This afternoon, a two-story building in the bronx suddenly collapsed leaving one construction worker dead and another severely injured. To find out more details of the tragic incident hit the jump!!
A construction worker said he felt lucky to be alive on Saturday after a building fell down around him, killing a fellow hardhat.
“I made it out,” Orlando Acetty, 37, said after the collapse of a two-story building in the Soundview neighborhood. “I could have died in there.”
His coworker was pulled from the rubble around 12:30 p.m. and taken to Jacobi Medical Center in serious condition, FDNY officials said.
He died a short time later, cops said. His full name wasn’t immediately released.
Acetty said the two men began working at 8 a.m. and were jackhammering on the first floor. The two were cutting into the cement floor around a support beam when the roof came crashing down, he said.
“We cut the cement, the column is old,” he said. “Maybe the column moved and everything fell down.”
Acetty ran to the back of the building and into the basement. Mohammed ran toward the front entrance.
“Everything fell down on top of his head,” Acetty said. “It was so fast. Two seconds. It all came down.”
Acetty identified the worker who died as Mohammed, a married father of three who lived in the neighborhood.
Witnesses were stunned.
“I was just walking across the street and I looked and the whole thing was just collapsed all the way down – gone,” said Robert Garcia, 23, who lives down the street.
Garcia said witnesses immediately pulled out their phones and called 911.
“Firemen went in and they pulled a guy out from the basement and put him on a stretcher,” Garcia said. “He wasn’t moving or breathing or anything.”
The top floor of the part of the building that collapsed belonged to Star Billiards, a pool hall. Witnesses said the ground floor used to be a restaurant, but it closed a few months ago for construction.
Maria Velez, 19, was crossing Stratford Ave. near the building when “all of a sudden it just all crashed, in a split second – boom!”
“I’m really shocked,” she said. “I was so close to it. There was a [box] truck parked in front of it and everything just landed right on top of it.”
Arafat Igbara, 36, Manager of Bx Linen right across the street from the collapse said construction has been going on for about a month.
“They must have taken a beam out or something because nothing would collapse like that,” he said. “We heard a big noise and looked outside and just saw the whole thing on the ground.”
Owner Stratford West LLC was hit with a $6,000 fine for a 2009 violation for running the pool hall in the building, city records show. A hearing on the violation was set for April 30, 2010, but the owner defaulted, the records show.
The owner couldn’t immediately be reached Saturday.
Acetty – whose kids are 18, 16 and 7 – said he considered himself lucky.
“Mohammed ran the other way and everything crushed him,” he said. “I ran to the back of the basement and I was ok. I have kids, my wife. I can’t be without them.”
