to catch the spots the machine missed, said Steven Plate, director of the World Trade Center construction department at the Port Authority. “It was never effective,” Mr. Plate said in an interview on Thursday. “It basically didn’t clean the building.”
One of the men who kept the glass of the twin towers clean was Roko Camaj, whose hazardous duty was the subject of a children’s book “Window Washer: At Work Above the Clouds.” The book, published in 1995, quoted Mr. Camaj saying that “Ten years from now, all window washing will probably be done by a machine.” On that point, Mr. Camaj, who was killed when the towers were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, was not a prophet. Mr. Caulkins said “there may be several dozen” skyscrapers in the entire country that employ robots to clean their windows.
Another reason for the sparse use of robots is that buildings require a lot more maintenance than just window cleaning, Mr. Caulkins said. Equipment is needed to lower people to repair facades and broken windows, like the one that rescue workers had to cut through to rescue the window washers on Wednesday, he said. “At some point you need workers up on the side of that building,” Mr. Caulkins said. If a building requires a mechanism on the roof to lower a platform for that sort of work, the owner is unlikely to invest in a second, mechanized system for cleaning the glass, he said.
In all, there are about 700 scaffolds for window washing on buildings in New York City, said Gerard McEneaney, a field representative for about 500 washers who are members of S.E.I.U. Local 32BJ, a union representing building service employees. Mr. McEneaney said he understood why the owners of 1 World Trade Center would employ humans to clean the tapered glass facade. “They want that building sparkling, sparkling clean,” he said.
His members are willing to do the work because it pays well: as much $26.89 an hour plus benefits. Many of the window cleaners are immigrants from South America. “They’re fearless guys, fearless workers,” Mr. McEneaney said. Having spent nine years on scaffolds in New York City, he said he knew firsthand how scary an ordeal like the one on Wednesday could be. The first time he descended on a scaffold at 1 Penn Plaza, he said, his end of the platform did not stop when it should have, tilting the scaffold. His partner reacted quickly and lowered his end of the platform to keep it level and avert the need for a rescue, he said. “In a job where you know your life hangs in the balance, you just kind of accept it and rely on your partner and pray that your training has prepared you.”
Brother of window washer who fell to his death remembered as a helpful provider for his family whose clients included Woody Allen, Diane Sawyer: The distraught brother of an enterprising window washer who fell to his death from an Upper East Side town house said he wasn’t wearing a safety harness and slipped.
