Scaffold Collapse Recalls Previous Tractel Disaster

The failure of the window-washing machinery high atop Hearst Tower ended well Wednesday, when both workers on board were rescued by first responders. That wasn't the case in 2007, when a window washing accident sent two brothers on a 47-story free fall. The lone survivor filed suit against Tractel, one of the companies that maintained the scaffolding system. I-Team reporter Chris Glorioso reports on that incident and the possible connection to the latest scaffolding incident.

Scaffold Collapse Recalls Deadly '07 Accident: Two window washers plummeted 47 stories from a collapsed scaffolding on the Upper East Side in 2007. The two workers who were rescued from a collapsed scaffold atop the Hearst Tower Wednesday were not hurt, but a similar incident on the Upper East Side years earlier left one man dead and another with serious injuries. In 2007, two window washers, who were brothers - were working on scaffolding alongside 265 E. 66th St. when the structure plummeted 47 stories to the pavement.

The surviving brother, 43-year-old Alcides Moreno, filed a lawsuit against Tractel, the company that helped maintain the Upper East Side window washing scaffold that fell. After that accident, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued Tractel three serious citations for improper installation of parts that supported the platform’s load.

Marketing literature published online shows Tractel is also the company that provided a window washing scaffold that looks identical to the one that failed Wednesday alongside the Hearst building. Tractel "provided a unique façade maintenance unit” for the Hearst Headquarters, according to the product information. Tractel personnel had not returned the I-Team’s phone message seeking comment at the time of this article's publication.

It is not clear if Tractel was responsible for installing or maintaining the window-washing mechanism atop the Hearst Tower. The two workers who became stranded were technicians for Tractel Harness, according to first responders. The New York Department of Labor regulates window washing scaffolding mechanisms. In 2008, state labor regulators issued Tractel a notice of violation for failing to maintain the scaffold that collapsed at East 66th Street. The initial investigation found the hoist rope was attached to the scaffold with a faulty compression device.

Back in December 2007, when two “window washing” brothers—immigrants from Ecuador—plunged 47 stories from a luxury apartment building on the East Side, we marveled that one of them survived the fall that killed his brother instantly.  37-year-old Alcides Moreno was considered the “miracle  man” who was able to walk again, after grieving the death of his brother, Edgar. At the time, PIX 11 did a special report on the sometimes-fatal dangers of window washing, especially when the scaffold is faulty.  It turns out the high-tech scaffold being  used at the Hearst Tower on 57th Street, where two window washers were rescued Wednesday, was operated by the same, Long Island City company that was fined thousands of dollars in the fatal 2007 accident involving the Moreno brothers.  When contacted by PIX 11 Wednesday, a Tractel Company representative who answered the phone said, “In regards to the Hearst Building, we have no comment.  Please direct your questions to the Fire Department of New York.”

Man trapped in midtown Manhattan scaffold collapse says feared he'd be ‘crash-test dummy’ ‘You see everything happen in front of you. All I heard was the metal snapping,’ reveals survivor Victor Caraballo. Clinging to a broken scaffolding suspended 44 stories above midtown, 26-year-old maintenance man Victor Caraballo feared becoming a “crash dummy.” A day after he and coworker Stephen Schmidt, 49, endured a heart-pounding, 90-minute scare 450 feet up the face of the Hearst Tower, the Bronx man said he was lucky to be alive to tell the tale. “If anything goes wrong, I’m the crash dummy,” Caraballo told the Daily News Thursday of the fear that ran through his mind as firefighters raced to the rescue.
Caraballo, who lives in the Bronx with his mom and two pit bulls, said he has an “ordinary job,” but the horror above W. 57th St. proved his work takes guts. He said he and Schmidt were conducting a test drop of a window-washing rig about 2:45 p.m. when suddenly an average day turned into a thriller. “It was pretty scary at first,” said Caraballo, who works for Tractel Inc. “You see everything happen in front of you. All I heard was the metal snapping.” Despite dangling from the twisted scaffolding, praying for help to arrive fast, Caraballo described the incident in retrospect as a rare “technical difficulty.” “I have gotten stuck plenty of times, but not like this,” he said. “The way this happened it was pretty scary, but you deal with it.”
Still, he couldn’t suppress thoughts that “if it goes, I go with it.” Firefighters from Rescue Co. 1 executed the high-rise heroics with aplomb, cutting a hole in a 44th-floor window of the glass-and-steel skyscraper to pull the men to safety. “When the FDNY sent me the safe line, I knew everything was fine,” Caraballo said outside his Bronx apartment building, happy to be on terra firma and to have the day off. “They responded fast. Everything went good. I was very appreciative of what they did for us.” As soon as he was rescued, he called his mother. “She was a little shaken up,” Caraballo said. “She hates my job to begin with. So this makes her not want me to go back to work.” But Caraballo said he’s not about to give up his job, even for his mother. “Of course it crosses your mind,” he said of the occupational hazards. “But you got to stay positive. You don’t want to think like that.”

