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Seventeen people were injured when a building scaffold collapsed onto a city bus at West 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem around 9:25 a.m. Tuesday, the Fire Department said. Fire officials described the injuries as minor and not life threatening and said no one was missing.
The scaffolding had been erected at 301 West 125th Street, a five-story brick building that was being demolished, the Department of Buildings said. Bricks from the building littered the street.
A police spokesman at the scene said that eight of the injured people were passengers on the bus and that two police officers sustained minor injuries. He said it appeared from preliminary accounts that during work on the elevator shaft in the building, bricks fell from building onto the scaffolding, knocking it down.
A spokeswoman for the buildings department, Jennifer Gilbert, said that the demolition project had permits and that the department received a complaint about the demolition on Sept. 7, but that inspectors sent to the site found nothing amiss. Officials at the company doing the demolition, Disano Demolition of Queens, were at the site behind police tape and could not immediately be reached for comment.
Sasha Chavkin/The New York World
Sasha Chavkin, a reporter for The New York World, a new investigative journalism site housed at Columbia Journalism School, was on the bus, a Bx15 headed west on 125th Street.
“We pulled into the stop and I heard a falling sound of something collapsing toward the back, and the back of the bus filled up with smoke,” Mr. Chavkin said. “People were running from the back and screaming. After about a minute, the bus driver let everyone off the bus. “I talked to a kid in the back who said he thought he was going to die. He said rubble had fallen through the windows of the bus.”
Islam Mohammad, who runs a fruit stand across the street from the accident, said that passengers who had been waiting at the stop got on the bus just moments before the collapse.
At the scene of the accident, a busy commercial strip lined with clothing stores and other retail stores, firefighters swarmed the bus and the collapsed scaffolding.
Shortly before noon, a transit worker started the bus and drove it down the block from the scene, brick and debris still clinging to its damaged rear half. A tow truck picked it up and dragged it west on West 125th Street, out of sight.
Source: New York Times
The scaffolding had been erected at 301 West 125th Street, a five-story brick building that was being demolished, the Department of Buildings said. Bricks from the building littered the street.
A police spokesman at the scene said that eight of the injured people were passengers on the bus and that two police officers sustained minor injuries. He said it appeared from preliminary accounts that during work on the elevator shaft in the building, bricks fell from building onto the scaffolding, knocking it down.
A spokeswoman for the buildings department, Jennifer Gilbert, said that the demolition project had permits and that the department received a complaint about the demolition on Sept. 7, but that inspectors sent to the site found nothing amiss. Officials at the company doing the demolition, Disano Demolition of Queens, were at the site behind police tape and could not immediately be reached for comment.
Sasha Chavkin/The New York World
Sasha Chavkin, a reporter for The New York World, a new investigative journalism site housed at Columbia Journalism School, was on the bus, a Bx15 headed west on 125th Street.
“We pulled into the stop and I heard a falling sound of something collapsing toward the back, and the back of the bus filled up with smoke,” Mr. Chavkin said. “People were running from the back and screaming. After about a minute, the bus driver let everyone off the bus. “I talked to a kid in the back who said he thought he was going to die. He said rubble had fallen through the windows of the bus.”
Islam Mohammad, who runs a fruit stand across the street from the accident, said that passengers who had been waiting at the stop got on the bus just moments before the collapse.
At the scene of the accident, a busy commercial strip lined with clothing stores and other retail stores, firefighters swarmed the bus and the collapsed scaffolding.
Shortly before noon, a transit worker started the bus and drove it down the block from the scene, brick and debris still clinging to its damaged rear half. A tow truck picked it up and dragged it west on West 125th Street, out of sight.
Source: New York Times
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