A retired contractor warned the city 12 days ago the doomed crane on E. 51st St. wasn’t properly braced, but the Buildings Department blew him off after making a cursory check. “I think the Buildings Department is grossly negligent because they had been warned. They sent an inspector and they brushed it under the rug, so to speak,” said Bruce Silberblatt, an 80-year-old former contractor.

“Now, I’m sitting here and, at last count, four people are dead and a couple buildings on 50th St. are completely wrecked. … It looks like Baghdad over there.” Silberblatt said he called the city at 3 p.m. on March 4 because he had been concerned for days about the lack of braces securing the crane at a construction site near his United Nations Plaza home.
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Early yesterday, Silberblatt watched as the crane was lifted about 50 feet higher into the air. That left almost 150 feet of the massive white crane unsecured, he estimated. “That to me is unstable,” he said. “It’s too heavy. You don’t have to be an engineer to understand that.” Hours later, Silberblatt’s worst fear was realized: The crane toppled over, splitting in two after it crashed into one building, and then flattening a four-story building.
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Stephen Kaplan, owner of the construction company managing the site, Reliance Construction Group, said the crane became dislodged after a piece of steel fell and severed one of its ties. “It was an absolute freak accident,” Kaplan told The Associated Press. “All the piece of steel had to do was fall slightly left or right, and nothing would have happened.” Silberblatt called that explanation nonsense.

A buildings inspector has been arrested and charged with faking a report that he visited a towering construction crane on the East Side of Manhattan on March 4 in response to a complaint. The inspector, the authorities said, never visited the crane, which toppled and killed seven people 11 days later.
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The officials noted that an inspection on March 14, by a different inspector, of additional tower sections that were to be installed on the crane was done properly.
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The Buildings Department has been plagued by corruption scandals, often including the bribery of inspectors. In 2002, 19 plumbing inspectors were arrested as part of an anticorruption program. Since then only five department employees have been arrested on charges related to their work, none in the last two years.