 So I'm really excited to announce that I've got a new musical EP out. This one is delving into the world of vaporwave and mallsoft music. It's out on cassette tape as well as digital download. So check it out on my bangcamp. So thank you for listening to my little bit of shameless self-promotion. Let's get started with this week's disaster video. It is the afternoon of the 15th of March 2008 and all seems fine along the bustling streets of Turtle Bay Manhattan. People are going about their daily business. The normal background noise of traffic and construction work is then all of a sudden pierced by a massive crash. The source? A new under construction tower block. In the aftermath seven lives would be lost and many more would be injured. So today we're looking at the 303rd 51st street crane collapse. My name is John and welcome to Plainly Difficult. A new tower and it's crane. So normally for a plain difficult structural collapse video it's the building being built that is the failure point. But today it's the thing that's helping build the building itself. For the purpose of our story the crane is intertwined with the building project which is a new residential tower block in New York City. As always this video's facts and figures have been taken from the official reports. This time it's from OSHA and the New York City Department of Buildings and as always the links will be down below. So it's the mid-naughties and a new tower block is being penned by architect firm Garrett Gawley. It initially is meant to be 40 stories tall. Building work would begin in 2007 at the site on 303 East 51st street. Shortly after commencement of the project the building's height was increased from 40 to 44 stories. But disaster would strike long before that. So in order to build a tower like this you need a crane because well you aren't going to carry all the materials on your back. So the crane employed was a laughing jib crane tower manufactured by Favco which was owned by the New York Crane Company. The crane was tied to the ground via reinforced concrete base. It is still framed with diagonal and horizontal steel members. It is attached to the concrete frame building via steel ties attached to the building on floors 3 and 9. These ties are then attached to a steel collar that runs around the mast of the crane. As the building's height increased so would the crane. This was done in a thing called a jump in which extra sections were added to the crane. Each additional section was raised using hydraulic lifts and then bolted together. So far in the project each lift had been assisted with a mobile crane but as the tower block grew taller so would the crane. The increasing height made the use of a mobile crane more difficult. This time instead the tower was to be able to build itself in that it could lift the heavy collar up by itself. I should say the collar came in two parts which would require bolting together. Wearing at the correct height after which the required attachments to the mast and building were then done. It was a chunky thing weighing in at £11,200 so during the plan lift both halves of the collar would still be hauled separately and before attachment there would be a two inch gap around the mast structure. To facilitate the attachment of the collar four polyester straps were used two for each half which is then attached to the crane tower. Now this plan was flawed the number of straps was half of what the crane manufacturer specified. So we're now on to that part of the video let's jump to the 15th of March 2008. The Disaster. Time to grab out your bingo card. As a quick side note if I made up physical versions of this would you be interested in buying it? Anywho it is of the 15th of March 2008 at 303 51st East Street. The morning has been rather uneventful. Building work is pouring concrete on the 19th floor and it's all going to plan with form work in place a couple of floors below. The crane had been that morning jumped and the aforementioned tying to the structure was being prepared. Two halves of the collar for the 18th floor were hoisted up to its intended place. This was around about early afternoon. Once both halves were in place workmen leveled them out and bolted them together with the eight required bolts. So everything looked good. Workmen on the crane began to line up the tie beams to attach one to the collar halves. They had three to install. They began installing the first one. The now whole collar is still supported against gravity by these polyester slings. After the first tie was placed it needed a pin to be installed but before workers could do this they started hearing popping sounds from the collar. More noises emanated from the collar within seconds the collar plunged down the crane tower hurling towards the ninth floor supports. The two collided smashing the ties on the ninth floor and now both collars slid down the crane. The time is now just before 2.30pm. The now two collars slammed into the third floor support collar finally stopping the slide but it wasn't over. The now 200 foot tall crane had virtually no lateral load protection. It was now freestanding and it began to creak. It swayed initially northwards but the weight on the crane arm which was over the southern end pulled the whole structure towards the south. The crane twisted and the top portion collided with a building across the street. Debris smashed into buildings around the area. The rest of the crane crashed into the ground with the top part resting on another building. The base of the crane had been dislodged leaving it at an angle from the ground. Immediately after the catastrophe 911 calls bombarded dispatchers and emergency services swarmed to the building site. Rescue works would take a little bit of a while as they dug through the debris and listened out for anyone trapped. Six workers would be lost in the collapse, five working on the mast and the crane operator. In addition to this another non-worker who was in the building the crane crashed into was also killed. On top of this several more workers sustained serious injuries. With disaster stop the construction works on the tower block I mean just look at the aftermath and work wouldn't resume until 2011 after another company bought the structure which the original building company had then foreclosed on. Of course now though we need to look into the investigation. So a number of different government bodies were involved with the investigation. Most notably OSHA and the New York City Department of Buildings. The latter would use OSHA's experiments into the polyester slings. I should say that interviews with surviving workers helped zero in investigators to the spark of the disaster. This was the slings used to hold the collars in place during installation. It quickly became clear that workers were not following the manufacturer's guidelines for the install. But then why did the slings fail after and not during the bolting of the two collar halves? After inspection of the slings it was found that one of them must have been severely degraded before it was used for the collar hold. It was showing UV damage and general wear. It was also found that workers had attached the slings to the wrong lifting points which allowed them to run against the crane wearing away at the two inches of girth the slings had. The seating of the slings around the tower mast near the diagonal members pushed the polyester into a V shape which also reduced its load carrying capacity. To add more fuel to the fire only four slings were used instead of the required eight which after testing showed that just one failure of a sling could cause the whole arrangement to fail like it did on that fateful day. OSHA would conclude in its report 1. The choice of using polyester slings to suspend the collar at four points was questionable as they are subject to large elongations under tensile loads thus creating a need to constantly monitor and level the collar. The collar was rigged improperly in that the slings used to suspend the collar were choked around the vertical legs of the crane mast and were seated in the V shape groove between the angle bracing and the flange of the crane mast leg. This significantly reduced the load carrying capacity of the slings. The slings were not protected against sharp edges for cuts and abrasions. A deteriorated sling which should have been discarded if proper inspection of the sling was done prior to its use was used to suspend the collar. The crane raised the collar from the ground hoisting it at locations different from the crane's manufacturer's recommendations. This led employees to suspend the collar from locations above which there was no horizontal members. This resulted in choking of the slings around the legs of the crane mast. Each collar half was suspended at two points instead of at four points as recommended by the manufacturer. There will be a little bit of a scandal as well as the building site had racked up a number of OSA violations during its operation and after a number of complaints a department of buildings inspector was dispatched to look at the crane. Interestingly no issues were reported this was just a few days after the disaster but it would come out that the inspection never took place and the report had been fraudulently written. He would be later arrested and charged for falsifying documents however as DOB Commissioner Patricia Lancaster said even if the crane had been inspected on the 4th of March it would have not have prevented the accident because the crane was in such a different position at the time of the break. Still all of the inspector's work will be re-inspected. So the half built tower would languish for a number of years until a new company took over eventually completing it in 2015. So disaster scale time I'm going to give it a three or a four and this is what I've got for the bingo card. This is a plain difficult production all videos on the channel are created commons attribution share like licensed plain difficult videos produced by me John in the currently very wet and windy corner of London UK. I've got Instagram, second YouTube channel and Twitter or X for extra odds and sold some bits and pieces as well as I would like to give a very warm thank you to my Patreon and YouTube members for your financial support. And all that's left to say is thank you for watching and Mr Music Plays Out Please.