Crane Operator Injured in Fall at Metro Rail Site : Transit: A worker suffers a broken arm when he slips and plunges into a shaft near the location of the July 13 fire.

A crane operator at a Metro Rail construction site was injured Friday when he fell 20 feet down an air shaft at the downtown subway segment that burned two months ago, officials said.

Jim King Jr., 21, was rushed to County-USC Medical Center, where he was treated for a broken right arm, dislocated right elbow and bruises, said hospital spokeswoman Adelaida De La Cerda.

The accident occurred about 9:30 a.m. near the Hollywood Freeway and only about 600 feet away from where an underground fire collapsed a 150-foot stretch of tunnel in July. King apparently was attempting to put some pipe down an air plenum--a ventilation shaft used to circulate fresh air into the underground rail system--when he slipped on a piece of plywood that gave way, plunged 20 feet and struck the concrete below, said John-Paul White, resident engineer with the PDCD, a consortium that manages construction on the Metro Rail project.

King was conscious and talking as paramedics placed him in a wire basket that was pulled to the surface by a crane, White said. It was the first serious fall to occur at the site, where construction is being done by the Tutor-Saliba-Perini joint venture.

Cal/OSHA sent an investigator to the tunnel site to determine if any state safety laws had been violated, said Byron Ishkanian, head of Cal/OSHA’s mining and tunneling division in Van Nuys. Cal/OSHA checks into all such injury accidents.

The air shaft was on top of A-130 Right, one of two parallel tunnels that will carry empty trains between Union Station and a maintenance yard being built beside the Los Angeles River, said Clara Potes of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which is responsible for the design and construction of the Metro Rail system.

The July 13 fire that led to the closure of a three-mile stretch of the Hollywood Freeway occurred in A-130 Left and about 600 feet south of where King’s accident occurred, Potes said. Arson investigators are still trying to determine what caused that blaze.

The tunnel is part of a 4.4-mile, $1.4-billion first phase of construction on the Metro Rail project. Tutor-Saliba, which joined with the Framingham, Mass.-based Perini Corp. for three of its Metro Rail contracts, has been cited nearly 300 times for safety violations by Cal/OSHA since 1979, 9.3% of which were considered serious.