Life At The Top - Hearst Tower

For many years, being a window cleaner in Manhattan was regarded as one of the most dangerous occupations in the world.

Life at the Top - What a window washer sees (by Adam Higginbotham) - Abstract: Our local correspondents about window washers in Manhattan. When the architect Norman Foster initially presented sketches for the Hearst Tower, the first skyscraper approved for construction in Manhattan after September 11th, one of the questions the building’s prospective owners asked was: How are we going to clean those windows?

In early 2002, Foster + Partners’ associate architects approached Tractel-Swingstage, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of scaffolds and window-washing platforms, to provide a solution. The result, a rectangular steel box the size of a Smart car, supporting a forty-foot mast and a hydraulic boom arm attached by six strands of wire rope to a telescopic cleaning basket, houses a computer that monitors sixty-seven electromechanical safety sensors and switches, and runs around the roof of the Tower on four hundred and twenty feet of elevated steel track.

The commercial window-washing industry in New York emerged with the rise of the skyscraper, at the end of the nineteenth-century, after one Polish immigrant organized a team of expert window cleaners whom he let out on contract. By 1931, when the Empire State Building was completed, there were between two and three thousand unionized window cleaners in New York. The size of any building cleaned by scaffold is measured in drops. Every three floors, Bob Menzer and his team at the Hearst Tower anchor the wire ropes from which they’re suspended to steel buttons on the façade, to prevent the basket from being pulled away from the building by the wind.

Every three floors, Menzer and his team at the Hearst Tower anchor the wire ropes from which they’re suspended to steel buttons on the façade, to prevent the basket from being pulled away from the building by the wind.

Once the glass has been wet down with a sponge or a wand, the water is wiped away with a squeegee. Given good weather, it takes a month to clean the whole tower from top to bottom. For many years, being a window cleaner in Manhattan was regarded as one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. Today, the work of washing windows in the United States is significantly safer than driving a cab. Most injuries on the job are the result of falls (from elevation). The culture of the trade has gradually changed. Many veteran window washers no longer expect their children to pursue the occupation.

Adam Higginbotham looks at the evolution of the commercial window-washing industry, as New York City has become “a crystal garden of geometric forms and irregular shapes,” owing to advances in technology that allow for more intricately designed architecture. Since the rise of the skyscraper, at the end of the nineteenth century, when window washers simply stood outside on a window ledge and gripped the frame, the profession has become less dangerous and more efficient. Modern-day buildings such as the Hearst Tower, which features “curtain walls of glass and stainless steel hung in a diagonal grid . . . known as ‘bird’s mouths’ by the architects,” require advanced window-washing technology.

Hearst Tower’s distinctive facetted silhouette rises dramatically above Joseph Urban’s existing six-storey Art Deco building, its main spatial event a vast internal plaza, occupying the entire shell of the historic base. Designed to consume significantly less energy than a conventional New York office building, it is a model of sustainable office design.

The rig that cleans the Hearst Tower, “a rectangular steel box the size of a Smart car,” took three years to design and was finally installed at a cost of three million dollars. When Higginbotham joined the window-cleaning crew to descend the tower, “a frigid wind scythed down across Columbus Circle, humming in the rigging overhead, and each time I shifted my weight the narrow platform swayed sickeningly, like the world’s most appalling fairground ride,” he writes. Although “the work of washing windows in the United States is significantly safer than driving a cab,” Higginbotham writes, “deaths persist.”

