A construction worker was rescued Tuesday after a trench collapsed on him at the base of a pre-war apartment building in Woodside, Queens, according to FDNY and first reported by QNS.com.
QNS.com reported the collapse occurred at the base of the building during excavation work and that FDNY units extricated the worker from the trench. The outlet did not publish the building's street address in the portion of its report reviewed for this piece.
No New York City Department of Buildings incident or violation record for this event had posted as of this writing. DOB's public datasets for site-safety incidents and violations typically post four or more days after an event, so the absence of a DOB record at this point is routine and does not confirm or contradict the outlet's account.
No information on the worker's condition, the name of the general contractor, or the permit status of the excavation work was available in the cited report. This piece will be updated, or a follow-up filed, once DOB's own incident record for the address becomes available.
Trench and excavation work remains one of the more tightly regulated categories of construction activity in New York City precisely because of collapse risk; OSHA and DOB both require protective systems — shoring, sloping, or trench boxes — for excavations beyond a certain depth. No determination of whether such protections were in place at this site has been made public.