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RUINED LIVES? JUST COLLATERAL DAMAGE TO CITY

EARLY Friday morn ing, I awoke to the wild shouts of “Watch the crane! Move the crane!” No, I don’t live on or near East 91st Street, where a deadly crane accident was occurring at approximately the same time.

I ran to the window to see construction workers on the east side of Second Avenue at 49th Street wildly calling across the street to the construction workers on the west side of Second, one block south of the deadly crane accident that killed seven people in March.

Since there didn’t appear to be a crane in place, I assume they were yelling about the giant-necked concrete loader, one of many looming over Turtle Bay like beings out of “Alien.”

Too angry for words, and determined not to call the useless 311 again, I picked up the phone and called Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. I’m now convinced 311 is a placebo number put in place not to fix anything but just to give disgruntled residents the illusion that we are getting through to somebody who will do something.

Turtle Bay is just one neighborhood under siege by foreign real-estate moguls building artless, tacky buildings with Chinese money to sell to Europeans, Chinese, Russians and Middle Easterners – the only ones, with the exception of Michael Bloomberg, who can still afford to buy in Manhattan.

Yes, kids, the Russians and Chinese are coming – but they’re coming with checkbooks, not bombs – even though the effect is the same: destruction of neighborhoods by big-bucks bullies.

By Friday morning, I’d really had it. The building going up at 49th and Second was the cause of the yelling.

I’m sick with worry because they don’t use union workers. I’ve complained about the weekend construction, the after-hours construction, the scaffold that leaks into puddles the size of wading pools. And that’s just one building.

Almost every single block on Second Avenue between 53rd and 46th has a monster high-rise either under construction or shuttered because of the crane accident. It’s like living in Fallujah.

So, frightened, angry and disgusted, I finally called Betsy Gotbaum to complain Friday morning. She couldn’t talk right then. A crane, she told me, had just collapsed on 91st Street and it looked like there’d be fatalities.

linda.stasi@nypost.com