On October 12, tragedy struck at a construction site in New Orleans, when an 18-story under-construction hotel partially collapsed, killing 3. Due to the unstable tower cranes on site, crews have yet to be able to recover 2 of the bodies inside the building.
After a couple days of delays, both tower cranes on site were imploded on Sunday afternoon, but there’s still plenty of work to do after the explosions.
As you can see in the video below, shared by WWLTV on YouTube, one of the cranes collapsed on top of the building and a large section of another somehow remained upright after it flipped completely over and lodged itself into the street.
City officials seemed happy with how the implosion went, as only a sewer line and some windows of adjacent buildings were damaged as the cranes fell.
At a press conference, New Orleans Fire Chief Tim McConnell said the initial assessment of the second crane was that it “hooked on the building like we wanted it, it’s very stable.” Contractors plan to bring in another crane to cut up the remaining portions into sections and drop them one by one.
The bodies of two of them men killed by the initial collapse are still on-site and demolishing the cranes was the first major step to their recovery.
Since the incident, local news media has been providing steady updates about the incident, including some video inside the building before it fell. In the video below WWLTV explains that workers believed there were not enough supports to carry the weight of the concrete above as it cured:
The general contractor of the project, Citadel Builders, has issued the following statement on their website:
“At Citadel Builders, safety has always been and shall remain a priority for our employees and subcontractors. In the 16 years since we opened our doors, we have completed over $700 million in projects across Louisiana without any OSHA violations or Loss Time Accidents. We have also been a multi-year recipient of the Step Safety Award from the Louisiana Association of Builders and Contractors. We are proud of this impeccable record, and have worked hard to achieve it. While we don't yet know what caused the accident at the Hard Rock site, we would like our clients, friends, and the general public to rest assured that we are working with some of the finest engineering minds in the world and will get to the bottom of it.”
OSHA records do show that there have been several inspections on CItadel Builders jobs in the past, but there were not any violations listed on any of them.
We’ll continue to update as we have more information.
