A worker fell from a platform ladder on the third floor of 1122 Madison Avenue into the elevator shaft, landing on the first floor, according to Buildings Department records of an August 24 incident. The department's incident log records one injury.

DOB issued CM and Associates Construction four violations the same day, totaling $20,000. The largest, $10,000, is a Class 1 for failure to safeguard — the worker was working at a height of more than six feet, per the record. The others: $2,500 for the ladder being placed in an unsafe manner, $5,000 because the work being performed was not communicated at the daily pre-shift safety meeting, and $2,500 because no lights were installed at the elevator vestibule, creating a fall hazard in the dark.

Read those four together and the record tells a sequence any superintendent will recognize: work that was not on the morning's plan, on a ladder set where it should not have been, next to an unlit shaft opening. Each violation is a link; the fall needed all of them.

The violations are active, with hearings scheduled for October 29. The pre-shift meeting violation deserves the trade's attention most — it is the cheapest one on the ticket and the one that could have interrupted the chain before a man went into a shaft.