Outrage Grows as Inspector of Cranes Is Arrested

The arrest of a city official who allegedly lied about inspecting a crane that collapsed on Manhattan’s East Side Saturday, killing seven people and causing millions of dollars in damage, is fueling a new wave of outrage from New Yorkers and elected officials.The inspector, Edward Marquette, 46, was accused yesterday of failing to examine the crane after an Upper East Side resident called the city to complain that it appeared unstable. The city Department of Investigation and the Manhattan district attorney’s office charge that Mr. Marquette falsified his paperwork by writing that he had inspected the crane and found no problems 11 days before the accident.City officials who already had harsh words for the Department of Buildings and its commissioner, Patricia Lancaster, before the disclosure of the inspection fraud were in an uproar yesterday.“I’m very upset about what happened. It’s difficult to have faith in an agency and to have faith in the inspectors when we find out that this particular inspector allegedly was too lazy to do his job and maybe people lost their lives because of it,” a City Council member who represents the Upper East Side, Jessica Lappin, said. “We don’t know what he might have seen. We don’t know if things would have turned out differently. We just don’t know,” she said.Asked specifically whether she would call for Ms. Lancaster to resign, Ms. Lappin said the commissioner “is ultimately responsible for what happens at her agency.”Ms. Lancaster said the absentee inspector most likely did not contribute to the accident, which occurred at East 51st Street and Second Avenue.“At this time, we think it’s highly unlikely the lack of this inspection caused or was remotely associated with the accident,” she said.She apologized when asked what she would say to New Yorkers affected by the accident.“I’m so, so terribly sorry,” Ms. Lancaster said. “It’s a horrible tragedy and we’re doing everything we can to mitigate the damage.”A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, Stuart Loeser, defended Ms. Lancaster against a call for her resignation earlier this week from Council Member Tony Avella, saying that a demand that she step down was “foolishness.” When reached last night, Mr. Loeser said nothing had changed.The Department of Buildings first received a phone call about the crane on March 4, from a 311 caller who said the apparatus did not appear properly braced to the building and that the upper parts of the crane seemed insecure, according to the Department of Buildings.In response, Mr. Marquette was tasked with inspecting the building that day. The paperwork documenting Marquette’s phantom inspection declared the crane to be without problems, and no action was taken.Investigators believe Mr. Marquette was in fact at work at the time he should have been inspecting the crane, but may have been working in a different part of the city and falsified his paperwork out of convenience, according to a law enforcement official who asked not to be named because this is an ongoing investigation.The commissioner of the Department of Investigation, Rose Gill Hearn, said yesterday that she could not comment on Mr. Marquette’s motives while the investigation is ongoing. She said that there was no evidence that the construction company was complicit in the alleged non-inspection or falsification of records.The Department of Buildings suspended Mr. Marquette, who was arraigned at 3 p.m. in Manhattan State Supreme Court and charged with falsifying business records and offering a false instrument for filing, both class E felonies. The charges carry up to a four-year prison sentence.Mr. Marquette joined the Department of Buildings in 2001, and had been making an annual salary of $52,283 a year, the Department of Buildings said.The Department of Investigation first interviewed Mr. Marquette the day after the accident, when he told investigators that he had conducted the March 4 inspection and found no problems with the crane. His account “didn’t add up,” Ms. Gill Hearn said, so investigators interviewed Mr. Marquette again on Wednesday, when he admitted that he never inspected the crane.The accident occurred when workers were preparing for a “crane jumping” in which the crane is extended further into the air. The crane passed a pre-jump inspection by officials the day before the accident.The Department of Buildings is planning to re-inspect every crane Mr. Marquette said he inspected in the last six months. He had inspected 76 locations a total of 423 times in the past six months throughout the city, with the majority of the sites in Manhattan.“So far, we haven’t found any other discrepancies, but we’re just beginning to check,” Ms. Lancaster said.The city employs five crane inspectors, each of whom has an average inspection load of 4 cranes a day. There are 250 cranes in city, 40 of which are tower cranes like the one that collapsed, Ms. Lancaster said.The Department of Buildings will also be launching a full operational review of the cranes and derricks unit, Ms. Lancaster said. The City Council announced a hearing for April 29 to discuss crane regulations.

Outrage Grows as Inspector of Cranes Is Arrested

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