New York City’s Department of Buildings imposed $130,000 in penalties at 13 construction sites in August for failure to safeguard, according to the NYC DOB enforcement bulletin the agency released Oct. 2. That’s 13 violations at $10,000 apiece. The June bulletin, the last one DOB published before this, listed eight sites and $80,000 under the same heading.
Read the individual entries and a pattern shows up. Most of these penalties weren’t about what happened to a worker. They were about what the site did, or could have done, to someone walking past it.
What the NYC DOB enforcement bulletin shows about failure to safeguard
Four of the 13 entries are fences. In the Bronx, about 100 feet of construction fence collapsed and left the site open. A stalled Manhattan project had an unsecured fence. Two other sites, one in Manhattan and one in Queens, were found open and accessible to the public.
Two more involve falling objects that reached the street. A brick came off a suspended scaffold and hit a vehicle’s windshield. During a hoist dismantling in Manhattan, a six-inch metal shim fell and struck a pedestrian, and inspectors found the safety netting inadequate.
The rest are a mix: an 8-by-8-foot trench left unprotected inside an operating parking garage, inadequate wood shoring during structural work, a rear deck blocking a fire escape, and a concrete pour with no overhead protection.
Three worker injuries, and the penalties attached
Three entries describe a worker getting hurt. DOB lays out the mechanics in each:
- An outrigger platform installed contrary to the manufacturer’s specifications came loose and a worker fell. Penalties on that Brooklyn site totaled $16,250, which also covered a non-compliant sidewalk shed and missing design drawings.
- A large window panel fell on a worker in Queens. Inspectors found no tie-backs or other safety measures in place. Also $16,250.
- A worker was injured using a ladder that was improperly positioned and not secured. $10,000.
The largest construction-site figure in the bulletin was $25,000 at a Brooklyn new-building job, where the safeguarding violation came bundled with failure to perform the duties of a construction superintendent and failure to protect adjoining property.
Set those numbers beside the bulletin’s other category. Two illegal residential conversions in Queens drew $122,500 and $31,000, with daily penalties running. A worker’s fall from a misinstalled platform cost the respondent about one-eighth of what converting a two-family house into seven units did.
Construction site safety penalties after the summer sweep
These are closed cases with penalties imposed, not open allegations, and DOB says the bulletin covers only a portion of its enforcement work. It also isn’t a count of violations written. When the department swept 180 jobsites after the East 42nd Street collapse, inspectors wrote 65 violations. Those won’t appear in a bulletin until they’re adjudicated.
One licensing action stands out for design firms. DOB’s Special Enforcement Team audited 12 professionally certified applications from a single engineer, found Alteration Type 2 filings on jobs that changed use, egress or occupancy, and accepted a voluntary surrender of self-certification privileges.
The bulletin archive goes from June straight to August with no July edition posted. September’s numbers, when they come, will be the first to show whether the sweep changed anything a superintendent would notice. For now the going rate for a failure-to-safeguard violation in New York is $10,000, and DOB charged it 13 times in a month.