High winds played a pivotal role in the collapse of a massive construction crane in Lower Manhattan Friday morning — but the quick thinking of the crane operator kept the fatal accident from being far worse, sources told The Post.
The collapse happened as the operator of the 600-foot-high crane was beginning to lower it to the ground to keep it from being buffeted by a morning snow squall, and when a strong gust helped knock it off balance, he was able to steer the rig so that it fell along Worth Street, which had already been mostly cleared of pedestrians.
“There were very high, gusty winds, and that’s the primary factor in the collapse,” according to a source familiar with the investigation.
“If this crane operator wasn’t on top of his game, this would have been a complete disaster,” the source added of operator Kevin Reilly, who was in the cab steering at the time.
Still, high winds alone cannot account for the fatal collapse, investigators and experts told The Post.
The collapse killed a Harvard-trained mathematician who was on his way to work, and injured three other pedestrians, including a 73-year-old man who became trapped in his Jeep and remains hospitalized.
“These types of cranes without a doubt can withstand a 40-mile-an-hour wind gust” like the one that struck the crane, owned by Bay Crane out of Hicksville, NY, said a second source apprised of the investigation.
“There had to be some other extenuating factors as to why this occurred,” that source added.
Crane experts agreed.
James Pritchett, a crane accident consultant out of Alabama, said that videos of the collapse show that the long arm, or “luffer,” of the crane was still extended horizontally as the main boom began to tilt off balance from its vertical position.
“Looking at that video, the luffer is supposed to be lowered to the ground first, and it wasn’t,” said Pritchett, president of Crane Experts International.
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“In my mind, wind causing this could be a possibility,” he added. “But right now, I think he didn’t lower the luffer down first — it’s real evident that the luffer was still out.”
At least one kind of mechanical failure — a broken cable — can probably be ruled out, he added. Had a cable broken, the crane would have collapsed much faster than it did, Pritchett said.
Meanwhile, city officials said it would take all day Saturday and into Sunday morning for workers to cut apart and remove the massive, collapsed crane from where it lay twisted along a block and a half of Worth Street at West Broadway.
The rig will be disassembled into 35 pieces, then trucked away and stored for an investigation that could take weeks, officials said.
The investigation will search for metal fatigue in the body of the crane and the pins that hold it together. The crane’s computer will also be examined in hopes of retrieving data about the winds and the angle of the boom at the point of collapse.
Meanwhile, tower cranes have been given the go-ahead to resume operation and the smaller crawler cranes will be visited individually before being OK’d to resume.
Additional reporting by Abby Gepner
