A construction contractor in Union Square yesterday became the latest casualty of the city’s construction boom, falling 19 stories to his death and becoming the 17th such fatality in the past 12 months.

Officials said the employee in yesterday’s accident was moving between two scaffoldings about 25 feet apart that were attached to a building on Fifth Avenue at West 17th Street. Officials said around 8:45 a.m., the employee, Klever Ramiro Jara, 25, of Brooklyn, unclipped his harness and was walking on a building ledge when he apparently fell.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings, Jennifer Givner, said a stop work order was subsequently issued at the site. Yesterday, officials indicated that three requirements for the type of rig used there had not been met, including securing a permit, designating a rigger, and training employees on the rig.

In two other incidents yesterday, firefighters rescued employees from scaffold mishaps without injury.

Since October 2005, there have been 17 fatal falls in construction work citywide, including yesterday’s accident, the New York area director for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Richard Mendelsohn, said. In Manhattan, five workers have died since August.

Data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates there were 17 fatal falls in all of 2005. In 2004, 24 employees fell and died, and in a comparison of the number of such fatalities since 1999, the lowest reported rate was 13 fatal falls in 2001. (The 2001 data did not include fatalities related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.)

Advocates said reasons for safety lapses include a shortage of site inspections. They also spoke of paltry fines for contractors who violate safety regulations.

“There are many reasons this is occurring – the first and foremost, we think, has to do with the lack of resources that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has to enforce its own rules and regulations,” the executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety, Joel Shufro, said. “The other part of this, of course, is that when OSHA shows up, their fines are nothing more than slaps on the wrist,” he said.

Officials said prosecuting employers and contractors is extremely difficult. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office most recently convicted a scaffold contractor after five workers died when a scaffold collapsed on Park Avenue South in 2001. However, prosecutors were not able to convince a jury to find a contractor guilty after a day laborer was killed in a 2002 building collapse on the Upper East Side, even though the contractor failed to take basic safety precautions.

“After the verdict, the jury said they had to acquit him because there was insufficient evidence that he consciously disregarded the substantial and unjustifiable risk of death,” the chief of the investigative division at the Manhattan D.A.’s office, Daniel Castleman, said. “That goes to his state of mind. And when you have to prove someone’s intent or state of mind, that can be very problematic.”

Lawyers representing injured said some employers knowingly skimp on safety precautions for employees who may be illegal immigrants, paid off the books.

“They take advantage. They have people who have no knowledge of the law, they don’t know what their rights are,” an attorney, Alexander Rosado, said. “They have got to survive. They’re going to take any job that comes around.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings said the number of permits for hanging scaffoldings has increased in the last few years due to Local Law 11 of 1998, imposing façade inspection requirements that require exterior building maintenance. The filing deadline for permits for this work is February 21, 2007.