Four killed in crane collapse

A crane tower at an East Side Manhattan construction site toppled out of a blue sky without warning Saturday, killing four construction workers and injuring eight others, three of them critically, authorities said. One woman remained unaccounted for Saturday night.

The collapse, at a site that has drawn neighbors’ complaints, sent up a huge cloud of debris and smoke. The rescue effort that stretched into the night.

Abeer Shofani, 33, was asleep in a friend’s apartment on East 50th Street when she awoke to a sound she described as “big trucks crashing down off a highway ramp.”

“I thought it was thunder, but it kept going on and on and on,” she said. Shofani rushed outside to a scene of pandemonium: overturned and smashed cars, pulverized brick and wood, the air darkened with choking dust. “I walked out in tears,” she said.

The white metal tower, which stood next to a partially completed residential building on the north side of 51st Street near 2nd Avenue, toppled in midafternoon under calm winds. As it fell south, its lower section, about 19 stories high, clipped a corner of a brick residential building across the street, badly damaging apartments but causing no serious injuries, officials said.

The impact snapped the crane and sent its upper section sailing south, where it hit two buildings on East 50th Street and landed on a brownstone containing apartments, offices and a bar. The five-story building was demolished.

At least one man inside the brownstone was pulled out alive but seriously injured, fire officials said, and rescue workers continued to search for a woman believed to have been inside.

“This is going to be a painstaking hand operation as we try to remove the rubble,” Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said.

The four confirmed killed were construction workers at 303 E. 51st St., where crews had built about 19 stories of a concrete-and-metal frame of a planned 43-story residential building.

Stephen Kaplan, who owns the Reliance Construction Group, which manages the site’s construction, told the Associated Press that a falling piece of steel sheared one of the ties holding the crane to the building.

“It was an absolute freak accident,” Kaplan said.

A Department of Buildings official said that the crane was inspected Friday and that the agency issued the builder a variance to use it Saturday to lift a new section to lengthen the tower.

The crane was in that process, known as “jumping,” when it fell, officials said.