Welder Killed in Collapse of Steel Column

A welder was crushed to death Monday by a 3,500-pound column of steel reinforcing bars that toppled at the construction site of the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel’s new wing.

Joey Hlista, 23, of Costa Mesa, who was working on the fourth and highest-completed floor of the building, was killed almost instantly when the 24-foot-tall column “failed at the welds,” said Newport Beach Police Officer Mike Lavigne, who is investigating the incident.

Other sources said, however, that investigators with Cal-OSHA (the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration) had not yet determined why the column fell.

Jim Brown, a Cal-OSHA district manager in Orange County, said late Monday that because he had not talked with the case investigator, he did not know enough about the accident to comment. Case investigators are not allowed to discuss investigations with reporters, he said.

Hlista, who was employed by A. Lloyd’s Welding of Westminster, one of several subcontractors on the project hired by the Marriott, died of massive head and internal injuries moments after the 11:30 a.m. incident.

Newport Beach Police Sgt. Mike McDonough said Hlista was sitting on the fourth floor, welding a column, when the top of an adjacent steel structure fell on him. His supervisor, identified by police only by a surname, Lloyd, was working a few feet away and was one of three men who narrowly escaped injury, police said. No one else was hurt.

A co-worker on the fourth floor with a two-way radio notified a supervisor on the ground to call authorities, and other workers removed the column from Hlista’s body before paramedics arrived, police said. Several construction workers openly sobbed as investigators combed the site, and work on the fourth floor was halted for the day.

Daniel Aikin, the Orange County deputy coroner investigating Hlista’s death, said the column had not been welded before it fell.

McDonough, however, said that the weld Hlista had just completed “gave way, fell over sideways and hit him.”

Normally, Aikin said, guy wires support the steel columns until they are welded at their base. Hlista’s job was to weld columns, after which another worker was to remove the guy wires, Aikin said.

But Aikin said Hlista had not worked on the column that toppled and the guy wires were not broken, so “theoretically” the column should not have fallen. When it tumbled, the column severed the guy wires supporting two other steel bars that had not been welded, but there were no other injuries, authorities said.

Construction on the 400-room hotel’s new wing--actually a tower detached from the main building--has been under way for eight months, a Newport Beach Marriott spokesman said Monday. When completed in October, 1986, the 14-story addition will contain 202 rooms and a top-floor cocktail lounge.