Scaffold maker cites absence of a crane
Says it could have averted fatal collapse
Investigators are focusing on the disconnection of a metal tie that had secured a three-ton scaffold before it plunged onto Boylston Street and killed two workers and a passing motorist, but questions emerged yesterday about whether the presence of a crane might have averted the tragedy.
The scaffold's maker, Fraco Products Ltd. of Montreal, said that the company's safety standards state that, as a precaution, a construction crane should have been attached to the scaffold while it was being dismantled Monday. A crane could have prevented the platform from toppling, even after the last tie attaching it to the building was gone, said Armand Rainville, Fraco's chief executive officer. .
A spokeswoman for Bostonian Masonry, the East Walpole contractor that employed the workers who were operating the scaffold, acknowledged there was no crane at the site, but disagreed that one was necessary.
''There does seem to be some dispute as to whether a crane was required for this operation using this type of equipment," said spokeswoman Karen Schwartzman.
Boston officials would not say yesterday whether investigators are looking at the crane issue, but it does appear that the inquiry into the incident is growing more complicated.
Macomber Builders, the lead contractor at the Emerson College work site, said yesterday it had retained a respected local engineering firm to help determine why the scaffolding collapsed, indicating that it could be well into next week before initial explanations are forthcoming.
The union leader who represented 27-year-old Romildo Silva, one of the workers killed, said his group was conducting its own investigation, parallel but separate from the corporate and federal probes underway.
Louis A. Mandarini Jr., business manager of Local 22 of the Laborers' International Union of North America, declined to say whether the union probe would examine the crane issue.
''We're looking at everything," he said yesterday in his first interview since the accident. ''We're focusing on the whole thing, how [the scaffold] was working, who was on it, everything."
A high-ranking city official has said that investigators have been focusing on a metal tie that somehow came undone as the scaffold was being taken down. The dismantling process requires that several such ties, which attached the scaffold to the Emerson building, be sequentially removed, from top to bottom.
Rainville said that before the final tie was removed, a crane should have been attached to the platform.
Construction worker Mike Steigerwald, who helped save a third worker from the plunging scaffold, said there was no crane. ''I did not see a crane on site," he said yesterday. ''I have seen them use cranes to dismantle the equipment before at other sites."
Mandarini said Silva was well trained to handle scaffold work. Boston Masonry said the other worker killed, foreman Robert Beane, 41, had trained specifically in dismantling Fraco scaffolds. The entire three-man crew that day, said Mandarini, was well-versed in scaffold use.
He said Beane was known among construction workers throughout the city for his skill with scaffolds, particularly in setting them up and taking them down.
''He'd been erecting that stuff for years," said Mandarini. ''He did it in job after job. If that job was in anyway unsafe, we wouldn't have been near it."
Mandarini also said the two companies at the center of the accident, Macomber and Bostonian Masonry, were ''good companies with good, safe people."
The work site, a 14-story building being converted into an Emerson dormitory scheduled to open in September, remained closed yesterday.
City officials have cited Macomber Builders for failing to protect public safety as required by the city building code.
To resume work, the firm must produce a report explaining the scaffold accident and outlining a safety plan.
Donovan Slack of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Raja Mishra can be reached at rmishra@globe.com. 