Hearst Tower is the first building to receive a Gold LEED certified rating for core and shell and interiors in New York City. In 2012, Hearst Tower earned a Platinum LEED Rating for Existing Buildings, becoming the first building to receive both Gold and Platinum certifications.

The window washers’ union has prided itself on its safety record, due in part to its apprentice-training program, which requires all new union window cleaners to take two hundred and sixteen hours of classroom instruction, followed by three thousand hours of accredited time with an employer. But a growing number of non-union workers aren’t held to the same standards, and they “were involved in roughly two hundred accidents, more than seventy of them fatal,” between 1983 and 2008. One widow, whose husband fell from a window at 40 Fifth Avenue, said, “People don’t realize . . . being married to a window cleaner is very much like being married to a fireman or a policeman.”

But the culture of the trade has also changed. “The recession has led to less frequent cleaning cycles on the big buildings, smaller permanent crews, and layoffs,” Higginbotham writes. “Yet the work of the men with buckets apparently remains just beyond the reach of technology,” Higginbotham writes. Although a glass manufacturer has developed windows with a self-cleaning coating catalyzed by sunlight, and scientists in Germany and Japan have built a series of costly façade-cleaning robots, “neither has yet gained a foothold in New York.”

The Hearst Tower is a building located at 300 West 57th Street, 959 8th Avenue, near Columbus Circle in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York. It is the world headquarters of the Hearst Corporation, bringing together for the first time their numerous publications and communications companies under one roof, including, among others, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping and Seventeen.

Six Facts About Cleaning New York City Skyscraper Windows: The current issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating (and, sadly, subscription-only) article about how the windows of NYC's skyscrapers get washed. It turns out newfangled skyscraper architecture can make it difficult to use conventional window-washing methods—and that's just one of many fun facts we learned from the story. Here are five more:

1) The Empire State Building is particularly tough to clean because tenants on higher floors often throw things out of the windows. "One time," says one building window cleaner, "they threw, like, twenty gallons of strawberry preserves—and it went through ten floors, all over the windows. And it was the winter, so it froze on there and we couldn't get it off."

2) Designing a cleaning rig that could that clean the Hearst Tower took the engineers at Tractel-Swingstage three years (and around $3 million); the company's vice-president of engineering had never seen anything like what Foster and Partners' called the building's "bird's mouths."

3) A building's size is measured, for cleaning, in "drops"—"a single vertical section of the facade running from the roof to the lowest point the basket can descend." That lowest point might be a setback or other architectural feature, or it might be the ground.

4) The city's first scaffolding for window cleaning was built in 1952 and used to clean Park Avenue's Lever House.

5) Because of the way they move, most window cleaners will end up leaving a "signature" on the window glass.

6) Cleaning the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers takes a long time: "One days' work on an average drop takes around four hours; given good wather it, it takes a month to clean the whole [Hearst] tower from top to bottom. Work on larger skyscrapers in the city takes much longer: a single cleaning cycle on the eighty-story black glass curtain walls of the Time Warner Center, where the central 'canyon drop' alone descends seven hundred feet, from the roof to the fourth-floor setback, can take six men four months."

Citations for Window Cleaners Deaths

Two Companies Connected With Window Washer's Deaths:

Six months after a deadly scaffold collapse that killed a window washer in Manhattan, two local companies were cited Friday for violating federal workplace safely standards. Two window washers fell more than forty stories from an Upper East Side building in December when their scaffold collapsed. One worker was killed. The Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration has cited the victims' employer, City Wide Window Cleaning and Tractel Incorporated, in connection with the collapse. Citations include equipment failure, lack of fall protection, and lack of employee training. City Wide could face up to $24,000 in penalties, while Tractel faces $21,000.

More detail here: City Wide Window Cleaning has been issued five serious citations for the lack of fall protection, training and inspections, and for the lack of a vertical lifeline. The company faces $24,000 in proposed penalties. Tractel has been issued three serious citations, with $21,000 in proposed penalties, for improper installation of the crimps, the crimps' failure to support the scaffold's load and not inspecting the crimps. A serious citation is issued when death or serious physical harm is likely to result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known.